Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Intelligence . - 1981- - Establishment
Andrew, Christopher and Vasili The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and 1991, ISBN Basic Books
Mitrokhin the Secret History of the KGB 2005 0465003117
Andrew, Christopher, and Oleg KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from - 1990 - Gordievsky Lenin to Gorbachev
The Spy Novels of John Le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Aronoff, Myron J. - 1999 - Politics
Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Bissell, Richard - 1996 - Pigs'
Bogle, Lori, ed. Cold War Espionage and Spying - 2001- essays
Christopher Andrew and Vasili The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the - - - Mitrokhin Battle for the Third World
Christopher Andrew and Vasili The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the ISBN 978-0-14- Gardners Books 2000
Mitrokhin West 028487-4
Jim Colella My Life as an Italian Mafioso Spy - 2000 -
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Dorril, Stephen - 2000 - Intelligence Service
Dziak, John J. Chekisty: A History of the KGB - 1988 -
From The Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story Of Five Gates, Robert M. - 1997 - Presidents And How They Won The Cold War'
Spyworld: Inside the Canadian and American Frost, Mike and Michel Gratton Doubleday Canada 1994 - Intelligence Establishments
Haynes, John Earl, and Harvey Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America - 1999 - Klehr A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Helms, Richard - 2003 - Intelligence Agency
Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Koehler, John O. - 1999 - Police'
Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William J. Casey- Persico, Joseph - 1991 -
From the OSS to the CIA
Murphy, David E., Sergei A. Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War - 1997 - Kondrashev, and George Bailey
Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Prados, John - 1996 - Operations Since World War II
The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Rositzke, Harry. - 1988 - Counterespionage, and Covert Action
Srodes, James Allen Dulles: Master of Spies Regnery 2000 CIA head to 1961
Sontag Sherry, and Christopher Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Harper 1998 Drew Submarine Espinonage
Encyclopedia of Cold War Espionage, Spies and Secret Greenwood 2004 - Operations Press/Questia
[edit]Post Cold War era: 1991-present day [edit]See also
Author(s) Title Publisher Date Notes Anderson, Enigma 2008 eBook[8]and Enigma NOC Nicholas Books Books., 2009 The Human Factor: Inside the CIA's Dysfunctional Intelligence Encounter deep cover
Ishmael Jones 2008, rev. 2010 Culture Books espionage The Volunteer: The Incredible True Story of an Israeli Spy on
Michael Ross the Trail of International Terrorists
KGB From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see KGB (disambiguation).
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (April 2009)
Committee for State Security
ʶ̨̛̥̯̖̯ ̨̨̭̱̬̭̯̖̦̦̜̐̔̌̏ ̨̨̛̖̪̭̦̭̯̍̌̚
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
The KGB Sword-and-Shield emblem.
Agency overview
Dissolved 6 November 1991 (de facto) 3 December 1991 (de jure)
J urisdiction Council of Ministers of the USSR
Headquarters Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
55°45ƍ31.2ƎN 37°37ƍ32.16ƎE
The KGB (ɄȽȻ) is the common abbreviation for the Russian: Ʉɨɦɢɬɟɬ ɝɨɫɭɞɚɪɫɬɜɟɧɧɨɣ ɛɟɡɨɩɚɫɧɨɫɬɢ
(help·info) (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or Committee for State Security). It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and its premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.
The contemporary State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus uses the Russian name KGB. Most of the KGB archives remain classified, yet two on-line documentary sources are available.[1][2]
Contents
[hide]
1 Modus operandi
2 History
3 KGB in the US
o 3.1 The world war interregnum
o 3.2 During the Cold War
4 KGB in the Soviet Bloc
5 Suppressing ideological subversion
6 Notable operations
7 Organization of the KGB
o 7.1 Senior staff
o 7.2 The Directorates
o 7.3 Other units
8 The KGB's evolution
9 See also
10 Notes
11 References
12 Further reading 13 External links
[edit]Modus operandi
It's stated that the KGB has been the world's most effective information-gathering organization.[3] It operated legal and illegal espionage residencies in target countries where the legal resident spied from the Soviet embassy, and, if caught, was protected with diplomatic immunity from prosecution; at best, the compromised spy either returned to Russia or was expelled by the target country government. Theillegal resident spied unprotected by diplomatic immunity and worked independently of the Soviet diplomatic and trade missions, (cf. the non-official cover CIA agent). In its early history, the KGB valued illegal spies more than legal spies, because illegals penetrated their targets more easily. The KGB residency executed four types of espionage: (i) political, (ii) economic, (iii) military- strategic, and (iv) disinformation, effected with "active measures" (PR Line),counter-intelligence and security (KR Line), and scientific±technologic intelligence (X Line); quotidian duties included SIGINT (RP Line) and illegal support (N Line).[4] At first, using the romantic and intellectual allure of "The First Worker±Peasant State" (1917), "The Fight Against Fascism" (1936±39), and the "Anti-Nazi Great Patriotic War" (1941±45) the Soviets recruited many idealistic, high-level Westerners as ideological agents . . . but the Russo±German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939) and the suppressed Hungarian Uprising (1956) andPrague Spring (1968) mostly ended ideological recruitment. By the 1960s and 1970s, the Red Army's invasions and the infirm Brezhnev's corrupt, poor leadership repelled young, left-wing radicals from the Soviet Socialist cause²so, the KGB blackmailed and bribed Westerners into spying for the Soviet Union.
The KGB classed its spies as agents (intelligence providers) and controllers (intelligence relayers). The false- identity legend assumed by a Russian-born illegal spy was elaborate, the life of either a "live double" (participant to the fabrication) or a "dead double" (whose identity is tailored to the spy). The agent then substantiated his or her legend by living it in a foreign country, before emigrating to the target country; thus the sending of US-bound illegal residents via the Soviet residency in Ottawa, Canada. Tradecraft included stealing and photographing documents, code-names, contacts, targets, and dead letter boxes, and working as "friend of the cause" agents provocateur who infiltrate the target's group to sow dissension, influence policy, and arrange kidnaps and assassinations.
[edit]History
The Cheka was established to defend the October Revolution and the nascent Bolshevik state from its enemies² principally the monarchist White Army. To ensure the Bolshevik régime's survival, it suppressed counter-revolution with domestic terror and international deception. The scope of foreign intelligence operations prompted Lenin to authorise the Cheka's creation of the INO (Innostranyi Otdel ± Foreign-intelligence Department)²the precursor to the First Chief Directorate (FCD) of the KGB. In 1922, Lenin's régime re-named the Cheka as the State Political Directorate (OGPU).[5] The OGPU expanded Soviet espionage nationally and internationally, and provided to Stalin the head personal bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik. The vagaries of Stalin's paranoia influenced the OGPU's performance and direction in the 1930s, i.e. fantastic Trotskyist conspiracies, etc. Acting as his own analyst, Stalin unwisely subordinated intelligence analysis to collecting it; eventually, reports pandered to his conspiracy fantasies. The middle history of the KGB culminates in the Great Purge (1936±38) killings of civil, military, and government people deemed politically unreliable²among them, chairmen Genrikh Yagoda (1938) and Nikolai Yezhov (1940); later, Lavrentiy Beria (1953) followed suit. Ironically, Yezhov denounced Yagoda for executing the Great Terror, which from 1937 to 1938 is called Yezhovshchina, the especially cruel "Yezhov era".[6]
In 1941, under Chairman Lavrentiy Beria, the OGPU became the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security, integral to the NKVD) and recovered from the Great Purge of the thirties. Yet, the NKGB unwisely continued pandering to Stalin's conspiracy fantasies²whilst simultaneously achieving its deepest penetrations of the West. Next, Foreign MinisterVyacheslav Molotov centralised the intelligence agencies, re-organising the NKGB as the KI (Komitet Informatsii ± Committee of Information), composed (1947±51) of the MGB (Ministry for State Security) and the GRU (Foreign military Intelligence Directorate). In practice making an ambassador head of the MGB and GRU legal residencies in his embassy; intelligence operations are under political control; the KI ended when Molotov incurred Stalin's disfavor. Despite its political end, the KI's contribution to Soviet Intelligence was reliant upon illegal residents- spies able to establish a more secure base of operations in the target country.[7]
Moreover, expecting to succeed Stalin as leader of the USSR, the ambitious head of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Lavrentiy Beria merged the MGB and the MVD on Stalin's death in 1953. Anticipating a coup d'etat, the Presidium swiftly eliminated Beria with treasonous charges of "criminal anti-Party and anti-state activities" and executed him. In the event, the MGB was renamed KGB and detached from the MVD.
Mindful of ambitious spy chiefs²and after deposing Premier Nikita Krushchev²Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the CPSU knew to manage the next over-ambitious KGB Chairman,Aleksandr Shelepin (1958±61), who facilitated Brezhnev's Stalinist palace coup d'état against Khrushchev in 1964²despite Shelepin not then being in KGB. With political reassignments, Shelepin protégé Vladimir Semichastny (1961±67) was sacked as KGB Chairman, and Shelepin, himself, was demoted from chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control to Trade Union Council chairman.
In the 1980s, the glasnost liberalisation of Soviet society provoked KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov (1988±91) to lead the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev. By then, however, Soviet society's disrespect for the KGB had (among other reasons) exhausted popular support for the régime of the CPSU. The thwarted coup d'étatended the KGB on 6 November 1991. The KGB's successors are the secret police agency FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) and the espionage agency SVR(Foreign Intelligence Service).
[edit]KGB in the US [edit]The world war interregnum
The GRU (military intelligence) recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss, who became State
Department diplomats in 1936. The NKVD's first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934.[8] Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its Gen.-Sec'y Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.
Other important, high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in theTreasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie (an FDR advisor), and the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.[9] Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers, formerly Alger Hiss's courier, approached the Roosevelt Government²to identify the Soviet spies Duggan, White, and others²he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War (1939±45)²at the Teheran (1943), Yalta (1945), and Potsdam (1945) conferences²Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better-informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies, than they about his.[10]
Soviet espionage succeeded most in collecting scientific and technologic intelligence about advances in jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, which impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against Anglo±American science and technology. To wit, British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (GRU 1941) was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring.[citation needed] In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, by recruitingTheodore Hall, a nineteen-year- old Harvard physicist. [edit]During the Cold War
Former head of Azerbaijani KGBHeydar Aliyev, ex±Azerbaijani President. The KGB failed to rebuild most of its US illegal resident networks. The aftermath of the Second Red Scare (1947± 57), McCarthyism, and the destruction of the CPUSA hampered recruitment. The last major illegal resident, Rudolf Abel ("Willie" Vilyam Fisher), was betrayed by his assistant, Reino Häyhänen, in 1957.
Recruitment then emphasised mercenary agents, an approach especially successful[citation needed][quantify] in scientific and technical espionage²because private industry practiced lax internal security, unlike the US Government. In late 1967, the notable KGB success was the walk-in recruitment of US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John Anthony Walker who individually and via the Walker Spy Ring for eighteen years enabled Soviet Intelligence to decipher some one million US Navy messages, and track the US Navy.[11]
In the late Cold War, the KGB was lucky with intelligence coups with the cases of the mercenary walk-in recruits, FBI man Robert Hanssen(1979±2001) and CIA Soviet Division officer Aldrich Ames (1985).[12]
[edit]KGB in the Soviet Bloc
KGB[citation needed] prison doors displayed in the Museum of Occupations, Tallinn, Estonia.
It was Cold War policy for the KGB of the Soviet Union and the satellite-state KGBs to extensively monitor public and private opinion, internal subversion, and possible revolutionary plots in the Soviet Bloc. In supporting those Communist governments, the KGB was instrumental in crushing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the Prague Spring of "Socialism with a Human Face", in 1968 Czechoslovakia.
During the Hungarian revolt, KGB chairman Ivan Serov, personally supervised the post-invasion "normalization" of the country. In consequence, KGB monitored the satellite-state populations for occurrences of "harmful attitudes" and "hostile acts"; yet, stopping the Prague Spring, deposing a nationalist Communist government, was its greatest achievement.
The KGB prepared the Red Army's route by infiltrating to Czechoslovakia many illegal residents disguised as Western tourists. They were to gain the trust of and spy upon the most outspoken proponents of Alexander Dubček's new government. They were to plant subversive evidence, justifying the USSR's invasion, that right-wing groups² aided by Western intelligence agencies²were going to depose the Communist government of Czechoslovakia. Finally, the KGB prepared hardline, pro-USSR members of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (CPC), such as Alois Indra and Vasil Biľak, to assume power after the Red Army's invasion. The courage of the betrayed Prague Spring leaders did not escape KGB notice; the defector Oleg Gordievsky later remarked, "It was that dreadful event, that awful day, which determined the course of my own life" (The Sword and the Shield, p. 261).
The KGB's Czech success in the 1960s was matched with the failed suppression of the Solidarity labour movement in 1980s Poland. The KGB had forecast political instability consequent to the election of the priest Karol Wojtyla, as the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, whom they had categorised as "subversive", because of his anti-Communist sermons against the one-party PUWP régime. Despite its accurate forecast of crisis, the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) hindered the KGB's destroying the nascent Solidarity-backed political movement, fearing explosive civil violence if they imposed the KGB-recommended martial law. Aided by their Polish counterpart, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa(SB), the KGB successfully infiltrated spies to Solidarity and the Catholic Church, and in Operation X co-ordinated the declaration of martial law with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and the Polish Communist Party; however, the vacillating, conciliatory Polish approach blunted KGB effectiveness²and Solidarity then fatally weakened the Communist Polish government in 1989.
[edit]Suppressing ideological subversion
Monument to KGB victims, Vilnius,Lithuania.
During the Cold War, the KGB actively suppressed "ideological subversion"²unorthodox political and religious ideas and the espousing dissidents. In 1967, the suppression increased under new KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, who said all dissent threatened the Soviet state²including anti-Communist religious movements. Most arrested dissidents were sentenced to indefinite terms in Gulag-administered forced labour camps²where their dissension lacked the strength it might have had in public. Moreover, Yale University archive documents record that suppressing "ideological subversion" was the principal preoccupation of Yuri Andropov and Vitali Fedorchuk when each was KGB Chairman.[1] After denouncing Stalinism in his secret speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences (1956), Nikita Khrushchev lessened suppression of "ideological subversion". Resultantly, critical literature re-emerged, notably the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich(1962), by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; however, after Khrushchev's deposition in 1964, Leonid Brezhnev reverted the State and KGB to actively harsh suppression²routine house searches to seize documents and the continual monitoring of dissidents. To wit, in 1965, such a search-and-seizure operation yielded Solzhenitsyn (code-name PAUK, "spider") manuscripts of "slanderous fabrications", and the subversion trial of the novelists Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel; Sinyavsky (alias "Abram Tertz"), and Daniel (alias "Nikolai Arzhak"), were captured after a Moscow literary-world informant told KGB when to find them at home.
After suppressing the Prague Spring, KGB Chairman Andropov established the Fifth Directorate to monitor dissension and eliminate dissenters. He was especially concerned with theAleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, "Public Enemy Number One".[13] Andropov failed to expel Solzhenitsyn before 1974; but did internally-exile Sakharov to Gorky city [Nizhny Novgorod] in 1980. KGB failed to prevent Sakharov's collecting his Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, but did prevent Yuri Orlov collecting his Nobel Prize in 1978; Chairman Andropov supervised both operations.
KGB dissident-group infiltration featured agents provocateur pretending "sympathy to the cause", smear campaigns against prominent dissidents, and show trials; once imprisoned, the dissident endured KGB interrogators and sympathetic informant-cell mates. In the event, Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policies lessened persecution of dissidents; he was effecting some of the policy changes they had been demanding since the 1970s.[14]
[edit]Notable operations
KGB Headquarters on Lubyanka Square, designed by Aleksey Schusev.
With the Trust Operation, the OGPU successfully deceived some leaders of the right-wing, counter- revolutionary White Guards back to the USSR for execution.
NKVD infiltrated and destroyed Trotskyist groups; in 1940, the Spanish agent Ramón Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky in Mexico City.
KGB favoured active measures (e.g. disinformation), in discrediting the USSR's enemies.
For war-time, KGB had ready sabotage operations arms caches in target countries. In the 1960s, acting upon the information of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, the CIA counter-intelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, believed KGB had moles in two key places²the counter-intelligence section of CIA and the FBI's counter-intelligence department²through whom they would know of, and control, US counter-espionage to protect the moles and hamper the detection and capture of other Communist spies. Moreover, KGB counter-intelligence vetted foreign intelligence sources, so that the moles might "officially" approve an anti-CIA double agent as trustworthy. In retrospect, the captures of the moles Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, proved Angleton²ignored as over-cautious²was correct, despite costing him his job at CIA, which he left in 1975.[citation needed]
Occasionally, the KGB assassinated the enemies of the USSR²principally Soviet Bloc defectors, either directly or by aiding Communist country secret services²the (alleged) air-crash assassination of Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961; the surreptitious ricin poisoning of the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov, shot with an umbrella-gun of KGB design, in 1978; and the (alleged) attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981.[15]
The highest-ranking Communist intelligence officer to defect, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, said the Romanian Communist party leader Nicolae Ceauşescu told him about the "ten international leaders the Kremlin killed, or tried to kill": Laszlo Rajk and Imre Nagy of Hungary; Lucretiu Patrascanu and Gheorghiu-Dej of Romania; Rudolf Slansky, the head of Czechoslovakia, and chief diplomat Jan Masaryk; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran; Palmiro Togliatti of Italy; US President John F. Kennedy; and Mao Zedong of China via Lin Biao; and noted that "among the leaders of Moscow's satellite intelligence services, there was unanimous agreement that the KGB had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy."[16]
[edit]Organization of the KGB
[edit]Senior staff
The Chairman of the KGB, First Deputy Chairmen (1±2), Deputy Chairmen (4±6). Its policy Collegium comprised a chairman, deputy chairmen, directorate chiefs, and republican KGB chairmen. [edit]The Directorates
First Chief Directorate (Foreign Operations) ± foreign espionage.
Second Chief Directorate ± counter-intelligence, internal political control.
Third Chief Directorate (Armed Forces) ± military counter-intelligence and armed forces political surveillance.
Fourth Directorate (Transportation security)
Fifth Chief Directorate ± censorship and internal security against artistic, political, and religious dissension; renamed "Directorate Z", protecting the Constitutional order, in 1989.
Sixth Directorate (Economic Counter-intelligence, industrial security)
Seventh Directorate (Surveillance) ± of Soviet nationals and foreigners.
Eighth Chief Directorate ± monitored-managed national, foreign, and overseas communications, cryptologic equipment, and research and development. Ninth Directorate (Guards and KGB Protection Service) 40,000-man uniformed bodyguard for the CPSU leaders and families, guarded government installations (nuclear weapons, etc.), operated the Moscow VIP subway, and secure Government±Party telephony. Pres. Yeltsin transformed it to the Federal Protective Service (FPS).
Fifteenth Directorate (Security of Government Installations)
Sixteenth Directorate (SIGINT and communications interception) operated the national and government telephone and telegraph systems.
Border Guards Directorate responsible for the USSR's border troops.
Operations and Technology Directorate ± research laboratories for recording devices and Laboratory 12 for poisons and drugs. [edit]Other units
KGB Personnel Department
Secretariat of the KGB
KGB Technical Support Staff
KGB Finance Department
KGB Archives
KGB Irregulars
Administration Department of the KGB, and
The CPSU Committee.
KGB Spetsnaz (special operations) units such as:
The Alpha Group
The Vympel, etc.
Kremlin Guard Force for the Presidium, et al., then became the FPS.
[edit]The KGB's evolution
Dates Organisation
December 1917 Cheka February 1922 Incorporated to NKVD (as GPU)
July 1923 OGPU
July 1934 Re-incorporated to NKVD (as GUGB)
February 1941 NKGB
July 1941 Re-incorporated to NKVD (as GUGB)
April 1943 NKGB
March 1946 MGB
October 1947ʹNovember 1951 Foreign Intelligence to the KI
March 1953 Merged to and enlarged MVD
March 1954 KGB
November 1991 FSK
Organization Chairman Dates
ʹ ʹ 7ʹ Cheka GPU OGPU Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky 191 26
ʹ3 OGPU Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky 1926 4
3 ʹ3 NKVD Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda 19 4 6 3 ʹ38 Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov 19 6
38ʹ Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 19 41
ʹ NKGB Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov 1941 (Feb Jul)
ʹ 3 NKVD Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 1941 4
ʹ 3ʹ NKGB MGB Vsevolod Nikolayevich Merkulov 194 46
ʹ Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov 1946 51
ʹ 3 Semyon Denisovich Ignatyev 1951 5
MGB
3 ʹ Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria 195 (Mar Jun)
3ʹ Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov 195 54
ʹ 8 Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov 1954 5
8ʹ Aleksandr Nikolayevich Shelepin 195 61
ʹ 7 Vladimir Yefimovich Semichastny 1961 6
KGB
7ʹ8 Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov 196 2
8 ʹ Vitali Vasilyevich Fedorchuk 19 2 (May Dec)
8 ʹ88 Viktor Mikhailovich Chebrikov 19 2 88ʹ Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov 19 91
ʹ Vadim Viktorovich Bakatin 1991 (Aug Nov)
KGB MEMORIALS
Estonia
The KGB Cells Museum in Tartu is situated in the "gray house", which in the 1940s-1950s housed the South Estonian Centre of the NKVD/KGB. The basement floor with the cells for prisoners is open for visitors. Part of the cells, lock-ups and the corridor in the basement have been restored.[1]
[edit]Lithuania
The Museum of Genocide Victims was set up in Vilnius on 14 October 1992 in the former KGB headquarters (which had been used by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation). The building also houses the Lithuanian Special Archive, where documents of the former KGB archive are kept.[2]
[edit]Latvia
"The Black Door", a memorial at the former KGB building on Stabu Street in Rīga, was unveiled in 2003. The memorial, designed by artist Glebs Pantelejevs, is a half-open steel door and a commemorative plaque.[3]
[edit]Germany
A memorial and exhibition centre is being created in the former KGB prison in Potsdam. Initially used for interrogating alleged Western spies, some of whom were executed, the prison later mainly held Soviet soldiers who had been arrested for mutiny, desertion or anti-Soviet activity. [4]
MITROKHIN ARCHIVE
The Mitrokhin Archive is a collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin during his thirty years as a KGB archivist in the foreign intelligence service and the First Chief Directorate. When he defected to Great Britain, he brought the Archive with him. Two books, Sword and the Shield and The KGB and the Battle for the Third World, based on the Archive and hundreds other sources were published in 1992 and 2005, which gives details about much of the Soviet Union's clandestine intelligence operations around the world. The books were written by British intelligence historian Christopher Andrew. Their publication provoked parliamentary inquiries in the U.K., India, and Italy.[1][2]
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
Cold War
In 1946, SIS absorbed the "rump" remnant of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), dispersing the latter's personnel and equipment between its operational divisions or "controllerates" and new Directorates for Training and Development and for War Planning. The 1921 arrangement was streamlined with the geographical, operational units redesignated "Production Sections", sorted regionally under Controllers, all under a Director of Production. The Circulating Sections were renamed 'Requirements Sections' and placed under a Directorate of Requirements.
SIS operations against the USSR were extensively compromised by the fact that the post-war Counter-Espionage Section, R5, was headed for two years by an agent working for the Soviet Union, Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby. Although Philby's damage was mitigated for several years by his transfer as Head of Station in Turkey, he later returned and was the SIS intelligence liaison officer at the Embassy in Washington D.C.. In this capacity he compromised a programme of joint U.S.-UK paramilitary operations (Albanian Subversion, Valuable Project) in Enver Hoxha's Albania (although it has been shown that these operations were further compromised "on the ground" by poor security discipline amongst the Albanian émigrésrecruited to undertake the operations). Philby was eased out of office and quietly retired in 1953 after the defection of his friends and fellow members of the "Cambridge spy ring" Donald Duart Maclean and Guy Burgess.
SIS suffered further embarrassment when it turned out that an officer involved in both the Vienna and Berlin tunnel operations had been turned as a Soviet agent during internment by theChinese during the Korean War. This agent, George Blake, returned from his internment to be treated as something of a hero by his contemporaries in "the office". His security authorisation was restored, and in 1953 he was posted to the Vienna Station where the original Vienna tunnels had been running for years. After compromising these to his Soviet controllers, he was subsequently assigned to the British team involved on Operation Gold, the Berlin tunnel, and which was, consequently, blown from the outset. Blake was eventually identified, arrested and faced trial in court for espionage and was sent to prison² only to be liberated and extracted to the USSR in 1964. In 1956 MI6 Director John Alexander Sinclairhad to resign after the botched affair of the death of Lionel Crabb.
Despite these setbacks, SIS began to recover in the early 1960s as a result of improved vetting and security, and a series of successful penetrations, one of the Polish security establishment codenamed NODDY and the other the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Penkovsky ran for two years as a considerable success, providing several thousand photographed documents, including Red Army rocketry manuals that allowed U.S. National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) analysts to recognise the deployment pattern of Soviet SS4MRBMs and SS5 IRBMs in Cuba in October 1962. SIS operations against the USSR continued to gain pace through the remainder of the Cold War, arguably peaking with the recruitment in the 1970s of Oleg Gordievsky whom SIS ran for the better part of a decade, then successfully exfiltrated from the USSR across the Finnish border in 1985.
The real scale and impact of SIS activities during the second half of the Cold War remains unknown, however, because the bulk of their most successful targeting operations against Soviet officials were the result of "Third Country" operations recruiting Soviet sources travelling abroad in Asia and Africa. These included the defection to the SIS Tehran Station in 1982 of KGB officer Vladimir Kuzichkin, the son of a senior Politburo member and a member of the KGB's internal Second Chief Directorate who provided SIS and the British government with warning of the mobilisation of the KGB's Alpha Force during the 1991 August Coup which, briefly, toppled Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
SIS activities allegedly included a range of covert political action successes, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 (in collaboration with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency), the again collaborative toppling of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in 1961, and the triggering of an internal conflict between Lebanese paramilitary groups in the second half of the 1980s that effectively distracted them from further hostage takings of Westerners in the region.
A number of intelligence operatives have left SIS. Usually they have found new employment in the civilian world. In the late 1990s, an SIS officer called Richard Tomlinson was dismissed and later wrote a story of his experiences entitled "The Big Breach".
Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services
Cover of book updated in 1994.
Author Ian Black and Benny Morris
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Non-fiction
Publisher Grove Press
Publication date 1991
Media type Print
Pages 634 pp
78 8 3 8 ISBN 9 0 021 2 64
7 7 OCLC Number 249 0 944
Israel's Secret Wars: A History of Israel's Intelligence Services (also known as Israel's Secret Wars: The Untold History of Israeli Intelligence) is a 1991 book written by Ian Black and Benny Morris about the history of the Israeli intelligence services from the period of theYishuv to the end of the 1980s. It was updated in 1994 to include the Gulf War period.
It explores the role of secret intelligence and covert activities in the Zionist movement before independence and explore the operational and political histories all three major Israeli intelligence agencies Aman (military intelligence), Mossad (foreign intelligence and covert operations) andShin Bet (internal security).[1]
John C. Campbell, writing in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the book "cannot be the definitive history, but it comes as close as we are likely to get and is especially good in showing how critical to, and closely interwoven with, the fate of the nation these agencies have been."[1]
Early Cold War Spies The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics John Earl Haynes & Harvey Klehr
Cambridge University Press, 2006 Paperback (ISBN-13: 9780521674072 | ISBN-10: 0521674077) Hardback (ISBN-13: 9780521857383 | ISBN-10: 0521857384) Communism was never a popular ideology in America, but the vehemence of American anticommunism varied from passive disdain in the 1920s to fervent hostility in the early years of the Cold War. Nothing so stimulated the white hot anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s more than a series of spy trials that revealed that American Communists had co-operated with Soviet espionage against the United States and had assisted in stealing the technical secrets of the atomic bomb as well as penetrating the U.S. State Department, the Treasury Department, and the White House itself. This book reviews the major spy cases of the early Cold War (Hiss- Chambers, Rosenberg, Bentley, Gouzenko, Coplon, Amerasia and others) and the often- frustrating clashes between the exacting rules of the American criminal justice system and the requirements of effective counter-espionage.
A compact and concise survey of the major spy cases of the early Cold War Offers a retrospective look at the trials in light of evidence that became available at the end of the Cold War and with the collapse of the USSR Each chapter summarizes a major case or a group of related cases, noting any historical or legal controversies Contents
Series Editor¶s Foreword
1 Introduction: Early Cold War Spy Cases
Early Cold War Spy Trials
A Word about Trials and History
Spy Trials and McCarthyism
Politics of the Early Cold War 2 The Precursors
Amerasia: The First Cold War Spy Case
Gouzenko: A Canadian Spy Case with American Repercussions
3 Elizabeth Bentley: The Case of the Blond Spy Queen
The Silvermaster Group
The Perlo Group
The Trials of William Remington
Venona and Bentley¶s Vindication
The Bentley Case: A Conclusion
4 The Alger Hiss±Whittaker Chambers Case
Whittaker Chambers
Alger Hiss
Dueling Testimony
The Slander Suit, the Baltimore Documents, and the Pumpkin Papers The Grand Jury
The First Hiss Trial
The Second Hiss Trial
Chambers after the Trial
Hiss after the Trial
The Historical Argument
5 The Atomic Espionage Cases
Klaus Fuchs: The Background
Theodore Hall: The Background
Rosenberg and Greenglass: The Background
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Communists at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory
The Red Bomb and the Postwar Trials
J. Robert Oppenheimer after the Manhattan Project
The Trials of Rudolf Abel and Morris and Lona Cohen 6 Judith Coplon: The Spy Who Got Away with It
Coplon¶s Recruitment into Espionage
The Washington Trial
The New York Trial
On Appeal: Justice Frustrated
7 The Soble-Soblen Case: Last of the Early Cold War Spy Trials
Infiltrating the Trotskyist Movement
Mark Zborowski
Boris Morros: Double Agent
The Soble Ring Trials
The Robert Soblen Trial
8 Conclusion: The Decline of the Ideological Spy
Spy Trials and Understanding Soviet Espionage
Counterespionage and the American Criminal Justice System
The Elusive Balance between Security and Liberty
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster
Born November 27, 1898
Odessa
Died October 7, 1964 (aged 65)
possibly Beach Haven, New Jersey
Known for Silvermaster spy ring
Spouse(s) Elena Witte
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster (November 27, 1898 ± October 7, 1964), an economist with the United States War Production Board (WPB) during World War II, was the head of a large ring of Communist spies in the U.S. government. [1] It is from him that the FBI¶s ³Silvermaster file´[2], documenting the Bureau¶s investigation into Communist penetration of the Federal government during the Cold War, takes its name.
Silvermaster was identified as a Soviet agent in the WPB operating under the code names Pel[3], Pal, ³Paul´[4] in the Venona decrypts; and as ³Robert´ both in Venona[5] and independently by defecting Soviet intelligence courier Elizabeth Bentley.[6]
Contents
[hide]
1 Early years
2 Government
3 Spy
4 War Production Board 5 Death
6 Chronology
7 Silvermaster group
8 References
9 Sources
10 External links
[edit]Early years
Silvermaster was born of a Jewish family in Odessa, Russia, on October 27, 1898. He moved with his family to China, where he learned to speak perfect English with a British accent. He emigrated to the U.S., and received a B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle (where he was ³stated to be a known Communist´) and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where his thesis was entitled ³Lenin¶s Economic Thought Prior to the October Revolution.´ He became a naturalized American citizen in 1926. He was reported to be in contact with a very large number of Communist Party USA officials, and was active in a number of Communist front groups.[7]
[edit]Government
While nominally remaining on the employment rolls of the Farm Security Administration, Silvermaster arranged in 1942 to be detailed to the Board of Economic Warfare. The transfer, however, triggered objections from military counter-intelligence who suspected he was a hidden Communist and regarded him as a security risk. On July 16, 1942 the U.S. Civil Service Commission recommended "Cancel eligibilities...and bar him for the duration of the National Emergency."
[edit]Spy
Silvermaster denied any Communist links and appealed to Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson to overrule the security officials. Both White House advisor Lauchlin Currie (identified in Venona as the Soviet agent operating under the cover name ³Page´[8]) and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White (identified in Venona as the Soviet agent operating under the cover names ³Lawyer´[9]; ³Jurist´[8]; ³Richard´[10]) intervened on his behalf. Silvermaster subsequently received two promotions and pay raises.
[edit]War Production Board
At the War Production Board, Silvermaster was able to provide the Soviet Union with a large amount of data on arms, aircraft, and shipping production. In June 1943, Silvermaster sent a War Production Board report on arms production in the United States, including bombers, pursuit planes, tanks, propelled guns, howitzers, radar and submarines, sub chasers, and the like, to Soviet intelligence.[11] Then, in December 1944, the New York MGB[12]office cabled another Silvermaster report stating: "(Silvermaster) has sent us a 50-page Top Secret War Production Board report ... on arms production in the U.S."[13]
Silvermaster is also associated with Harry Dexter White at the Bretton Woods conference, and his testimony before the US Senate Internal Security Subcommittee covers "175 pages of interrogation and exhibits" regarding his espionage activities in the US.
[edit]Death
He died in October 7, 1964 possibly in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey.[14][15]
The Silvermaster group was a major Soviet espionage organization that operated within the United States Government during World War II. It was investigated by the FBI spanning the years 1945 through 1959. Nathan Gregory Silvermaster was the leader of the spy ring which consisted of 27 principal KGB operatives gathering information from at least six Federal agencies. The group operated primarily in the Department of the Treasury but also had contacts in the Army Air Force and in the White House. Sixty-one of the Venona cables concern the activities of the Silvermaster spy ring.
In 1942 the Silvermaster Group delivered 59 rolls of film to their handler. In 1943, it was 211 rolls, 600 in 1944, and 1895 in 1945.
Contents
[hide]
1 Investigation
o 1.1 Leaks
o 1.2 Executive Conference
o 1.3 Morgan memorandum
2 Members
3 References Investigation
In November 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, the courier from group based in Washington, D.C. to KGB headquarters in New York defected to the FBI. The KGB had removed Bentley from overseeing at least 80 members of the CPUSA Underground Apparatus in 1944. Realizing she knew too much, was longer of use to the KGB, and her life was in danger, she told her story to the FBI in a deposition.
The FBI knew of 5 Soviet agents throughout the war, Bentley added at least another 80, some of which were still employed in the US government at that time. Her story at first was incredible and embarrassing to the FBI, but her allegations soon were borne out by information already in Bureau files. [1] By December, no fewer than 227 FBI agents were involved in the case. [2]
The suspects were surveilled throughout much of 1946 in hopes of learning more about the organization and building a prosecutable case. Meanwhile, other information came from Igor Guzenko [3] , a Soviet code clerk who defected in Canada, and the Army Signals Intelligence Service which began secretly reading KGB communications with Moscow. Leaks
By December 1946 leaks began to develop, [4] copies of an FBI memorandum entitled "Underground Soviet Espionage Organization (NKVD) in Agencies of the United States Government" [5] had been disseminated to several government departments and agencies, including the White House, and some were unaccounted for. In late December, a Justice Department prosecutor in the Criminal Division requested of a New York Special Agent in Charge (SAC) field investigator a copy of the Bentley deposition. The SAC telephoned FBI headquarters in Washington to request a copy of the signed affidavit in the presence of the prosecutor sitting at his desk. In a stinging rebuke to the field investigator, FBI Agent Edward Tamm noted in a memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover that the Bureau had gone to great lengths to protect the identity of the informant who was codenamed "Gregory" in the files, and the call in the presence of the attorney was an "an atrocious exhibition of a complete lack of judgment." [6]
A copy of the Bentley deposition was furnished to the Criminal Division and they then pressed for a personal interview with Bentley to evaluate her ability to testify. Tamm wrote to the Director how he informed the prosecutors that ³the Bureau was apprehensive for the life of informant since the informant would probably be killed if [her] identity were inadvertently disclosed´ [7] Executive Conference
An Executive Conference was formed consisting of the prosecutors from the Department of Justice Criminal Division and FBI field investigators to discuss the Silvermaster subjects and how to proceed with prosecution. The United Press began running stories on the case with information coming directly out of the Conference meeting. In a hand written note in the margin of a memo from January 23, 1947, Hoover writes, "in view of all the 'gabbing' done by the Dept to the Press there is little which can be expected from any action now." [8] The conference concluded with a request of the Attorney General that the FBI recommend which of several possible courses of action be taken. Hoover, in a somber tone, responds, "I am of the opinion...it will be impossible to continue the investigation on an intelligence basis....the subjects...are now all very security conscious...as a result of this premature and ill-advised publicity, the Bureau's key informant ...refuses to continue to cooperate with the Bureau. It is needless to point out that without the cooperation of this informant a real coverage of this case is impossible....any attempt to interrogate them, either by Bureau agents or before a grand jury, would produce nothing. Obviously, this situation leaves only the third alternative; that is, that the Department furnish to the employing departments the basic data concerning the activities of the individual subjects as a possible means of concluding the case. It is assumed, of course, that the employing departments will take administrative action against the subjects who are employed in these departments." [9] Morgan memorandum
Edward Morgan of the FBI was asked to make an objective analysis of where the case stood from a legal and investigative standpoint. This document, Morgan's memorandum, sheds much light on what was to follow in the ensuing years. [10] Morgan writes, "there exists a fraternal and intimate social bond" among the group, the subjects are "extraordinarily intelligent, at least they are unusually well educated," and some of the finest legal talent in the country could be expected to be retained for their defense. Without Venona evidence, Morgan declares "the case is no more than the word of Gregory against that of the several conspirators. The likely result would be an acquittal under very embarrassing circumstances." Morgan observes, "Coming in after the event as the Bureau did, we are now on the outside looking in, with the rather embarrassing responsibility of having a most serious case of Soviet espionage laid in our laps without a decent opportunity to make it stick. This very circumstance, however, necessitates pursuing more direct methods" and states, "this case is one of Soviet espionage or it is nothing." Morgan proposes developing one of the "lesser lights" as an informant to corroborate Bentley, but acknowledges the unlikelihood of it occurring. "I doubt if any more can be accomplished of probative value through further investigation apart from the interviews." Morgan refers to the political problem Bentley laid in their lap 10 years after the fact, "I personally am of the opinion that the Bureau would be subjected to possible criticism as being derelict in its responsibility in this instance if the various subjects were not thoroughly and exhaustively interviewed. The odds are not too good that such interviews would terminate successfully; however, it is quite possible that some of the lesser lights among the subjects would crack during the course of a careful and pointed interview."
Morgan concludes with the recommendation "That one of the subjects of this case, probably the weakest sister, be contacted with a view to making him an informant...Failing in this respect, that immediately the other subjects be exhaustively interviewed. Since an interview with one would virtually amount to putting all of them on notice, it would seem logical to conduct such interviews as nearly simultaneously as possible....That failing to break any of the subjects, serious consideration be given to exposing this lousy outfit and at least hounding them from the Federal Service. Several possibilities exist in this regard but this would seem to be a bridge to cross when we get to it." Members
Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Chief Planning Technician, Procurement Division, United States Department of the Treasury; Chief Economist, War Assets Administration; Director of the Labor Division, Farm Security Administration; Board of Economic Warfare; Reconstruction Finance Corporation Department of Commerce
Helen Silvermaster (wife)
Schlomer Adler, United States Department of the Treasury
Norman Chandler Bursler, United States Department of Justice Anti-Trust Division
Frank Coe, Assistant Director, Division of Monetary Research, Treasury Department; Special Assistant to the United States Ambassador in London; Assistant to the Executive Director, Board of Economic Warfare; Assistant Administrator, Foreign Economic Administration
Lauchlin Currie, Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt; Deputy Administrator of Foreign Economic Administration; Special Representative to China
Bela Gold, Assistant Head of Program Surveys, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, United States Department of Agriculture; Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Economic Programs in Foreign Economic Administration
Sonia Steinman Gold, Division of Monetary Research U.S. Treasury Department; U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Interstate Migration; U.S. Bureau of Employment Security
Irving Kaplan, Foreign Funds Control and Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury Foreign Economic Administration; chief advisor to the Military Government of Germany
George Silverman, civilian Chief Production Specialist, Material Division, Army Air Force Air Staff, War Department, Pentagon
William Henry Taylor, Assistant Director of the Middle East Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of Treasury
William Ullman, delegate to United Nations Charter meeting and Bretton Woods conference; Division of Monetary Research, Department of Treasury; Material and Services Division, Air Corps Headquarters, Pentagon
Anatole Volkov
Harry Dexter White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury; Head of the International Monetary Fund
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The Cold War was the protracted struggle that emerged after Second World War between capitalism and communism, revolving around the superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States. It lasted from 1946/1947 to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 1991-12- 25.
Category: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War --- See latest Cold War news here. How vital were Cold War spies, did they actually make any difference? The world of espionage is at the heart of the mythology of the Cold War. But while the tales of adventure, treason, and mole hunts are a great source for thriller writers, did they really make a difference to the outcome? Did intelligence make the Cold War hotter or colder? It is difficult to know the answer, because much of the intelligence collected was military or tactical in nature, and would only have useful if the Cold War had gone hot. But in the lack of traditional warfare, intelligence becomes itself the primary battleground. by bbc.co.uk :: 2009-08-11 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Anthony Blunt: passing secrets to Communist Russia was the biggest mistake of my life The memoirs of spy Anthony Blunt reveal how he regarded passing British secrets to Communist Russia as the "biggest mistake of my life". He passed secret documents to the Soviets while a WWII agent for MI5. Blunt was part of the Cambridge spy ring, with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. His memoirs, at the British Library in London, says a "naive" desire to help Moscow beat fascism motivated him. Blunt penned the 30,000-word document after PM Margaret Thatcher exposed his treachery in 1979. Blunt says he became disillusioned with Moscow, wishing only to "return to my normal academic life". However, his knowledge of the others in the spy ring made this impossible. by bbc.co.uk :: 2009-08-11 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War East German spy swap fixer Wolfgang Vogel dies East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, who oversaw some of the Cold War's biggest swaps of seized spies in Berlin, has died aged 82. His swaps included KGB agent Rudolf Abel for American pilot Gary Powers, shot down over the USSR, in 1962. He also oversaw the transfer of almost a quarter of a million people from East to West Germany for billions of marks. After reunification in 1989, Vogel was accused of ripping off some of his former East German clients of their properties and conning his Western negotiating partners, and was shortly jailed in the 1990s. by bbc.co.uk :: 2008-09-03 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War For Americans who spy against the U.S. it's no longer about the money Americans who spy against the U.S. are more and more motivated by ideology rather than by money, with almost half of the known spies since the end of the Cold War showing allegiance to another country or cause. Prior to 1990 only 20% were ideologically motivated. Recent report compares trends among the 173 Americans known to have spied against the U.S. since 1947, of which 37 began their spying since 1990. Only 5 of those 37 spies are known to have got payment. Of the 11 spies id'd since 2000, none was paid. In earlier periods, money has proven to be a much more powerful sole motive. by ap :: 2008-04-09 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Spy-vs-spy in Cold War tunnel archives The recently revealed details of a U.S.-built tunnel to East Berlin brings new debate to the spy-vs.-spy Cold War battle. Intelligence officials began building the tunnel in August 1954 and got 300 yards into Soviet East Berlin 18-months later. The CIA and British intelligence tapped 3 cables between East Berlin and Soviet sources, gathering 25-tons of magnetic tape worth of Soviet secrets. The archives say that in spite of awareness of the tunnel's eventual discovery, U.S. officials hailed it as an breakthrough. The Soviet Union and East Germans detected the tunnel April 22, 1956, and called it as a propaganda victory revealing the enemy's "filthy trick." by earthtimes :: 2008-01-28 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War MI5 officer Charles Elwell, who broke the Portland island spy ring, died A former MI5 officer who helped to crush the Portland spy ring in the 1960s has passed away at 88. Charles Elwell played a essential part in revealing 5 KGB agents. He was a master spycatcher who made his name by targeting Russian agents during the Cold War. Elwell achieved his greatest success when the KGB tried to get hold of military secrets by using the Portland spy ring, led by Konon Molody. Elwell's role in the unmasking began when a Russian mole called Sniper told the CIA secrets were reaching Moscow from Portland. MI5 were informed the information was coming from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment on the island. by thisisdorset.net/ :: 2008-01-24 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Canada's official spy souvenir shop off limits to ordinary citizens Canada's official spy souvenir shop is the perfect complement to the country's spy museum. They're both top-secret building that are off limits to average Canadians. Word of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's museum, featuring espionage cameras and other Cold War paraphernalia, leaked to the media years ago. But a newly released files suggests CSIS also runs a non- profit "souvenir shop," available only to those with proper security clearance. "For individuals wishing to purchase items from the Souvenir Shop, they can do so by stating what they want and putting the money in an envelope," say the minutes of a meeting at CSIS HQs in Ottawa. by 88db.net :: 2008-01-19 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Support group for Spies: From East German Spooks to Victims Most agree: Those who worked for the East German secret police should not hold positions of power in the reunified country. But some of the ex-spies feel they are subject to discrimination, and do what they can to support each other. "Stasi methods!" It's one of the worst insults at the German state. But even now it remains a popular insult in Berlin. A former judge Hans-Herbert Nehmer in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR)thinks East Germany remains under constant attack: "Germany is dominated by West propaganda and anti- communist hardliner politics which bedevil the image of the GDR". by spiegel :: 2007-06-13 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War The lost 20 years of CIA spies caught in China trap Lured by a double agent and jailed secretly, the story of Jack Downey and Richard Fecteau is one of the most extraordinary in espionage. On a spring morning in 1973 an emaciated man made his way across the Lo Wu bridge from China into Hong Kong. A British soldier at the frontier post saluted him as he approached. This was 'the first act of dignity shown to him in 20 years'. His name was Jack Downey. He was a CIA agent, and since 1952 he and Richard Fecteau had languished in a Chinese prison, often in solitary confinement, secret hostages in the Cold War between the U.S. and China. by timesonline :: 2007-04-26 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Alger Hiss: Cold War's most famous spy case gets a new look Scholars probing anew into the Cold War's most famous espionage case suggested that another U.S. diplomat, not Alger Hiss, was the Soviet agent code-named Ales, and a stepson of Hiss said his chief accuser had invented the spy allegations after his sexual advances were rejected. The two claims, presented at a daylong symposium titled "Alger Hiss & History", provided startling new information that, if true, could point toward a posthumous vindication of Hiss, who was accused of feeding U.S. secrets to Moscow and spent nearly 5 years in prison for perjury before his death in 1996 at age 92. by newsday :: 2007-04-06 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Czech secret agents trained to infiltrate Germany in the early 1970s The Czechoslovak communist military counter-intelligence trained secret commando units to infiltrate West Germany in the 1970s. Some 100 agents in this top secret setup were meant to carry out tasks such as sabotage and murders in the event of a World War III. The files were found in the archives of the military intelligence service. They contain information about a unit that was set up following warnings from the Soviet Union of a similar plot across the border in West Germany. A general in the Soviet intelligence service warned of a danger to the Warsaw Pact, and urged the allies in Prague to set up their own top secret sabotage unit. by dw-world :: 2007-02-25 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Long-forgotten U.S. Cold War spies remembered During the Korean War, a plane carrying two agents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (John Downey and Richard Fecteau) crashed in the Chinese province of Jilin on Nov 29, 1952. The two were in a mission to meet with Chinese anti-government activists. After being caught by Chinese People's Liberation Army, they spent 20 years in prison. A CIA report "Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-73" documents the men's story. The report shows the reality of anti-communist operations. At that time, the U.S. undertook operations to nurture "a third anti-communist force" in China, because the Kuomintang had been discredited by the Chinese people. by hani :: 2007-01-27 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Polish Church and the communist-era secret police Poland's Roman Catholic Church is to investigate whether any of its senior members collaborated with the communist-era secret police. The decision was made at an emergency meeting of the country's 45 bishops triggered by the dramatic resignation of Warsaw's archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus, who quit after he confessed to collaborating with the communist police. Historians estimate that up to 15% of Polish clergy agreed to inform on their colleagues in the communist era. by bbc :: 2007-01-17 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Cold war spying never really ended The Cold War ended long ago, but the arrest of a Russian spy in Montreal suggests the stealth battles between spies and spy-catchers that characterized the Soviet era continue. Although counterterrorism has been at the centre of Canada's security, the government has been dropping hints about a spike in spying, called the world's second-oldest profession. Intelligence chief Jim Judd said in a speech that "foreign espionage is, if anything, growing and, in fact, becoming more sophisticated than ever through the application of new technologies." by nationalpost :: 2006-11-22 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Secret of Cold War Spy Messages Revealed The invisible ink formula used by East German secret police to pass messages during the Cold War has remained classified, until now. The Stasi, a feared and highly covert police force modeled after the KGB, communicated top-secret messages with invisible ink. More than 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification, a group of scientists believe they've cracked the well- guarded chemical code. "This is a first, since spy agencies' secret writing formulas and methods are super-secret and never made public," said Kristie Macrakis. by livescience :: 2006-11-13 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Markus Wolf - East German Spymaster Without a Face - Dies Markus Wolf, the East German spymaster known as "the Man Without a Face" because the West didn't have his photo until the late 1970s, died on the 17th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was 83. Wolf, who earned the Russian nickname "Mischa" after spending more than a decade of his youth in the Soviet Union, died unexpectedly in Berlin, his publisher said. During Wolf's 34-year tenure as the head of the HVA foreign intelligence section of East Germany's Ministry of State Security, or Stasi, he sent thousands of agents across the Iron Curtain. by bloomberg :: 2006-11-13 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Cold war papers reveal cover-up over diver's mysterious death Government records released shed new light on a famous cold war mystery surrounding the disappearance of a navy diver said to have been the model for James Bond. Commander Lionel "Buster" Crabb went missing during a dive off Portsmouth in April 1956, the year of Suez and the Hungarian uprising, amid claims that he had been spying on Soviet ships during the visit of the USSR's leaders, Nikita Khruschev and Nikolai Bulganin. There was speculation at the time, including that the Soviet leadership had given him a job or ordered his execution. by guardian :: 2006-10-29 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War History's best spies and covert operators With the release of the Venona Papers, U.S./British deciphered Soviet secret messages from 1946 to 1980, and KGB archivist Vasili Mitronkin's two books on the smuggled-out KGB files, much is now known about the KGB's espionage. As noted by Peter Earnest, a 35-year CIA vet and the Spy Museum director: You can't pick up a newspaper without reading how intelligence has succeeded or failed. "I Lie for a Living: Greatest Spies of All Time" presents the best spies and covert operators known to history. It contains photos and profiles of the patriots, traitors and adventurers that have dealt in the dark trade of espionage. by philly :: 2006-08-22 :: Spies, Intelligence, Espionage of Cold War Spy criticized CIA's handling of defectors F. Mark Wyatt, a former CIA agent who spent 3 decades on the front lines of Cold War espionage and who in retirement worked to improve the lives of Soviet-bloc defectors, died. After years of helping woo potential defectors, Wyatt believed the CIA could do a better job of helping former spies adjust to their new lives in this country. Several top officials redefected because of the shabby treatment they received. by washingtonpost :: 2006-07-19 :: CIA during Cold War Perlo group From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article has been nominated to be checked for its neutrality. Discussion of this nomination can be found on the talk page.(December 2007)
Headed by Victor Perlo, the Perlo group is the name given to a group of Americans who provided information which was given to Soviet intelligence agencies; it was active during theWorld War II period, until the entire group was exposed to the FBI by the defection of Elizabeth Bentley.[dubious ± discuss]
It had sources on the War Production Board, the Senate La Follette Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; and in the United States Department of Treasury.
Contents
[hide]
1 The Perlo group and Venona
2 KGB Archives
3 Members
4 See also
5 References 6 External links
[edit]The Perlo group and Venona
Much useful additional information on the activities of the Perlo group was given by the Venona project. The first Venona transcript referencing the Perlo group gives the names of all the members in clear text, as code names had not yet been assigned.
The Perlo group fits into the Venona project information when transcript # 687 of 13 May 1944 is examined. Iskhak Akhmerov in New York City personally prepared a report to MGBheadquarters in Moscow advising that some unspecified action had been taken regarding Elizabeth Bentley in accordance with instructions of Earl Browder. Akhmerov then made reference to winter and also to Harry Magdoff. This latter reference was then followed by a statement that in Bentley's opinion "they" are reliable. It was also mentioned that no one had interested himself in their possibilities.
The name Golovin was mentioned, and it was then reported that Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer, Edward Fitzgerald and Harry Magdoff would take turns coming to New York every two weeks. Akhmerov said Kramer and Fitzgerald knew Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, whose cover name was later changed to "Robert".
Bentley advised that Jacob Golos informed her he had made contact with a group in Washington, D.C. through Earl Browder. After the death of Golos in 1943, two meetings were arranged with this group in 1944. The first meeting was arranged by Browder and was held in early 1944. The meetings were held in the apartment of John Abt in New York City and Bentley was introduced to four individuals identified as Victor Perlo, Charles Kramer, Harry Magdoff and Edward Fitzgerald.
[edit]KGB Archives
Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev in Haunted Wood, a book written from an examination of KGB Archives in Moscow, report the KGB credits the Perlo group members with having sent, among other items, the following 1945 U.S. Government documents to Moscow:
February
Contents of a WPB memo dealing with apportionment of aircraft to the USSR in the event of war on Japan;
WPB discussion of the production policy regarding war materials at an Executive Committee meeting;
Documents on future territorial planning for commoditiies in short supply;
Documents on a priority system for foreign orders for producing goods in the United States after the end of the war in Europe; Documents on trade policy and trade controls after the war;
Documents on arms production in the United States in January 1945;
March
A WPB report on "Aluminum for the USSR and current political issues in the U.S. over aluminum supplies" (2/26/45);
April
Documents concerning the committee developing plans for the U.S. economy after the defeat of Germany, and also regarding war orders for the war against Japan;
Documents on the production of the B-29 bomber and the B-32;
Tactical characteristics of various bombers and fighters;
Materials on the United States using Saudi Arabian oil resources;
June
Data concerning U.S. war industry production in May from the WPB's secret report;
Data concerning plans for a 1945±1946 aircraft production from the WPB;
More data on specific aircraft's technical aspects;
August
Data concerning the new Export-Import Bank;
Data concerning supplies of American aircraft to the Allies in June 1945;
Data from the top secret WPB report on U.S. war industry production in June;
October
Detailed data concerning the industrial capacities of the Western occupation zones of Germany that could be brought out as war reparations;
Information on views within the U.S. Army circles concerning the inevitability of war against the USSR as well as statements by an air force general supporting U.S. acquisition of advanced bases in Europe for building missiles. [edit]Members
Victor Perlo headed the Perlo group. Perlo was originally allegedly a member of the Ware group before World War II. After receiving a master's degree in mathematics from Columbia University in 1933, Perlo worked at a number of New Deal government agencies among a group of economists known as ³Harry Hopkins¶ bright young men.´ The group worked, among other things, for creation and implementation of the WPA jobs program, and helped push through unemployment compensation, the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and Social Security. During World War II, Perlo served in several capacities, working first as chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board, then in the Office of Price Administration, and later for the Treasury Department. Perlo left the government in 1947. Perlo also worked for the Brookings Institution and wrote American Imperialism. Perlo's code name in Soviet intelligence was "Eck" and "Raid" appearing in Venona project as "Raider".
Victor Perlo, Chief of the Aviation Section of the War Production Board; head of branch in Research Section, Office of Price Administration Department of Commerce; Division of Monetary Research Department of Treasury; Brookings Institution
Edward Fitzgerald, War Production Board
Harold Glasser, Deputy Director, Division of Monetary Research, United States Department of the Treasury; United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration; War Production Board; Advisor on North African Affairs Committee; United States Treasury Representative to the Allied High Commission in Italy
Charles Kramer, Senate Subcommittee on War Mobilization; Office of Price Administration; National Labor Relations Board; Senate Subcommittee on Wartime Health and Education; Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee; Democratic National Committee
Harry Magdoff, Statistical Division of War Production Board and Office of Emergency Management; Bureau of Research and Statistics, WTB; Tools Division, War Production Board; Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, United States Department of Commerce
Allen Rosenberg, Board of Economic Warfare; Chief of the Economic Institution Staff, Foreign Economic Administration; Senate Subcommittee on Civil Liberties; Senate Committee on Education and Labor; Railroad Retirement Board; Councel to the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board
Donald Wheeler, Office of Strategic Services Research and Analysis division
Harry Magdoff and espionage From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Several historians and researchers have come to the conclusion that Harry Magdoff was among a number of persons inside the U.S. government used as information sources by Soviet intelligence.
Contents
[hide]
1 Investigation
2 Decrypted cables
3 Moscow Archives
4 Chronology
5 Skeptical Views
6 Notes
7 References
o 7.1 Print
o 7.2 Online
o 7.3 Images
8 External links
[edit]Investigation
An FBI file description says Magdoff and others were probed as part of "a major espionage investigation spanning the years 1945 through 1959" into a suspected "Soviet spy ring which supposedly had 27 individuals gathering information from at least six Federal agencies. However, none of the subjects were indicted by the Grand Jury."1
Soviet cable from New York to Moscow on the 13th of April, 1944, refers toMAGDOFF - "KANT". A mass of previously unremarked materials collectively known as the VENONA project was declassified by the U.S. government in 1995. Among these were Army decryptions of Soviet cables which revealed there to be some number of American citizens involved in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Magdoff was among those investigated as a member of what was called the Perlo group.
The public accusation that Magdoff was working for Soviet intelligence was itself not new; it had originated with defector Elizabeth Bentley who provided this information to the FBI and later testified to that same effect in open hearings. Bentley told the FBI:
On the date specified I went to the apartment of John Abt, was admitted by him to his apartment and there met four individuals, none of whom I had ever seen before. They were introduced to me as Victor Perlo, Charlie Kramer, Henry Magdoff and Edward Fitzgerald. They seemed to know, at least, generally that they could talk freely in my presence and I recall some conversation about their paying Communist Party dues to me, as well as my furnishing them with Communist Party literature. There followed then a general discussion among all of us as to the type of information which these people, excepting Abt, would be able to furnish. It was obvious to me that these people, including Abt, had been associated for some time and that they had been engaged in some sort of espionage for Earl Browder. 2
Victor Perlo, leader of the group, asked if the material was going to "Uncle Joe" (Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).
The Army Signals Intelligence Corp and the FBI conducted a thirty-eight year investigation into communist espionage with mixed results. According to Counterintelligence Reader, the Venona project confirms the accuracy of much of Bentley's testimony. Critics of Bentley point out that some of her claims were disputed at the time, and that the testimony of Bentley and others before various Congressional committees during the Red Scare was sometimes exaggerated or involved guilt by association assertions.
[edit]Decrypted cables
According to A Counterintelligence Reader, Magdoff was a member of the Perlo group.3 Magdoff was identified by Arlington Hall cryptographers in the VENONA cables and by FBIcounterintelligence investigators as being a possible Soviet information source using the cover name "KANT" as of 1944. 4 The name "KANT" appears in declassified decryptions fromNew York to Moscow, dated May 5, May 13, and May 30, 1944. The first is described by the decrypters as being sent from Pavel Ivanovich Fedosimov in which he requests to "telegraph a reply to No. 139 and advise about the possibility of a meeting with KANT."
On the 13 May cable, "MAYOR", according to Arlington Hall counterintelligence Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov, reports on the first meeting Elizabeth Bentley had with the Perlo group for the purposes of obtaining secret government information to transmit to the Soviet Union. Magdoff's surname was transmitted in the clear. 5
On HELMSMAN'S instructions GOOD GIRL contracted through AMT a new group:
[53 groups unrecoverable]
MAGDOFF - "KANT". GOOD GIRL's impressions: They are reliable FELLOWCOUNTRYMEN ["members of a Communist Party"], politically highly mature; they want to help with information. They said that they had been neglected and no one had taken any interest in their potentialities.
Magdoff at the time was ending a prolonged leave of absence due to a gall bladder operation was unsure of the type of material he could deliver.6 As a person targeted by Soviet intelligence as a potential recruit, or "probationer" in Soviet parlance, "KANT" was subject to a background check and a request was made for more information. The 30 May cable transmits personal histories for several members of the group.
February 25th, 1945; Vassiliev, Haynes believe "TAN" to be a latter day cover name for Magdoff.
2. "KANT" became a member of the CPUSA a long time ago, being [8 groups unrecovered], works in the Machine Tool Division of the DEPOT. A number of U.S. government agencies (as well as locations within the U.S.) were also given cover names. In this case, "DEPOT" is said byNSA analysts to be code for the War Production Board, where Magdoff worked in the Statistics and Tools Divisions.
[edit]Moscow Archives
In Moscow the request was processed. Evidence was unearthed in the Comintern Archives in the late 1980s has Lt. General Pavel Fitin, head of KGB foreign intelligence operations, requesting of Comintern Secretary General Georgi Dimitrov, information to pursue Magdoff's recruitment.7 This document was published in a book by historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov 8, and also in the memoirs of the Soviet Case Officer for Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs), Alexandre Feklisov, 9 published in 2001.
The Moscow Center then responded to New York KGB headquarters on February 25, 1945 in Venona decrypt #179,180. The authors ofHaunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, researchers Allen Weinstein, currently Archivist of the United States, and ex-KGB OfficerAlexander Vassiliev say cover name "KANT" was replaced with "TAN". Moscow Center expressed concern that knowledge of some persons being recruited was widely known among other CPUSA members, so it was not uncommon for code names to change. The code name "TAN" appears Anatoly Gorsky¶s Memo dated December 1948, a document from the KGB archives analyzed by Alexander Vassiliev. 10 Gorsky was then a senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the Soviet agency at the time supervising Soviet foreign intelligence. 11
A top secret internal FBI memo dated February 1, 1956 from Assistant Alan H. Belmont to the Director and head of the FBI's Internal Security Section, L. V. Boardman, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using Venona materials to prosecute suspects. In this memorandum, which remained classified forty-one years until the Moynihan Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy obtained its release to the public in 1997, Boardman quotes the 13 May 1944 Venona transcript, which named several members of the Perlo group, including Magdoff. Though Belmont was of the opinion that VENONA evidence could lead to successful convictions, it was ultimately decided, in consideration of compromising the Army Signals Intelligence efforts, that there would not be prosecutions. The memo also raises questions about the disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons based upon an exception to the hearsay rule requiring expert testimony of cryptographers revealing their practices and techniques to identify specific code names. 12
[edit]Chronology
25 February or 5 March 1944, a rainy Sunday, Elizabeth Bentley meets with Harry Magdoff and others in John Abts apartment in New York, the initial contact with the Perlo group (Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 1999, pg. 409); "the group specifically discussed the information they would be able to furnish her and with respect to Magdoff, Bentley advised, '.....Magdoff, who had just returned from a period of approximately six months hospitalization, expected to return to the War Production Board but was uncertain as to what specifically he would be able to furnish.....' " (pg. 182, paragraph 3)
5 May 1944, Venona decrypt 629 KGB New York to Moscow asks to "Urgently...advise about the possibility of a meeting with KANT"; KANT identified as Harry Samuel Magdoff. [1]
13 May 1944, Venona decrypt 687 KGB New York to Moscow reports on Bentley's contact with a new group in Washington, "MAGDOFF - KANT"..."reliable"...politically highly mature"..."they want to help with information". KANT identified as Harry Samuel Magdoff. [2]
30 May 1944, Venona 769, 771 KGB New York to Moscow, addressed to KGB head Pavel Fitin the probationers of the new group gives personal histories, " 'KANT' became a member of the CPUSA a long time ago...works in the Machine Tool Division of the DEPOT" [3]; KANT identified as Harry Samuel Magdoff. [4]
29 September 1944, in Moscow, Fitin to Dimitrov Memo asks to Comintern General Secretary to provide any information to KGB head on members of the Perlo group, including "Magdoff, works on the WPB."
25 February 1945, Moscow Center to Venona to New York 179, 180 KGB Moscow, uses code name "TAN"; subsequent researchers identify TAN as Harry Magdoff.
20 December 1946, "Magdoff indicated that he was happy to be leaving the Commerce Department..." (pg. 176).
30 December 1946, Magdoff retires from government service.
December 1948, Anatoly Gorsky, senior official of the Committee of Information (KI), the agency then supervising Soviet foreign intelligence reports in KGB file 43173 vol.2 (v) lists Magdoff as number "3. 'Tan' ± Harry Magdoff, former employee of the Commerce Department" of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts in his report on compromised American sources and networks; NKVD operatives are ranked either alphabetically or in chronological order, beginning with pre-WWII names, followed by WWII names, with the Soviet Case Officer himself the last in line.
1 February 1956, FBI Belmont to Boardman Memo discusses prosecution of the members of the Perlo group, including " 'Kant' (Harry Magdoff)" but weighs the disclosure of Government techniques and practices in the cryptography field to unauthorized persons and would compromise the Government's efforts in the communications intelligence field. [edit]Skeptical Views
Main article: Venona project#Critical Views
Victor Navasky, editor and publisher of The Nation, has written an editorial highly critical of the interpretation of recent work on the subject of Soviet espionage, arguing that historians who rely too much on Venona material are guilty of using every individual mentioned in the cables as prima facie proof of their involvement in Soviet espionage.
Appendix A to their book on Venona, Haynes and Klehr list 349 names (and code names) of people who they say "had a covert relationship with Soviet intelligence that is confirmed in the Venona traffic." They do not qualify the list, which includes everyone from Alger Hiss to Harry Magdoff, the former New Deal economist and Marxist editor of Monthly Review, and Walter Bernstein, the lefty screenwriter who reported on Tito for Yank magazine. It occurs to Haynes and Klehr to reprint ambiguous Venona material related to Magdoff and Bernstein but not to call up either of them (or any other living person on their list) to get their version of what did or didn't happen. 14
Cold War Spies A Web Quest by Darcie Rummel
Int ro duction______Imagine this: a world full of secrets, traitors, and danger. No one to trust but yourself as you steal quickly through the night, stealing and concealing both truths and lies from your enemies and comrades. This is the life of a spy, which was personified in the subtle workings of the Cold War. Without firing a shot, both Soviets and Americans fought against one another in what historians call the ͞Invisible Front͟. Today, it is your mission to discover more about the stories that have emerged from the shadows of Cold War espionage.
Tasks______Divide each group into two opposing sides: the East (USSR) and the West (USA). To become an expert spy on either side, you must know who you are working for and whom you will be working with. Once you have chosen a side, meet with your fellow Russian or American spies and complete the following tasks:
Task #1 : Using the links below, write 1-2 paragraphs on which intelligence agency you are working for. USSR spies research the KGB, and USA spies research the CIA. About the CIA About the KGB
Task #2: Using the link below, write a paragraph about one topic found under each file tab (Assassination, Disinformation, Domestic Espionage, Infiltration, and Subversion), totaling 5 paragraphs. Research either the East or the West, depending on which one you are spying for. The Spy Files
Task #3: Any spy worth his/her salt must have the best gadgets, right? Find 3-4 spy tools that fascinate you and write a brief (1-3 sentence) description about each. Tools of the Trade
Task #4: Now that you are set to be a top-secret spy during the Cold War, it¶s time to find out who your comrades are. Using the link, write a short paragraph about two people (both must be from your chosen spy faction) you find interesting. Who¶s Who in Cold War Espionage
Extra: For fun, try out the games under CNN¶s Cold War Challenge! Cold War Challenge
Resources______Here are some links to help you along on your Web Quest, along with a few related sites that may be of some interest:
CIA Home Page
CNN ʹ Cold War Experience: Espionage
Cold War Espionage Timeline
The Cold War Museum
Crime Library: Spies
FAS: Intelligence Resource Program
Process______The goal of this Web Quest it to provide you, the student, with interesting information about the two main secret intelligence networks during the Cold War. To get the most out of this assignment, these criteria must be met: y Students must be divided up into East and West spy factions (with approximately 5 people per group). y Both spy groups must complete the given tasks (1-4). If necessary, assign each person one of the tasks, with two people working on task #2. y Each spy group must then compile and discuss the information they have found. y Finally, each spy group must come up with a 5-7 minute speech about their collected information, which will be presented in front of the class. Each person is required to talk, and use of visual aids is encouraged.
Guidance______When you are doing the tasks, narrow down the information you find in each of the tasks to fit the time restraints of your group¶s speech. Each person is required to share some of the facts he/she has found with the class, so be quick, but thorough in your investigation!
The format of the 5-7 minute group speech might go like this: y Introduction (approximately 30-40 seconds) ʹ tell the class which faction your group is (East or West) and set the stage for your speech. http://www2.dsu.nodak.edu/users/jbrudvig/Technology%20Projects/webquests/student%20 work/ColdWarSpies.htm
y Body (approximately 1 minute for each topic) ʹ should include information found in each of the four tasks, allowing for slightly more time to discuss task #2. y Conclusion (approximately 30-40 seconds) ʹ tell the class if your group learned anything, what you found interesting, and bring the speech to a close.
Conclusion______Many are not aware of risks intelligence soldiers take while fighting on the ³Invisible Front´. They are the spies, the secret- mongers, who are paid to know everyone¶s business, both at home and abroad. They are stilltoday, but sophisticated spy work did not truly emerge until the 50-year span of the Cold War. Hopefully by completing this Web Quest, you will have gained some appreciation for the art of espionage and what it takes to be a master spy.
TOP 10 SPIES
Although most people think of spies as a Cold War phenomenon, they¶ve actually been around for hundreds of years, and include in their ranks larger than life figures like big game hunters, revolutionary war heroes, and even exotic dancers. While these real life spies might not have had cool gadgets or fast cars like James Bond, their lives still make for some pretty amazing stories, so sit back with a shaken-not-stirred martini and have a look at this list of the top ten masters of espionage throughout history. 10. Allan Pinkerton
Allan Pinkerton was a Scottish detective who pioneered many spying techniques that are still used today. He was one of the first detectives to shadow his subjects, and his undercover operations, what he called ³assuming a role,´ helped shape modern espionage. In 1850 he founded the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, a group of private detectives and policemen. The group was well known throughout the 1800s, and is best remembered for their involvement in the tracking and capture of several old west outlaws. During the American Civil War, Pinkerton was the head of the Union Intelligence Service, and was a close advisor and confidant to Abraham Lincoln. He helped foil an assassination plot on Lincoln in 1861, planted agents inside the Confederate army, and even went undercover as a Confederate officer in order to report on troop movements. 9. Klaus Fuchs
A German theoretical physicist and an expert on atomic bomb technology, Klaus Fuchs passed on a number of significant weapons secrets to the USSR while working as a scientist for the American government. Fuchs made a number of breakthroughs in nuclear fission, and was a part of the famed Manhattan Project that led to the development of the first A-bomb. A communist in his youth, he was recruited by a KGB case officer in 1941, and for years he passed on information about bomb technology and the state of the U.S. weapons stockpile to the Soviets. Fuchs was apprehended in 1946 after a Soviet cipher was cracked by Allied intelligence forces, and under interrogation he admitted to working for the Russians. While he is not as well known as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the atomic secrets provided by Klaus Fuchs are said to have had a bigger effect on the Russians¶ knowledge of the U.S. nuclear program, and even helped aid them in the development of their own atomic weapons. 8. Elizabeth Van Lew
Elizabeth Van Lew was a spy who worked on behalf of the Union during the American Civil War. Van Lew operated under the cover of a charity worker, and was allowed to enter the infamous Libby Prison in the Southern capital of Richmond to bring Union prisoners food and supplies. While there, she would gather information about Confederate troop movements and pass it on to U.S. forces. She also operated a small spy ring that was based out of Richmond and included several high profile members of the Confederate government, and it is rumored that she even managed to get one of her former slaves hired on at the White House of the Confederacy to act as an informant. After the war ended, Van Lew was credited by Ulysses Grant as the most valuable source of information on the Confederate capital city. Along with Belle Boyd on the Southern side, she is remembered as the most famous spy of the Civil War, and she was eventually inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame. 7. Aldrich Ames
While most spies engage in espionage for political or ideological reasons, for CIA mole Aldrich Ames the motivation was purely monetary. Ames, who worked as a counter-intelligence analyst in Washington D.C., was desperate for cash, and in 1985 he began supplying secrets to the Soviets in exchange for a fee, eventually receiving over $4 million from the Russians. Over the course of nine years, Ames supplied the Soviets with countless secrets, including the names of over 100 U.S. informants working in Russia, at least ten of whom were eventually executed. Ames used his millions to fund a lavish lifestyle, which attracted the attention of the CIA, but thanks to his intelligence training he was able to repeatedly pass lie detector tests. He was finally arrested in 1994, and after pleading guilty to spying, was sentenced to life in prison. Interestingly, at least $2 million of his fee remains in an undisclosed bank account, and to this day the Russians have refused to turn this money over to American authorities. 6. Richard Sorge
Considered to be one of the most skilled spies of the 20th century, Richard Sorge was a Soviet master of espionage who worked all over the world before and during World War II. For much of his career, he operated under the cover of a professional journalist, traveling to various European countries to calculate the chances of possible Communist uprisings. At the outbreak of WWII, Sorge traveled to Japan under the guise of a Nazi reporter and began supplying the Soviets with valuable intelligence about Japanese and German combat operations. He warned them about the Pearl Harbor attack, the planned German invasion of Russia, and countless other missions, but a lot of his intelligence was ignored by Stalin. Sorge was eventually captured by the Japanese in 1944, and though he never admitted to being a Soviet spy even under torture, was executed shortly thereafter. The Soviets did not recognize him or his activities until 1964, at which point he was belatedly hailed as a national hero. 5. Sidney Reilly
One of the major models for the James Bond character, Sidney Reilly was a master spy who worked for a number of governments in the early 20th century. Known as the ³Ace of Spies,´ Reilly was an expert at deception and self-promotion, so a lot of the information on his life is unreliable. We do know that he was a master of disguise, and frequently crossed national borders under assumed identities in order to steal military secrets, building plans, and aircraft prototypes. He was also known for his debonair character, and often used his charm to seduce the wives of politicians and military officers in order to get information from them. In his most famous exploit, Reilly worked as the leader of a British intelligence group involved in trying to overthrow the Bolshevik government in Russia in 1917. He helped stage an unsuccessful coup, and led an attempted assassination plot on Vladimir Lenin, but his group was eventually found out and he only narrowly escaped arrest by assuming the identity of German national and escaping to Finland. He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Russian government, and in 1925 he was lured to back into the Soviet Union as a part of a sting operation and captured. Though he never admitted to being a spy, he was eventually executed by firing squad. 4. Fritz Joubert Duquesne
Fritz Joubert Duquesne was a larger than life writer, soldier, and adventurer who gained fame as a spy for the Germans during World Wars I and II. As a young man, he fought against England in his native South Africa during the First and Second Boer Wars, at one point enlisting in the British army in order to sabotage missions and report on troop movements. This experience helped foster a lifelong hatred of all things English, and at the outbreak of the First World War, Duquesne began working for the Germans as a spy, planting bombs on several British ships that eventually went down at sea. He was captured in 1917 and extradited to New York, but after two years in jail he made a daring escape by cutting through the bars of his cell and scaling the prison walls. He disappeared for some time, working as a freelance journalist and even writing his own biography, before resurfacing at the outbreak of WWII and resuming his spy activities for the Germans. His days of espionage came to an end in 1942 when Duquesne, along with 33 other German spies, were arrested in what became known as the biggest espionage ring conviction in American history. 3. Nathan Hale
Considered by many to be America¶s first spy, Nathan Hale was a soldier in the Continental Army who in 1776 volunteered to go on a dangerous intelligence-gathering mission behind enemy lines. Hale, who was only 21 at the time, ventured into New York City in disguise in order to report on British troop movements, but after the city fell to the English, he was found out by a British officer and captured. Although spying wasn¶t widely practiced at the time, Hale was charged with being an illegal combatant and was hanged a few days after being apprehended. Before his execution, he is said to have uttered the now famous line ³I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.´ This speech and his espionage activities cemented Hale¶s reputation as one of the heroes of the Revolutionary War, and to this day a statue of him stands outside of the CIA headquarters. 2. Kim Philby
Perhaps the most famous double agent of the Cold War, Kim Philby was a globetrotting British spy who was in actuality a socialist under the control of the Soviet KGB. In a career that took him to Spain, Africa, the U.S., Istanbul, and Moscow, Philby gained a reputation as one of Britain¶s most capable spies, but all the while he was secretly sending along information to the Soviet Embassy in Paris. In the late forties, he was assigned to act as an intermediary between the British and U.S. intelligence organizations in Washington D.C. During this time, he passed along significant information on U.S. armaments and atomic weapons stockpiles, and many credit these reports with influencing Josef Stalin¶s political decisions and helping to lead to the Korean War. Philby was suspected as a possible Soviet spy by British intelligence throughout his career, but they were unable to prove anything, and he remained on the periphery of the intelligence community until he defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. He continued to work in Soviet intelligence until his death in 1988, when he was given numerous posthumous awards by the Russian government. 1. Mata Hari
Now recognized as the prototypical femme fatale, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle, AKA Mata Hari, was a famous exotic dancer and performer who was executed in 1917 for spying for the Germans during World War I. She gained fame in Paris for her risqué dance routines and performances, and at the outbreak of the war she was the mistress and escort to many high profile businessman and military officers. As a citizen of the neutral Netherlands, Mata Hari frequently crossed national borders, a practice that eventually attracted the attention of the Allies. When questioned by British intelligence, she claimed to be an undercover spy for the French, but their government denied this. Soon after, the French intercepted a German radio transmission detailing the activities of one of their most successful spies. Evidence pointed to Mata Hari as the culprit, and she was quickly arrested and charged with contributing to the deaths of 50,000 people. She was found guilty during a trial and executed in October of 1917 by firing squad. Although it has never been determined whether she was really working for the Germans or the French, Mata Hari continues to be remembered as one of the most famous spies of all time.
Category:Cold War weapons of the United States From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The United States was a major developer and producer of weapons during the Cold War. They were the primary power behind the NATO side of the arms race against the Soviet Union. Subcategories
This category has the following 7 subcategories, out of 7 total. A F n
[+] American Cold War air-dropped [+] Cold War firearms of the [+] American Cold War nuclear bombs (30 P) United States (15 P) bombs (78 P) M [+] Cold War anti-submarine weapons of the United States (13 P) [+] Cold War missiles of the [+] Cold War artillery of the United United States (5 C, 15 P) States (13 P) R
[+] Cold War rockets of the United States (4 P) Pages in category "Cold War weapons of the United States"
The following 56 pages are in this category, out of 56 total. This list may not reflect recent changes (learn more). 8 G cont. N cont.
8"/55 caliber Mark 71 gun GAM-87 Nord A Skybolt SS.11 I Norde ADM-20 Quail n AGM-28 Hound Dog Improve bombs AGM-69 SRAM d Launch ight AGM-86 ALCM Control P System ASM-135 ASAT L B PGM- 19 8 3 LGM-11 BLU-4 Dragontooth Jupiter 7 Peaceke BGM- 1 TOW PGM- eper Bomber gap 11 C LGM-30 Redsto Minute ne CAPTOR mine man PGM- CIM-10 Bomarc chronolo 17 Command Data Buffer gy Convair XSM-74 LGM- Thor D 25C S Titan II Davy Crockett (nuclear device) SM-65 E LGM-30 Atlas Minute SM-68 E14 munition man M Titan E23 munition SSM- E77 balloon bomb M125 N-8 ENTAC bomblet Regulu G M18 s T GAM-63 RASCAL recoilles s rifle T249 M20 Vigilan recoilles te s rifle Titan E F THE C L R M242 hapter 4: W APONS O O D WA (rocket Bushmas family) Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the ter - HGM- bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn't fit well, M67 that will be just too bad for mankind. 25A recoilles Titan I Aldous Huxley1 s rifle Triden M85 t machine (missil gun A Note on Military Jargon e) MGM-52 U Throughout this book I use as few acronyms and specialized Lance military terms as I can. These terms are not needed to grasp the MGR-3 UGM- general picture. Unlike their counterparts in the natural sciences Little 133 and mathematics, these terms do not economize or clarify Triden discussions of which they are a part, but needlessly encumber John them, thereby making it harder for citizens to critically evaluate Mark 37 t II military policies. And, once we begin to use the war intellectuals' torpedo UGM- terms, we tend to think about military affairs in their terms too. For Mark 46 27 example, it mattered little to the Russians whether a bomb which torpedo Polaris could destroy Moscow made its home in a Nebraskan or a German 8 UGM- missile site. Endowing these bombs with two different names, Mark 4 however, made it easier for our war intellectuals to act as if torpedo 73 locations and other trivial characteristics of these bombs made all MGR-1 Poseid the difference in the world. This, in turn, was used to support the fallacious argument that the cause of peace was served by Honest on negotiating small reductions in one kind of bomb and large John UGM- increases in another (see Chapter 6). N 96 Triden Nord Western governments and military organizations employ terms like t I "Minutemen," "Polaris," "initiative," and "shield" (which evoke in SS.10 W most of us positive associations) to promote weapons and policies of mass destruction. This miscalling started early; for example, W25 giving the name "Peacemaker" to a 1940s' aircraft whose deadly cargo could destroy at least one large metropolitan area. This (nucle miscalling still continues; for example, giving the name ar "Peacekeeper" to a ballistic missile which could wipe a few cities warhe off the face of the earth. The least this book can do is break away ad) from this inglorious tradition. X
XSM- 73 Conventional Weapons Goose In the 1980s, deployment, production, and research of conventional weapons accounted for some 75 percent of the United States' military budget.2a,3 These weapons are familiar to most of us, and only call for a few generalizations.
In this century, dramatic increases in the technological sophistication and effectiveness of conventional weapons have taken place. As a result, modern conventional wars are, to a considerable extent, wars between machines and their operators, not between soldiers in open combat. It follows that the side with a more advanced scientific base and a stronger economy has a decisive edge. Because most poor nations have neither, they must import most of their weapons, and they often settle internal political conflicts not through an open fight between the well- armed state and its poorer opponents, but through guerrilla warfare.
A new weapon might confer a decisive edge in conventional warfare on the side which deploys it first. However, soon opponents acquire the new weapon or invent effective countermeasures against it, so the edge is of a short duration. Hence, though new weapons have often helped the side possessing them win battles, in the long run they have harmed the human prospect by steadily raising the costs of war.
Weapon development often leads to obsolescence. Cannons replaced catapults, rifles replaced swords, tanks replaced horses, and modern anti-tank weapons may outdate tanks.
Throughout history, some devices which were not ordinarily viewed as weapons found use in warfare. This practice still continues, albeit at a more advanced technological level. The primitive method of fighting wars by setting forests or fields on fire was replaced by methodically poisoning, plowing over, and setting ablaze large tracts of land. The ancient tactic of defending a city under siege by pouring boiling oil on its attackers has given way to the use of incendiary materials that stick to people's skin and burn them alive.
Chemical and Biological Weapons
Chemical and biological weapons may be used to kill and injure people and other living organisms and to damage non-living materials. Chemical weapons are made of inanimate substances. Biological weapons are living organisms. In comparison to nuclear weapons neither weapon is, at the moment, very effective. They have both been used in the past and will be used in the future, but, except for their psychological impact, and (like all other weapons) their inhumanity, there is nothing particularly unusual or devastating about them. In 1990, the USA and USSR agreed to eliminate their stockpiles of chemical weapons, a decision which may further diminish their importance. On the other hand, their successful deployment in some recent Third World conflicts may increase their appeal, especially for hard-pressed non-nuclear countries.
The chief concern, then, is not with what people can do with these weapons now, but with what they might be able to do with them in the future. In this context, biological research appears more ominous. Over many decades, some biologists have been trying to develop new varieties of disease-causing living organisms.4 Future advances along these lines might tempt nations or terrorists to vaccinate their people against one such organism in secret, then let it loose, or threaten to let it loose, on the world. Today this is only a script for a science fiction thriller, but we have all learned by now the bitter-sweet lesson that today's science fiction may become tomorrow's commonplace realities.
Nuclear Bombs
Let us move on to nuclear weapons, the "backbone of American military power."5 In the late 1980s, the entire nuclear program accounted for about a quarter of America's military spending.3 The nuclear bombs themselves, are, comparatively speaking, cheap; their production probably consumed less than 1 percent of America's total defense budget.2a Their yields cover a considerable range; single bombs in the American arsenal could cause roughly as much as 100 times, or as little as 1/100th, the damage in Hiroshima.
A bomb's yield determines, in part, its wartime use. Small bombs are destined for such things as battlefield situations, mines, artillery shells, and anti-submarine operations. Medium bombs are destined against small military targets. Large bombs could be used against metropolitan areas or against large well-protected military targets.
Pound for pound, the Hiroshima bomb had a far greater destructive power than non-nuclear explosives. Since 1945, nuclear scientists have made even more impressive strides in this respect. In the 1980s, a modern bomb weighing as much as the Hiroshima bomb (about five metric tons), could have as much as 150 times its explosive yield.2b In fact, by 1980 at the latest, humanity came close to the theoretical limit of weight reductions; as far as contemporary theoretical physics is concerned, further research in this direction was fruitless.
Delivery Vehicles Bombers and Cruise Missiles
From 1945 through 1991, several types of airplanes could be used to deliver nuclear bombs to a target, depending in part on their starting points. In the event of war between the USA and the USSR, a large number would have taken off from the USA and flown to targets in the USSR and elsewhere. These bombers were large, they could fly to the Soviet Union and back without landing, and they could carry bombs or cruise missiles (see below). Smaller airplanes which could carry fewer nuclear bombs and could not fly so far were stationed in Europe, Korea, and on aircraft carriers.
American bombers were once destined to drop bombs above targets, but, allegedly, the Soviets air defense system could have prevented as many as half of our bombers from reaching their targets. Though the remaining half could still obliterate Soviet cities and military targets many times over, war planners-who like to play it safe-developed countermeasures against Soviet air defense. Of these countermeasures, two deserve special mention.
The so-called stealth bomber should be able to penetrate the Russian air defense system better than existing American bombers.
The second countermeasure equipped bombers with cruise missiles. These missiles could be released hundreds of miles from target, thereby reducing a bomber's vulnerability to Soviet air defense. A cruise missile is a small, pilotless airplane which can fly close to the ground. It is equipped with a built-in navigational system which allows it to deliver its single warhead to target with great accuracy. By early 1992, the USA was deploying cruise missiles by the thousand, with the Commonwealth of Independent States trailing some distance behind. Because these missiles could be launched from airplanes, they maximized the bomb's chances of reaching the target and the crew's safe return (it is not clear, however, whether there will be anyplace safe to return to in an all- out nuclear war). In addition to large bombers, these little unmanned airplanes can be readily launched from almost any platform. As seen in the Persian Gulf War, cruise missiles can also carry a large load of conventional bombs. Ballistic Missiles
Among delivery vehicles, ballistic missiles have for a long time been held in the highest regard by Western and Soviet analysts. These missiles are equipped with bombs, which, together with the mechanisms that set them off, guidance systems, and some other components, are called warheads. A ballistic missile is essentially a rocket which shoots its warheads out to space and from there propels them toward their targets. From then on, the warhead's trajectory is determined by gravity. Because there is no air resistance in space, warheads there fly with amazing speed-some 25 minutes after a Midwestern missile has been launched, its warheads would begin exploding over Asian or European soil.
At first, ballistic missiles had only one warhead each. Later, new missiles were often equipped with several warheads and many of the old ones were similarly retrofitted. Some ballistic missiles carried as many as ten warheads (ten MIRVs in jargon), and each of these warheads could hit a different target. All the bombs delivered from a single missile have, however, a limited range, and must fall within an area not exceeding some 90 miles in length and 30 miles in width.6 For instance, bombs from a single missile could destroy targets in both Baltimore and Washington, D.C. (30 miles apart), but not in Baltimore and Pittsburgh (210 miles apart).
Ballistic missiles in the American arsenal could be launched from land and sea. In the 1980s, most Western land missiles were stationed in Europe and in the American Midwest. The European- based missiles were smaller, had a shorter range, were not well protected, and, towards the end of the decade, were being negotiated out of existence. The Midwestern missiles (ICBM in jargon) were placed underground, had a longer range, and were protected by massive concrete silos.
Ballistic missiles could also be launched from submarines. Each missile-submarine carried a number of ballistic missiles, and each missile could be equipped with multiple warheads. On the American side, all missile-submarines were powered by nuclear reactors. Because these reactors enabled missile-submarines to stay under water (without surfacing) for more than two months at a time and to make less noise than conventional submarines, nuclear submarines were harder to detect and destroy.
Strategic Requirements of Nuclear Weapons and Delivery Vehicles
Ideally, all warheads and delivery vehicles must meet the following requirements:
Reliability. Delivery vehicles must take off and discharge their warheads properly; warheads must reach and pulverize their targets. Though the U.S. has never fired ballistic missiles over the North Pole (as it would have in time of war with Russia), most experts believe that American warheads and delivery vehicles were reliable.
Penetrability. They must get past any obstacle on their way to target. Most ballistic missiles are unstoppable, but a certain fraction of bombers and cruise missiles may have been prevented by Soviet air defenses from reaching target.
Accuracy. They must hit Moscow and not Paris; a missile site and not a preschool two miles away. The U.S. has made great strides in this regard: In 1991, about half of all American bombs, regardless of their point of origin and delivery vehicle, were reportedly able to land within one-quarter mile of target.
Survivability. Enough warheads and delivery vehicles must survive the worst imaginable surprise attack to assure the sufficient destruction of the attacker in a retaliatory strike. Only this, it is believed, can deter nuclear blackmail.
Command, Control, and Communication
A nation's Armed Forces must be continuously integrated into one functional unit. This integration has been achieved through a rigid chain of command which went all the way to the Presidents in the USA and the USSR; through various means of gathering intelligence, including advance warning of impending or actual nuclear attack; and through an extensive communication network.
The most important mission of the American and Soviet militaries in times of peace was prevention of accidental or unauthorized launch of nuclear weapons. For this purpose, a complicated (and so far remarkably effective) network of safeguards and codes has been used. The command, control, and communication network was also believed to be vital to the national interest because it helped assure nuclear retaliation. Though substantial efforts have been expended in this direction, it is doubtful whether this network would have survived a surprise attack in either the USA or the USSR.7
For obvious reasons, each side had to know what the other was up to. In part, the needed information has been gathered through traditional activities such as spying and analysis of open publications. In part, it has been gathered through sophisticated technologies such as radar and satellites. Early detection is considered particularly important in deterring nuclear war. Thus, if the Soviets knew that Americans were likely to be forewarned of a surprise attack and save their bombers (by putting them in the air on time), the Soviets might have been less inclined to launch an attack in the first place.
Satellites
Like some nuclear warheads, satellites are carried into space by rockets. But, instead of being propelled back to earth, they are propelled into orbit around it. In the early 1980s, some three- quarters of all space missions had military purposes,8a and every third day saw the launch of a new military satellite.8b Throughout the 1980s, military satellites were not involved in direct warfare; they only constituted a vital element in integrating the entire military machine. Their integrative functions included (1) reconnaissance, which provided, among other things, surveillance of the entire earth and advance warning of a missile attack; (2) communication, in fact, 80 percent of all military communications were carried out via satellites; and (3) navigation, for example, by helping missile submarines pinpoint their exact location, satellites enabled them to improve the targeting accuracy of their warheads.8c
Satellites are gradually being equipped with means of destroying fellow satellites and of defending themselves from attack. If military competitions among major world powers overtake humanity again, these developments could turn out to be critically important to warfare and to the fate of the earth. In contrast, although America's spaced-out 1980s' rush to render satellites capable of missile destruction (SDI in jargon) might produce some unexpected technological spin-offs, the contribution it will make to our national security is sure to be far too slight to justify the costs. Sooner or later, this attempt will be given up as a bad job.
This then is what those exciting first years of peaceful space exploration have come to. Many among us are too young to remember the early promise of humanity's reach to the stars. Some people disdained it even then. Others cannot forget the quarrels which set them apart from their fellow passengers to the grave. But those of us who shared the excitement, those of us whose compassion for their fellows transcends national and ideological boundaries, can only view the 1980s' militarization of space as a letdown from that wonderful moment in 1969 when a man first walked on the moon.
Summary
As much as possible, modern military terms are eschewed in this book because they only served to encumber, obfuscate, and degrade the moral and intellectual quality of discourse in Cold War America. Conventional weapons include such old standards as tanks and rifles and such relative newcomers as anti-tank guided missiles and laser beams. Throughout the Cold War, conventional weapons have been used extensively in international warfare and consumed a much larger fraction of the world's military spending than nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons such as mustard gas may be defined as substances which can be gainfully used to harm human beings, other living organisms, or non-living materials. Recent years have seen a marked increase in their use in local conflicts, but they were not expected to play a major role in a worldwide conflagration. Biological weapons are toxic or harmful living organisms, e.g., disease-causing bacteria or submarine- destroying dolphins. Although they have been relatively unimportant throughout the Cold War, future research might greatly increase their significance and appeal. Despite their overwhelming military importance, nuclear bombs consumed a relatively small portion of America's total military budget; a far greater proportion was expended on the development, production, and maintenance of delivery vehicles. Nuclear bombs could be launched from many corners of the globe; from air, sea, and land; from the ocean's and earth's surfaces and subsurfaces; from aircraft carriers and infantry cannons; from submarines and bombers. They could be delivered to target through bombers, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and cannons. These delivery vehicles and the warheads they carried were expected to meet minimum standards of reliability, penetrability, accuracy, and survivability. Each nation has used various means to integrate its armed forces into one functional unit and gain information about the activities of its adversaries and allies. Space satellites played important roles in the military machines of the United States and the Soviet Union, roles which included reconnaissance, communication, and navigation.
Cold War From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Cold War (disambiguation).
United States President Ronald Reagan (left) andPresident of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev meet in 1985.
Part of a series on the
Cold War
Origins of the Cold War
World War II
War Conferences
Eastern Bloc
Iron Curtain
Cold War (1947ʹ1953)
Cold War (1953ʹ1962)
Cold War (1962ʹ1979)
Cold War (1979ʹ1985)
Cold War (1985ʹ1991)
The Cold War (Russian: ɏɨɥɨ«ɞɧɚɹ ɜɨɣɧɚ«, Kholodnaya voyna, 1947±91) was the continuing state of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition existing after World War II (1939±1945), primarily between the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and the powers of the Western world, particularly the United States. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, extensive aid to states deemed vulnerable, proxy wars, espionage, propaganda, a nuclear arms race, economic and technological competitions, such as the Space Race.
Despite being allies against the Axis powers and having the most powerful military forces among peer nations, the USSR and the US disagreed about the configuration of the post- war world while occupying most of Europe. The Soviet Union created theEastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining others as satellite states, some of which were later consolidated as the Warsaw Pact (1955±1991). The US and some western European countries established containment of communism as a defensive policy, establishing alliances such as NATO to that end.
Several such countries also coordinated the Marshall Plan, especially in West Germany, which the USSR opposed. Elsewhere, in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the USSR assisted and helped foster communist revolutions, opposed by several Western countries and their regional allies; some they attempted to roll back, with mixed results. Some countries aligned with NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and others formed the Non-Aligned Movement.
The Cold War featured periods of relative calm and of international high tension ± the Berlin Blockade (1948±1949), the Korean War (1950±1953), theBerlin Crisis of 1961, the Vietnam War (1959±1975), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Soviet war in Afghanistan (1979± 1989), and the Able Archer 83NATO exercises in November 1983. Both sides sought détente to relieve political tensions and deter direct military attack, which would likely guarantee their mutual assured destruction with nuclear weapons.
In the 1980s, the United States increased diplomatic, military, and economic pressures against the USSR, which had already suffered severe economic stagnation. Thereafter, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ("reconstruction", "reorganization", 1987) andglasnost ("openness", ca. 1985). The Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, leaving the United States as the dominant military power, and Russia possessing most of the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. The Cold War and its events have had a significant impact on the world today, and it is commonly referred to in popular culture.
Contents
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1 Origins of the term
2 Background
3 World War II and post-war (1939ʹ47)
o 3.1 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-41)
o 3.2 Allies against the Axis (1941-45)
o 3.3 Wartime conferences regarding post-war Europe
o 3.4 Beginnings of the Eastern Bloc o 3.5 Potsdam Conference and defeat of Japan
o 3.6 Tensions build
4 Containment through the Korean War (1947ʹ53)
o 4.1 Soviet satellite states
o 4.2 Containment and the Truman Doctrine
o 4.3 Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état
o 4.4 Berlin Blockade and airlift
o 4.5 NATO beginnings and Radio Free Europe
o 4.6 Chinese Civil War and SEATO
o 4.7 Korean War
5 Crisis and escalation (1953ʹ62)
o 5.1 Khrushchev, Eisenhower and De-Stalinization
o 5.2 Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution
o 5.3 Berlin ultimatum and European integration
o 5.4 Worldwide competition
o 5.5 Sino-Soviet split, space race, ICBMs
o 5.6 Berlin Crisis of 1961
o 5.7 Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev ouster
6 Confrontation through détente (1962ʹ79)
o 6.1 Dominican Republic and French NATO withdrawal
o 6.2 Czechoslovakia invasion
o 6.3 Brezhnev Doctrine
o 6.4 Third World escalations
o 6.5 Sino-American relations
o 6.6 Nixon, Brezhnev, and détente
o 6.7 Late 1970s deterioration of relations
7 Second Cold War (1979ʹ85)
o 7.1 Afghanistan war
o 7.2 Reagan and Thatcher
o 7.3 Polish Solidarity movement
o 7.4 Soviet and US military and economic issues
8 End of the Cold War (1985ʹ91) o 8.1 Gorbachev reforms
o 8.2 Thaw in relations
o 8.3 Faltering Soviet system
o 8.4 Soviet dissolution
9 Legacy
10 Historiography
11 See also
12 Footnotes
13 References
14 Further reading
15 External links Origins of the term
During World War II, George Orwell used the term Cold War in the essay ³You and the Atomic Bomb´ published October 19, 1945, in the British newspaper Tribune. Contemplating a world living in the shadow of the threat of nuclear war, he warned of a ³peace that is no peace´, which he called a permanent ³cold war´,[1] Orwell directly referred to that war as the ideological confrontation between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.[2] Moreover, in The Observer of March 10, 1946, Orwell wrote that ³[a]fter the Moscow conference last December, Russia began to make a µcold war¶ on Britain and the British Empire.´[3]
The first use of the term to describe the post±World War II geopolitical tensions between the USSR and its satellites and the United States and its western European allies is attributed to Bernard Baruch, an American financier and presidential advisor.[4] In South Carolina, on April 16, 1947, he delivered a speech (by journalist Herbert Bayard Swope)[5] saying, ³Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war.´[6] Newspaper reporter-columnist Walter Lippmann gave the term wide currency, with the book Cold War (1947).[7] Background
Main article: Origins of the Cold War
Further information: Red Scare
American troops in Vladivostok, August 1918, during the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
There is disagreement among historians regarding the starting point of the Cold War. While most historians trace its origins to the period immediately following World War II, others argue that it began towards the end of World War I, although tensions between the Russian Empire, other European countries and the United States date back to the middle of the 19th century.[8]
As a result of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (followed by its withdrawal from World War I), Soviet Russia found itself isolated in international diplomacy.[9] Leader Vladimir Lenin stated that the Soviet Union was surrounded by a "hostile capitalist encirclement", and he viewed diplomacy as a weapon to keep Soviet enemies divided, beginning with the establishment of the Soviet Comintern, which called for revolutionary upheavals abroad.[10]
Subsequent leader Joseph Stalin, who viewed the Soviet Union as a "socialist island", stated that the Soviet Union must see that "the present capitalist encirclement is replaced by a socialist encirclement."[11] As early as 1925, Stalin stated that he viewed international politics as a bipolar world in which the Soviet Union would attract countries gravitating to socialism and capitalist countries would attract states gravitating toward capitalism, while the world was in a period of "temporary stabilization of capitalism" preceding its eventual collapse.[12]
Several events fueled suspicion and distrust between the western powers and the Soviet Union: the Bolsheviks' challenge to capitalism;[13] the 1926 Soviet funding of a British general workers strike causing Britain to break relations with the Soviet Union;[14] Stalin's 1927 declaration that peaceful coexistence with "the capitalist countries ... is receding into the past";[15] conspiratorial allegations in the Shakhty show trial of a planned French and British-led coup d'etat;[16] the Great Purge involving a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in which over half a million Soviets were executed;[17] the Moscow show trials including allegations of British, French, Japanese and German espionage;[18] the controversial death of 6-8 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the 1932-3 Ukrainian famine; western support of the White Army in the Russian Civil War; the US refusal to recognize the Soviet Union until 1933;[19] and the Soviet entry into the Treaty of Rapallo.[20] This outcome rendered Soviet±American relations a matter of major long-term concern for leaders in both countries.[8] World War II and post-war (1939±47)
Main article: Origins of the Cold War
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939-41) Further information: Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Nazi±Soviet economic relations (1934± 1941)
Soviet relations with the West further deteriorated when, one week prior to the start of the World War II, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which included a secret agreement to split Poland and Eastern Europe between the two states.[21] Beginning one week later, in September 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union divided Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe through invasions of the countries ceded to each under the Pact.[22][23]
For the next year and a half, they engaged in an extensive economic relationship, trading vital war materials[24][25] until Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union through the territories that the two countries had previously divided.[26] Allies against the Axis (1941-45) Further information: Eastern Front (World War II), Western Front (World War II), and Lend- Lease
During their joint war effort, which began thereafter in 1941, the Soviets suspected that the British and the Americans had conspired to allow the Soviets to bear the brunt of the fighting against Nazi Germany. According to this view, the Western Allies had deliberately delayed opening a second anti-German front in order to step in at the last moment and shape the peace settlement.[27] Thus, Soviet perceptions of the West left a strong undercurrent of tension and hostility between the Allied powers.[28]
In turn, in 1944, the Soviets appeared to the Allies to have deliberately delayed the relief of the Polish underground's Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis.[29] On at least one occasion, a Soviet fighter shot down an RAF plane supplying the Polish insurgents.[30] A 'secret war' also took place between the SOE-backed AK and NKVD-backed partisans.[29] Wartime conferences regarding post-war Europe
The "Big Three" at the Yalta Conference,Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt andJoseph Stalin
Further information: Tehran Conference and Yalta Conference
The Allies disagreed about how the European map should look, and how borders would be drawn, following the war.[31] Each side held dissimilar ideas regarding the establishment and maintenance of post-war security.[31] The western Allies desired a security system in which democratic governments were established as widely as possible, permitting countries to peacefully resolve differences through international organizations.[32]
Following Russian historical experiences with frequent invasions[33] and the immense death toll (estimated at 27 million) and destruction the Soviet Union sustained during World War II,[34] the Soviet Union sought to increase security by controlling the internal affairs of countries that bordered it.[31][35] In April 1945, both Churchill and new American President Harry S. Truman opposed, among other things, the Soviets' decision to prop up the Lublin government, the Soviet-controlled rival to the Polish government-in-exile, whose relations with the Soviets were severed.[36]
At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies failed to reach a firm consensus on the framework for post-war settlement in Europe.[37]Following the Allied victory in May, the Soviets effectively occupied Eastern Europe,[37] while strong US and Western allied forces remained in Western Europe.
The Soviet Union, United States, Britain and France established zones of occupation and a loose framework for four-power control of occupied Germany.[38] The Allies set up the United Nations for the maintenance of world peace, but the enforcement capacity of its Security Council was effectively paralyzed by individual members' ability to use veto power.[39]Accordingly, the UN was essentially converted into an inactive forum for exchanging polemical rhetoric, and the Soviets regarded it almost exclusively as a propaganda tribune.[40] Beginnings of the Eastern Bloc Further information: Eastern Bloc
During the final stages of the war, the Soviet Union laid the foundation for the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were initially (and effectively) ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. These included eastern Poland (incorporated into two different SSRs),[41] Latvia (which became the Latvian SSR)[42],[42][43] Estonia (which became the Estonian SSR),[42][43] Lithuania (which became the Lithuanian SSR),[42][43] part of eastern Finland (which became the Karelo- Finnish SSR)[23] and eastern Romania (which became the Moldavian SSR).[44][45]
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned that, given the enormous size of Soviet forces deployed in Europe at the end of the war, and the perception that Soviet leaderJoseph Stalin was unreliable, there existed a Soviet threat to Western Europe.[46] In April-May 1945, the British War Cabinet's Joint Planning Staff Committee developed Operation Unthinkable, a plan "to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and the British Empire".[47] The plan, however, was rejected by the British Chiefs of Staff Committee as militarily unfeasible.[46] Potsdam Conference and defeat of Japan
Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman andJoseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference.
Further information: Potsdam Conference and Surrender of Japan
At the Potsdam Conference, which started in late July after Germany's surrender, serious differences emerged over the future development of Germany and eastern Europe.[48] Moreover, the participants' mounting antipathy and bellicose language served to confirm their suspicions about each others' hostile intentions and entrench their positions.[49] At this conference Truman informed Stalin that the United States possessed a powerful new weapon.[50]
Stalin was aware that the Americans were working on the atomic bomb and, given that the Soviets' own rival program was in place, he reacted to the news calmly. The Soviet leader said he was pleased by the news and expressed the hope that the weapon would be used against Japan.[50] One week after the end of the Potsdam Conference, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly after the attacks, Stalin protested to US officials when Truman offered the Soviets little real influence in occupied Japan.[51] Tensions build Further information: Long Telegram, Iron Curtain, and Restatement of Policy on Germany
In February 1946, George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow helped to articulate the US government's increasingly hard line against the Soviets, and became the basis for US strategy toward the Soviet Union for the duration of the Cold War.[52] That September, the Soviet side produced the Novikov telegram, sent by the Soviet ambassador to the US but commissioned and "co-authored" by Vyacheslav Molotov; it portrayed the US as being in the grip of monopoly capitalists who were building up military capability "to prepare the conditions for winning world supremacy in a new war".[53]
On September 6, 1946, James F. Byrnes delivered a speech in Germany repudiating the Morgenthau Plan (a proposal to partition and de-industrialize post-war Germany) and warning the Soviets that the US intended to maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely.[54] As Byrnes admitted a month later, "The nub of our program was to win the German people [...] it was a battle between us and Russia over minds [...]"[55]
A few weeks after the release of this "Long Telegram", former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri.[56] The speech called for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, whom he accused of establishing an "iron curtain" from "Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic".[57][58] Containment through the Korean War (1947±53)
Main article: Cold War (1947±1953)
Soviet satellite states
Formation of the Eastern Bloc
Further information: Eastern Bloc and Cominform
After annexing several occupied countries as Soviet Socialist Republics at the end of World War II, other occupied states were added to theEastern Bloc by converting them into puppet Soviet Satellite states,[58] such as East Germany,[59] the People's Republic of Poland, the People's Republic of Hungary,[60] the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic,[61] the People's Republic of Romania and the People's Republic of Albania.[62]
The Soviet-style regimes that arose in the Bloc not only reproduced Soviet command economies, but also adopted the brutal methods employed by Joseph Stalin and Soviet secret police to suppress real and potential opposition.[63] In Asia, the Red Army had overrun Manchuria in the last month of the war, and went on to occupy the large swath of Korean territory located north of the 38th parallel.[64]
In September 1947, the Soviets created Cominform, the purpose of which was to enforce orthodoxy within the international communist movement and tighten political control over Soviet satellites through coordination of communist parties in the Eastern Bloc.[65] Cominform faced an embarrassing setback the following June, when the Tito±Stalin split obliged its members to expel Yugoslavia, which remained Communist but adopted a non-aligned position.[66] As part of the Soviet domination of the Eastern Bloc, the NKVD, led by Lavrentiy Beria, supervised the establishment of Soviet-style secret police systems in the Bloc that were supposed to crush anti-communist resistance.[67] When the slightest stirrings of independence emerged in the Bloc, Stalin's strategy matched that of dealing with domestic pre-war rivals: they were removed from power, put on trial, imprisoned, and in several instances, executed.[68] Containment and the Truman Doctrine
European military alliances
Main articles: Containment and Truman Doctrine
By 1947, US president Harry S. Truman's advisers urged him to take immediate steps to counter the Soviet Union's influence, citing Stalin's efforts (amid post-war confusion and collapse) to undermine the US by encouraging rivalries among capitalists that could precipitate another war.[69] In February 1947, the British government announced that it could no longer afford to finance the Greek monarchical military regime inits civil war against communist-led insurgents.
The American government's response to this announcement was the adoption of containment,[70] the goal of which was to stop the spread of communism. Truman delivered a speech that called for the allocation of $400 million to intervene in the war and unveiled the Truman Doctrine, which framed the conflict as a contest between free peoples and totalitarian regimes.[70] Even though the insurgents were helped by Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia,[19] US policymakers accused the Soviet Union of conspiring against the Greek royalists in an effort to expand Soviet influence.[71] Enunciation of the Truman Doctrine marked the beginning of a US bipartisan defense and foreign policy consensus between Republicans andDemocrats focused on containment and deterrence that weakened during and after the Vietnam War, but ultimately held steady.[72][73]Moderate and conservative parties in Europe, as well as social democrats, gave virtually unconditional support to the Western alliance,[74]while European and American Communists, paid by the KGB and involved in its intelligence operations,[75] adhered to Moscow's line, although dissent began to appear after 1956. Other critiques of consensus politics came from anti-Vietnam War activists, the CND and the nuclear freeze movement.[76] Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état
Map of Cold-War era Europe and the Near East showing countries that receivedMarshall Plan aid. The red
columns show the relative amount of total aid per nation.
European economic alliances
Main articles: Marshall Plan and Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948
In early 1947, Britain, France and the United States unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with the Soviet Union for a plan envisioning an economically self-sufficient Germany, including a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets.[77] In June 1947, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine, the United States enacted the Marshall Plan, a pledge of economic assistance for all European countries willing to participate, including the Soviet Union.[77]
The plan's aim was to rebuild the democratic and economic systems of Europe and to counter perceived threats to Europe's balance of power, such as communist parties seizing control through revolutions or elections.[78] The plan also stated that European prosperity was contingent upon German economic recovery.[79] One month later, Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947, creating a unified Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Council. These would become the main bureaucracies for US policy in the Cold War.[80]
Stalin believed that economic integration with the West would allow Eastern Bloc countries to escape Soviet control, and that the US was trying to buy a pro-US re-alignment of Europe.[65] Stalin therefore prevented Eastern Bloc nations from receiving Marshall Plan aid.[65] The Soviet Union's alternative to the Marshall plan, which was purported to involve Soviet subsidies and trade with eastern Europe, became known as the Molotov Plan (later institutionalized in January 1949 as the Comecon).[19] Stalin was also fearful of a reconstituted Germany; his vision of a post-war Germany did not include the ability to rearm or pose any kind of threat to the Soviet Union.[81]
In early 1948, following reports of strengthening "reactionary elements", Soviet operatives executed a coup d'état of 1948 in Czechoslovakia, the only Eastern Bloc state that the Soviets had permitted to retain democratic structures.[82][83] The public brutality of the coup shocked Western powers more than any event up to that point, set in a motion a brief scare that war would occur and swept away the last vestiges of opposition to the Marshall Plan in the United States Congress.[84]
The twin policies of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan led to billions in economic and military aid for Western Europe, and Greece and Turkey. With US assistance, the Greek military won its civil war,[80] The Italian Christian Democrats defeated the powerfulCommunist-Socialist alliance in the elections of 1948.[85] Increases occurred in intelligence and espionage activities, Eastern Bloc defectionsand diplomatic expulsions.[86] Berlin Blockade and airlift
C-47s unloading at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin during the Berlin Blockade.
Main article: Berlin Blockade
The United States and Britain merged their western German occupation zones into "Bizonia" (later "trizonia" with the addition of France's zone).[87] As part of the economic rebuilding of Germany, in early 1948, representatives of a number of Western European governments and the United States announced an agreement for a merger of western German areas into a federal governmental system.[88] In addition, in accordance with the Marshall Plan, they began to re-industrialize and rebuild the German economy, including the introduction of a newDeutsche Mark currency to replace the old Reichsmark currency that the Soviets had debased.[89]
Shortly thereafter, Stalin instituted the Berlin Blockade, one of the first major crises of the Cold War, preventing food, materials and supplies from arriving in West Berlin.[90] The United States, Britain, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several other countries began the massive "Berlin airlift", supplying West Berlin with food and other provisions.[91]
The Soviets mounted a public relations campaign against the policy change, communists attempted to disrupt the elections of 1948 preceding large losses therein,[92] 300,000 Berliners demonstrated and urged the international airlift to continue,[93] and the US accidentally created "Operation Vittles", which supplied candy to German children.[94] In May 1949, Stalin backed down and lifted the blockade.[67][95] NATO beginnings and Radio Free Europe Main articles: NATO, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Eastern Bloc information dissemination
President Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment of 1949 with guests in the Oval Office.
Britain, France, the United States, Canada and eight other western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, establishing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).[67] That August, Stalin ordered the detonation of the first Soviet atomic device.[19]Following Soviet refusals to participate in a German rebuilding effort set forth by western European countries in 1948,[88][96] the US, Britain and France spearheaded the establishment of West Germany from the three Western zones of occupation in May 1949.[48] The Soviet Union proclaimed its zone of occupation in Germany the German Democratic Republic that October.[48]
Media in the Eastern Bloc was an organ of the state, completely reliant on and subservient to the communist party, with radio and television organizations being state-owned, while print media was usually owned by political organizations, mostly by the local communist party.[97]Soviet propaganda used Marxist philosophy to attack capitalism, claiming labor exploitation and war-mongering imperialism were inherent in the system.[98]
Along with the broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Company and the Voice of America to Eastern Europe,[99] a major propaganda effort begun in 1949 was Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, dedicated to bringing about the peaceful demise of the Communist system in the Eastern Bloc.[100] Radio Free Europe attempted to achieve these goals by serving as a surrogate home radio station, an alternative to the controlled and party-dominated domestic press.[100] Radio Free Europe was a product of some of the most prominent architects of America's early Cold War strategy, especially those who believed that the Cold War would eventually be fought by political rather than military means, such as George F. Kennan.[101]
American policymakers, including Kennan and John Foster Dulles, acknowledged that the Cold War was in its essence a war of ideas.[101] The United States, acting through the CIA, funded a long list of projects to counter the Communist appeal among intellectuals in Europe and the developing world.[102]
In the early 1950s, the US worked for the rearmament of West Germany and, in 1955, secured its full membership of NATO.[48] In May 1953, Beria, by then in a government post, had made an unsuccessful proposal to allow the reunification of a neutral Germany to prevent West Germany's incorporation into NATO.[103] Chinese Civil War and SEATO Further information: Chinese Civil War and Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
In 1949, Mao's People's Liberation Army defeated Chiang's US-backed Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Government in China, and the Soviet Union promptly created an alliance with the newly formed People's Republic of China.[104] The Nationalist Government retreated to the island of Taiwan. Confronted with the Communist takeover of mainland China and the end of the US atomic monopoly in 1949, the Truman administration quickly moved to escalate and expand the containment policy.[19] In NSC-68, a secret 1950 document,[105] the National Security Council proposed to reinforce pro-Western alliance systems and quadruple spending on defense.[19]
US officials moved thereafter to expand containment into Asia, Africa, and Latin America, in order to counter revolutionary nationalist movements, often led by Communist parties financed by the USSR, fighting against the restoration of Europe's colonial empires in South-East Asia and elsewhere.[106] In the early 1950s (a period sometimes known as the "Pactomania"), the US formalized a series of alliances with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and the Philippines (notably ANZUS and SEATO), thereby guaranteeing the United States a number of long-term military bases.[48] Korean War Main article: Korean War
One of the more significant impacts of containment was the outbreak of the Korean War. In June 1950, Kim Il-Sung's North Korean People's Army invaded South Korea.[107] To Stalin's surprise,[19] the UN Security Council backed the defense of South Korea, though the Soviets were then boycotting meetings to protest that Taiwan and not Communist China held a permanent seat on the Council.[108] A UN force of personnel from South Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Canada, Australia, France, the Philippines, theNetherlands, Belgium, New Zealand and other countries joined to stop the invasion.[109]
Among other effects, the Korean War galvanised NATO to develop a military structure.[110] Public opinion in countries involved, such as Great Britain, was divided for and against the war. British Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross repudiated the sentiment of those opposed when he said:[111]
I know there are some who think that the horror and devastation of a world war now would be so frightful, whoever won, and the damage to civilization so lasting, that it would be better to submit to Communist domination. I understand that view±but I reject it.
Even though the Chinese and North Koreans were exhausted by the war and were prepared to end it by late 1952, Stalin insisted that they continue fighting, and a cease-fire was approved only in July 1953, after Stalin's death.[48] In North Korea, Kim Il Sung created a highly centralized and brutal dictatorship, according himself unlimited power and generating a formidable cult of personality.[112][113] Crisis and escalation (1953±62)
Main article: Cold War (1953±1962)
Khrushchev, Eisenhower and De-Stalinization
In 1953, changes in political leadership on both sides shifted the dynamic of the Cold War.[80] Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated president that January. During the last 18 months of the Truman administration, the US defense budget had quadrupled, and Eisenhower moved to reduce military spending by a third while continuing to fight the Cold War effectively.[19]
After the death of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev became the Soviet leader following the deposition and execution of Lavrentiy Beria and the pushing aside of rivals Georgy Malenkovand Vyacheslav Molotov. On February 25, 1956, Khrushchev shocked delegates to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party by cataloguing and denouncing Stalin's crimes.[114] As part of a campaign of de-Stalinization, he declared that the only way to reform and move away from Stalin's policies would be to acknowledge errors made in the past.[80]
On November 18, 1956, while addressing Western ambassadors at a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Khrushchev used his famous "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you" expression, shocking everyone present.[115] However, he had not been talking about nuclear war, he later claimed, but rather about the historically determined victory of communism over capitalism.[116] He then declared in 1961 that even if the USSR might indeed be behind the West, within a decade its housing shortage would disappear, consumer goods would be abundant, its population would be "materially provided for", and within two decades, the Soviet Union "would rise to such a great height that, by comparison, the main capitalist countries will remain far below and well behind".[117] Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, initiated a "New Look" for the containment strategy, calling for a greater reliance on nuclear weapons against US enemies in wartime.[80] Dulles also enunciated the doctrine of "massive retaliation", threatening a severe US response to any Soviet aggression. Possessing nuclear superiority, for example, allowed Eisenhower to face down Soviet threats to intervene in the Middle East during the 1956 Suez Crisis.[19] Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution Main articles: Warsaw Pact and Hungarian Revolution of 1956
Map of the Warsaw Pact countries
While Stalin's death in 1953 slightly relaxed tensions, the situation in Europe remained an uneasy armed truce.[118] The Soviets, who had already created a network of mutual assistance treaties in the Eastern Bloc by 1949,[119] established a formal alliance therein, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.[48]
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 occurred shortly after Khrushchev arranged the removal of Hungary's Stalinist leader Mátyás Rákosi.[120] In response to a popular uprising,[121] the new regime formally disbanded the secret police, declared its intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and pledged to re-establish free elections. The Soviet Red Army invaded.[122] Thousands of Hungarians were arrested, imprisoned and deported to the Soviet Union,[123] and approximately 200,000 Hungarians fled Hungary in the chaos.[124] Hungarian leader Imre Nagy and others were executed following secret trials.[125]
From 1957 through 1961, Khrushchev openly and repeatedly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation. He claimed that Soviet missile capabilities were far superior to those of the United States, capable of wiping out any American or European city. However, Khrushchev rejected Stalin's belief in the inevitability of war, and declared his new goal was to be "peaceful coexistence".[126] This formulation modified the Stalin-era Soviet stance, where international class struggle meant the two opposing camps were on an inevitable collision course where Communism would triumph through global war; now, peace would allow capitalism to collapse on its own,[127] as well as giving the Soviets time to boost their military capabilities,[128] which remained for decades until Gorbachev's later "new thinking" envisioning peaceful coexistence as an end in itself rather than a form of class struggle.[129]
US pronouncements concentrated on American strength abroad and the success of liberal capitalism.[130] However, by the late 1960s, the "battle for men's minds" between two systems of social organization that Kennedy spoke of in 1961 was largely over, with tensions henceforth based primarily on clashing geopolitical objectives rather than ideology.[131] Berlin ultimatum and European integration
During November 1958, Khrushchev made an unsuccessful attempt to turn all of Berlin into an independent, demilitarized "free city", giving the United States, Great Britain, and France a six-month ultimatum to withdraw their troops from the sectors they still occupied in West Berlin, or he would transfer control of Western access rights to the East Germans. Khrushchev earlier explained to Mao Tse-tung that "Berlin is the testicles of the West. Every time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on Berlin."[132] NATO formally rejected the ultimatum in mid-December and Khrushchev withdrew it in return for a Geneva conference on the German question.[133]
More broadly, one hallmark of the 1950s was the beginning of European integration²a fundamental by-product of the Cold War that Truman and Eisenhower promoted politically, economically, and militarily, but which later administrations viewed ambivalently, fearful that an independent Europe would forge a separate détente with the Soviet Union, which would use this to exacerbate Western disunity.[134] Worldwide competition
Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran,
the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups²or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists.[80] In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s;[135] additionally, the Soviets saw continuing losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.[136]
The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support allied ones.[80] The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran's first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 (see 1953 Iranian coup d'état) and Guatemala's democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état).[105] Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam's pro-Western regime.[19]
Many emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America rejected the pressure to choose sides in the East-West competition. In 1955, at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, dozens of Third World governments resolved to stay out of the Cold War.[137] The consensus reached at Bandung culminated with the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961.[80]Meanwhile, Khrushchev broadened Moscow's policy to establish ties with India and other key neutral states. Independence movements in the Third World transformed the post-war order into a more pluralistic world of decolonized African and Middle Eastern nations and of rising nationalism in Asia and Latin America.[19] Sino-Soviet split, space race, ICBMs
Charting the Space Race in context ofSputnik and other nuclear threats.
Main articles: Sino-Soviet split and Space Race
The period after 1956 was marked by serious setbacks for the Soviet Union, most notably the breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, beginning the Sino-Soviet split. Mao had defended Stalin when Khrushchev attacked him after his death in 1956, and treated the new Soviet leader as a superficial upstart, accusing him of having lost his revolutionary edge.[138]
After this, Khrushchev made many desperate attempts to reconstitute the Sino-Soviet alliance, but Mao considered it useless and denied any proposal.[138] The Chinese and the Soviets waged an intra-Communist propaganda war.[139] Further on, the Soviets focused on a bitter rivalry with Mao's China for leadership of the global communist movement,[140] and the two clashed militarily in 1969.[141] On the nuclear weapons front, the US and the USSR pursued nuclear rearmament and developed long-range weapons with which they could strike the territory of the other.[48] In August 1957, the Soviets successfully launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile(ICBM)[142] and in October, launched the first Earth satellite, Sputnik.[143] The launch of Sputnik inaugurated the Space Race. This culminated in the Apollo Moon landings, which astronaut Frank Borman later described as "just a battle in the Cold War"[144] with superior spaceflight rockets indicating superior ICBMs. Berlin Crisis of 1961
Soviet tanks face US tanks at Checkpoint Charlie, on October 27, during the Berlin Crisis of 1961
Main articles: Berlin Crisis of 1961, Berlin Wall, and Eastern Bloc emigration and defection
The Berlin Crisis of 1961 was the last major incident in the Cold War regarding the status of Berlin and post-World War II Germany. By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to restricting emigration movement was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc.[145] However, hundreds of thousands of East Germans annually emigrated to West Germany through a "loophole" in the system that existed between East and West Berlin, where the four occupying World War II powers governed movement.[146]
The emigration resulted in a massive "brain drain" from East Germany to West Germany of younger educated professionals, such that nearly 20% of East Germany's population had migrated to West Germany by 1961.[147] That June, the Soviet Union issued a new ultimatumdemanding the withdrawal of Allied forces from West Berlin.[148] The request was rebuffed, and in August, East Germany erected a barbed-wire barrier that would eventually be expanded through construction into the Berlin Wall, effectively closing the loophole.[149] Cuban Missile Crisis and Khrushchev ouster Main article: Cuban Missile Crisis The Soviet Union formed an alliance with Fidel Castro-led Cuba after the Cuban Revolution in 1959.[150] In 1962, President John F. Kennedy responded to the installation of nuclear missiles in Cuba with a naval blockade. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before.[151] It further demonstrated the concept of mutually assured destruction, that neither nuclear power was prepared to use nuclear weapons fearing total destruction via nuclear retaliation.[152] The aftermath of the crisis led to the first efforts in thenuclear arms race at nuclear disarmament and improving relations,[118] although the Cold War's first arms control agreement, the Antarctic Treaty, had come into force in 1961.[153]
In 1964, Khrushchev's Kremlin colleagues managed to oust him, but allowed him a peaceful retirement.[154] Accused of rudeness and incompetence, he was also credited with ruining Soviet agriculture and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.[154] Khrushchev had become an international embarrassment when he authorised construction of the Berlin Wall, a public humiliation for Marxism-Leninism.[154] Confrontation through détente (1962±79)
Main article: Cold War (1962±1979)
The United States reached the moon in 1969²a symbolic milestone in the space race.
United States Navy F-4 Phantom IIintercepts a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 D aircraft in the early 1970s
In the course of the 1960s and '70s, Cold War participants struggled to adjust to a new, more complicated pattern of international relations in which the world was no longer divided into two clearly opposed blocs.[80] From the beginning of the post-war period, Western Europe and Japan rapidly recovered from the destruction of World War II and sustained strong economic growth through the 1950s and '60s, with per capita GDPs approaching those of the United States, while Eastern Bloc economies stagnated.[80][155]
As a result of the 1973 oil crisis, combined with the growing influence of Third World alignments such as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the Non-Aligned Movement, less-powerful countries had more room to assert their independence and often showed themselves resistant to pressure from either superpower.[106] Moscow, meanwhile, was forced to turn its attention inward to deal with the Soviet Union's deep-seated domestic economic problems.[80] During this period, Soviet leaders such as Alexey Kosygin and Leonid Brezhnev embraced the notion of détente.[80] Dominican Republic and French NATO withdrawal Main article: United States invasion of the Dominican Republic
President Lyndon B. Johnson landed 22,000 troops in the Dominican Republic in Operation Power Pack, citing the threat of the emergence of a Cuban-style revolution in Latin America.[19] NATO countries remained primarily dependent on the US military for its defense against any potential Soviet invasion, a status most vociferously contested by France's Charles de Gaulle, who in 1966 withdrew from NATO's military structures and expelled NATO troops from French soil.[156] Czechoslovakia invasion Main articles: Prague Spring and Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
In 1968, a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia called the Prague Spring took place that included "Action Program" of liberalizations, which described increasing freedom of the press, freedom of speech and freedom of movement, along with an economic emphasis on consumer goods, the possibility of a multiparty government, limiting the power of the secret police[157][158] and potentially withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact.[159]
The Soviet Red Army, together with most of their Warsaw Pact allies, invaded Czechoslovakia.[160] The invasion was followed by a wave of emigration, including an estimated 70,000 Czechs initially fleeing, with the total eventually reaching 300,000.[161] The invasion sparked intense protests from Yugoslavia, Romania and China, and from Western European communist parties.[162] Brezhnev Doctrine
Brezhnev and Nixon during Brezhnev's June 1973 visit to Washington; this was a high-water mark in détente
between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Main article: Brezhnev Doctrine
In September 1968, during a speech at the Fifth Congress of the Polish United Workers' Party one month after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev outlined the Brezhnev Doctrine, in which he claimed the right to violate the sovereignty of any country attempting to replace Marxism-Leninism with capitalism. During the speech, Brezhnev stated:[159]
When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.
The doctrine found its origins in the failures of Marxism-Leninism in states like Poland, Hungary and East Germany, which were facing a declining standard of living contrasting with the prosperity of West Germany and the rest of Western Europe.[163] Third World escalations Main articles: Vietnam War, Operation Condor, and Yom Kippur War The US continued to spend heavily on supporting friendly Third World regimes in Asia. Conflicts in peripheral regions and client states²most prominently in Vietnam² continued.[164]Johnson stationed 575,000 troops in Southeast Asia to defeat the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF) and their North Vietnamese allies in the Vietnam War, but his costly policy weakened the US economy and, by 1975, ultimately culminated in what most of the world saw as a humiliating defeat of the world's most powerful superpower at the hands of one of the world's poorest nations.[19]
Additionally, Operation Condor, employed by South American dictators to suppress leftist dissent, was backed by the US, which (sometimes accurately) perceived Soviet or Cuban support behind these opposition movements.[165] Brezhnev, meanwhile, attempted to revive the Soviet economy, which was declining in part because of heavy military expenditures.[19]
Moreover, the Middle East continued to be a source of contention. Egypt, which received the bulk of its arms and economic assistance from the USSR, was a troublesome client, with a reluctant Soviet Union feeling obliged to assist in both the 1967 Six-Day War (with advisers and technicians) and the War of Attrition (with pilots and aircraft) against US ally Israel;[166]Syria and Iraq later received increased assistance as well as (indirectly) the PLO.[167]
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, rumors of imminent Soviet intervention on the Egyptians' behalf brought about a massive US mobilization that threatened to wreck détente;[168] this escalation, the USSR's first in a regional conflict central to US interests, inaugurated a new and more turbulent stage of Third World military activism in which the Soviets made use of their new strategic parity.[169] Sino-American relations Main article: 1972 Nixon visit to China
As a result of the Sino-Soviet split, tensions along the Chinese-Soviet border reached their peak in 1969, and US President Richard Nixon decided to use the conflict to shift the balance of power towards the West in the Cold War.[170] The Chinese had sought improved relations with the US in order to gain advantage over the Soviets as well.
In February 1972, Nixon announced a stunning rapprochement with Mao's China[171] by traveling to Beijing and meeting with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. At this time, the USSR achieved rough nuclear parity with the US while the Vietnam War weakened US influence in the Third World and cooled relations with Western Europe.[172] Although indirect conflict between Cold War powers continued through the late 1960s and early 1970s, tensions were beginning to ease.[118] Nixon, Brezhnev, and détente
Leonid Brezhnev and Jimmy Carter sign SALT II treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna
Main articles: Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Helsinki Accords, and Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
Following his China visit, Nixon met with Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev in Moscow.[173] These Strategic Arms Limitation Talks resulted in two landmark arms control treaties: SALT I, the first comprehensive limitation pact signed by the two superpowers,[174] and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which banned the development of systems designed to intercept incoming missiles. These aimed to limit the development of costly anti-ballistic missiles and nuclear missiles.[80]
Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of "peaceful coexistence" and established the groundbreaking new policy of détente (or cooperation) between the two superpowers. Between 1972 and 1974, the two sides also agreed to strengthen their economic ties,[19]including agreements for increased trade. As a result of their meetings, détente would replace the hostility of the Cold War and the two countries would live mutually.[173]
Meanwhile, these developments coincided with the "Ostpolitik" of West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.[162] Other agreements were concluded to stabilize the situation in Europe, culminating in the Helsinki Accords signed at the Conference on Security and Co- operation in Europe in 1975.[175] Late 1970s deterioration of relations
In the 1970s, the KGB, led by Yuri Andropov, continued to persecute distinguished Soviet personalities such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, who were criticising the Soviet leadership in harsh terms.[176] Indirect conflict between the superpowers continued through this period of détente in the Third World, particularly during political crises in the Middle East, Chile, Ethiopia and Angola.[177]
Although President Jimmy Carter tried to place another limit on the arms race with a SALT II agreement in 1979,[178] his efforts were undermined by the other events that year, including the Iranian Revolution and the Nicaraguan Revolution, which both ousted pro-US regimes, and his retaliation against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December.[19] Second Cold War (1979±85)
This map shows the two essential global spheres during the Cold War in 1980±the US in blue and the USSR
in red. See the legend on the map for more details.
Main article: Cold War (1979±1985)
The term second Cold War has been used by some historians to refer to the period of intensive reawakening of Cold War tensions and conflicts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tensions greatly increased between the major powers with both sides becoming more militaristic.[13] Afghanistan war Main article: Soviet war in Afghanistan
During December 1979, approximately 75,000 Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in order to support the Marxist government formed by ex-Prime-minister Nur Muhammad Taraki, assassinated that September by one of his party rivals.[179] As a result, US President Jimmy Carterwithdrew the SALT II treaty from the Senate, imposed embargoes on grain and technology shipments to the USSR, demanded a significant increase in military spending, and further announced that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics. He described the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan as "the most serious threat to the peace since the Second World War".[180] Reagan and Thatcher
In 1980, Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in the US presidential election, vowing to increase military spending and confront the Soviets everywhere.[181] Both Reagan and new British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union and its ideology. Reagan labeled the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and predicted that Communism would be left on the "ash heap of history".[182] Polish Solidarity movement Main articles: Solidarity (Polish trade union), Soviet reaction to the Polish Crisis of 1980- 1981, and Martial law in Poland
Pope John Paul II provided a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist resurgence centered on the Solidarity movementthat galvanized opposition and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later.[183] Reagan also imposed economic sanctions on Poland to protest the suppression of Solidarity.[184] In response, Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin's top ideologist, advised Soviet leaders not to intervene if Poland fell under the control of Solidarity, for fear it might lead to heavy economic sanctions, representing a catastrophe for the Soviet economy.[184] Soviet and US military and economic issues
US and USSR/Russian nuclear weapons stockpiles, 1945±2006
Further information: Brezhnev stagnation, Strategic Defense Initiative, RSD-10 Pioneer, and MGM-31 Pershing
Moscow had built up a military that consumed as much as 25 percent of the Soviet Union's gross national product at the expense ofconsumer goods and investment in civilian sectors.[185] Soviet spending on the arms race and other Cold War commitments both caused and exacerbated deep-seated structural problems in the Soviet system, which saw at least a decade of economic stagnation during the late Brezhnev years.
Soviet investment in the defense sector was not driven by military necessity, but in large part by the interests of massive party and state bureaucracies dependent on the sector for their own power and privileges.[186] The Soviet Armed Forces became the largest in the world in terms of the numbers and types of weapons they possessed, in the number of troops in their ranks, and in the sheer size of their military±industrial base.[187] However, the quantitative advantages held by the Soviet military often concealed areas where the Eastern Bloc dramatically lagged behind the West.[188]
After ten year old American Samantha Smith wrote a letter toYuri Andropovexpressing her fear of nuclear war,
Andropov invited Smith to the Soviet Union.
By the early 1980s, the USSR had built up a military arsenal and army surpassing that of the United States. Previously, the US had relied on the qualitative superiority of its weapons, but the gap had been narrowed.[189] Ronald Reagan began massively building up the United States military not long after taking office. This led to the largest peacetime defense buildup in United States history.[190]
Tensions continued intensifying in the early 1980s when Reagan revived the B-1 Lancer program that was canceled by the Carter administration, producedLGM-118 Peacekeepers,[191] installed US cruise missiles in Europe, and announced his experimental Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, a defense program to shoot down missiles in mid-flight.[192]
With the background of a buildup in tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the deployment of Soviet RSD-10 Pioneer ballistic missilestargeting Western Europe, NATO decided, under the impetus of the Carter presidency, to deploy MGM-31 Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe, primarily West Germany.[193] This deployment would have placed missiles just 10 minutes' striking distance from Moscow.[194]
After Reagan's military buildup, the Soviet Union did not respond by further building its military[195] because the enormous military expenses, along with inefficient planned manufacturing and collectivized agriculture, were already a heavy burden for the Soviet economy.[196] At the same time, Reagan persuadedSaudi Arabia to increase oil production,[197] even as other non-OPEC nations were increasing production.[198] These developments contributed to the 1980s oil glut, which affected the Soviet Union, as oil was the main source of Soviet export revenues.[185][196] Issues with command economics,[199] oil prices decreases and large military expenditures gradually brought the Soviet economy to stagnation.[196]
On September 1, 1983, the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 with 269 people aboard, including sitting Congressman Larry McDonald, when it violated Soviet airspace just past the west coast of Sakhalin Island near Moneron Island ² an act which Reagan characterized as a "massacre". This act increased support for military deployment, overseen by Reagan, which stood in place until the later accords between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.[200] The Able Archer 83 exercise in November 1983, a realistic simulation of a coordinated NATO nuclear release, has been called most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, as the Soviet leadership keeping a close watch on it considered a nuclear attack to be imminent.[201]
US domestic public concerns about intervening in foreign conflicts persisted from the end of the Vietnam War.[202] The Reagan administration emphasized the use of quick, low- costcounter-insurgency tactics to intervene in foreign conflicts.[202] In 1983, the Reagan administration intervened in the multisided Lebanese Civil War, invaded Grenada, bombed Libya and backed the Central American Contras, anti-communist paramilitaries seeking to overthrow the Soviet-aligned Sandinista government in Nicaragua.[106] While Reagan's interventions against Grenada and Libya were popular in the US, his backing of the Contra rebels was mired in controversy.[203]
Meanwhile, the Soviets incurred high costs for their own foreign interventions. Although Brezhnev was convinced in 1979 that the Soviet war in Afghanistan would be brief, Muslim guerrillas, aided by the US and other countries, waged a fierce resistance against the invasion.[204] The Kremlin sent nearly 100,000 troops to support its puppet regime in Afghanistan, leading many outside observers to dub the war "the Soviets' Vietnam".[204] However, Moscow's quagmire in Afghanistan was far more disastrous for the Soviets than Vietnam had been for the Americans because the conflict coincided with a period of internal decay and domestic crisis in the Soviet system.
A senior US State Department official predicted such an outcome as early as 1980, positing that the invasion resulted in part from a "domestic crisis within the Soviet system. ... It may be that the thermodynamic law of entropy has ... caught up with the Soviet system, which now seems to expend more energy on simply maintaining its equilibrium than on improving itself. We could be seeing a period of foreign movement at a time of internal decay".[205][206] The Soviets were not helped by their aged and sclerotic leadership either: Brezhnev, virtually incapacitated in his last years, was succeeded by Andropov and Chernenko, neither of whom lasted long. After Chernenko's death, Reagan was asked why he had not negotiated with Soviet leaders. Reagan quipped, "They keep dying on me".[207] End of the Cold War (1985±91)
Main article: Cold War (1985±1991)
Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan sign the INF Treaty at the White House, 1987
Gorbachev reforms Further information: Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika, and glasnost
By the time the comparatively youthful Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985,[182] the Soviet economy was stagnant and faced a sharp fall in foreign currency earnings as a result of the downward slide in oil prices in the 1980s.[208] These issues prompted Gorbachev to investigate measures to revive the ailing state.[208]
An ineffectual start led to the conclusion that deeper structural changes were necessary and in June 1987 Gorbachev announced an agenda of economic reform called perestroika, or restructuring.[209] Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country's resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector.[209]
Despite initial scepticism in the West, the new Soviet leader proved to be committed to reversing the Soviet Union's deteriorating economic condition instead of continuing the arms race with the West.[118][210] Partly as a way to fight off internal opposition from party cliques to his reforms, Gorbachev simultaneously introduced glasnost, or openness, which increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions.[211] Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of theCommunist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee.[212] Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating détente between the two nations.[213] Thaw in relations Further information: Reykjavík Summit, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, START I, and Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
In response to the Kremlin's military and political concessions, Reagan agreed to renew talks on economic issues and the scaling-back of the arms race.[214] The first was held in November 1985 in Geneva, Switzerland.[214] At one stage the two men, accompanied only by a translator, agreed in principle to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal by 50 percent.[215]
Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988
A second Reykjavík Summit was held in Iceland. Talks went well until the focus shifted to Reagan's proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, which Gorbachev wanted eliminated: Reagan refused.[216] The negotiations failed, but the third summit in 1987 led to a breakthrough with the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). The INF treaty eliminated all nuclear-armed, ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400 miles) and their infrastructure.[217]
East±West tensions rapidly subsided through the mid-to-late 1980s, culminating with the final summit in Moscow in 1989, when Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush signed the START I arms control treaty.[218] During the following year it became apparent to the Soviets that oil and gas subsidies, along with the cost of maintaining massive troops levels, represented a substantial economic drain.[219] In addition, the security advantage of a buffer zone was recognised as irrelevant and the Soviets officially declared that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe.[220]
In 1989, Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan[221] and by 1990 Gorbachev consented to German reunification,[219] the only alternative being a Tiananmen scenario.[222] When the Berlin Wall came down, Gorbachev's "Common European Home" concept began to take shape.[223]
On December 3, 1989, Gorbachev and Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, declared the Cold War over at the Malta Summit;[224] a year later, the two former rivals were partners in the Gulf War against longtime Soviet ally Iraq.[225] Faltering Soviet system Further information: Economy of the Soviet Union, Revolutions of 1989, and Baltic Way
By 1989, the Soviet alliance system was on the brink of collapse, and, deprived of Soviet military support, the Communist leaders of the Warsaw Pact states were losing power.[221] In the USSR itself, glasnost weakened the bonds that held the Soviet Union together[220] and by February 1990, with the dissolution of the USSR looming, the Communist Party was forced to surrender its 73-year-old monopoly on state power.[226]
At the same time freedom of press and dissent allowed by glasnost and the festering "nationalities question" increasingly led the Union's component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely.[227] The 1989 revolutionary wave that swept across Central and Eastern Europe overthrew the Soviet-style communist states, such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria,[228] Romania being the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.[229] Soviet dissolution Further information: January 1991 events in Latvia, 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, and History of the Soviet Union (1985±1991)
Commonwealth of Independent States, the official end of the Soviet Union Gorbachev's permissive attitude toward Eastern Europe did not initially extend to Soviet territory; even Bush, who strove to maintain friendly relations, condemned the January 1991 killings in Latvia and Lithuania, privately warning that economic ties would be frozen if the violence continued.[230] The USSR was fatally weakened by a failed coup and a growing number of Soviet republics, particularly Russia, who threatened to secede from the USSR. The Commonwealth of Independent States, created on December 21, 1991, is viewed as a successor entity to the Soviet Union but, according to Russia's leaders, its purpose was to "allow a civilized divorce" between the Soviet Republics and is comparable to a loose confederation.[231] The USSR was declared officially dissolved on December 25, 1991.[232] Legacy
Main article: Cold War Legacies
Following the Cold War, Russia cut military spending dramatically, creating a wrenching adjustment as the military-industrial sector had previously employed one of every five Soviet adults[233], meaning its dismantling left millions throughout the former Soviet Union unemployed.[233] After Russia embarked on capitalist economic reforms in the 1990s, it suffered a financial crisis and a recession more severe than the US and Germany had experienced during the Great Depression.[234] Russian living standards have worsened overall in the post-Cold War years, although the economy has resumed growth since 1999.[234]
The legacy of the Cold War continues to influence world affairs.[13] After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War world is widely considered as unipolar, with the United States the sole remaining superpower.[235][236][237] The Cold War defined the political role of the United States in the post-World War II world: by 1989 the US held military alliances with 50 countries, and had 1.5 million troops posted abroad in 117 countries.[238] The Cold War also institutionalized a global commitment to huge, permanent peacetime military-industrial complexes and large-scale military funding of science.[238]
Military expenditures by the US during the Cold War years were estimated to have been $8 trillion, while nearly 100,000 Americans lost their lives in the Korean War and Vietnam War.[239] Although the loss of life among Soviet soldiers is difficult to estimate, as a share of their gross national product the financial cost for the Soviet Union was far higher than that of the US.[240]
In addition to the loss of life by uniformed soldiers, millions died in the superpowers' proxy wars around the globe, most notably in Southeast Asia.[241] Most of the proxy wars and subsidies for local conflicts ended along with the Cold War; the incidence of interstate wars, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, as well as refugee and displaced persons crises has declined sharply in the post-Cold War years.[242]
No separate campaign medal has been authorized for the Cold War; however, in 1998, the United State Congress authorized Cold War Recognition Certificates "to all members of the armed forces and qualified federal government civilian personnel who faithfully and honorably served the United States anytime during the Cold War era, which is defined as Sept. 2, 1945 to Dec. 26, 1991." [243]
The legacy of Cold War conflict, however, is not always easily erased, as many of the economic and social tensions that were exploited to fuel Cold War competition in parts of the Third World remain acute.[13] The breakdown of state control in a number of areas formerly ruled by Communist governments has produced new civil and ethnic conflicts, particularly in the former Yugoslavia.[13] In Eastern Europe, the end of the Cold War has ushered in an era of economic growth and a large increase in the number of liberal democracies, while in other parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, independence was accompanied by state failure.[13] Historiography
Main article: Historiography of the Cold War
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to post-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict has been a source of heated controversy among historians, political scientists, and journalists.[244] In particular, historians have sharply disagreed as to who was responsible for the breakdown of Soviet±US relations after the Second World War; and whether the conflict between the two superpowers was inevitable, or could have been avoided.[245] Historians have also disagreed on what exactly the Cold War was, what the sources of the conflict were, and how to disentangle patterns of action and reaction between the two sides.[13]
Although explanations of the origins of the conflict in academic discussions are complex and diverse, several general schools of thought on the subject can be identified. Historians commonly speak of three differing approaches to the study of the Cold War: "orthodox" accounts, "revisionism", and "post-revisionism".[238]
"Orthodox" accounts place responsibility for the Cold War on the Soviet Union and its expansion into Eastern Europe.[238] "Revisionist" writers place more responsibility for the breakdown of post-war peace on the United States, citing a range of US efforts to isolate and confront the Soviet Union well before the end of World War II.[238] "Post-revisionists" see the events of the Cold War as more nuanced, and attempt to be more balanced in determining what occurred during the Cold War.[238] Much of the historiography on the Cold War weaves together two or even all three of these broad categories.[48]
Following World War II many of the factories that had been devoted to military production during the fighting were converted back to their prewar, civilian uses. However, the cessation of fighting in Europe and Asia was not greeted²as the end of World War I had been²with a wave of revulsion against American arms makers. Instead, the nation's military industries were widely viewed as a major pillar of American military strength and an important source of technological innovation. Thus, when the Cold War began in earnest, most members of Congress were prepared to support a new round of arms transfers along the lines of the lend-lease program.
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The resumption of U.S. arms aid to friendly powers abroad did not occur without prodding from the White House, however. With World War II barely concluded, many in Congress were at first reluctant to authorize significant military aid to the European powers²fearing, as had their counterparts in the 1920s and 1930s, that this would eventually lead to U.S. military involvement in overseas conflicts. To overcome this resistance, President Harry S. Truman and his close advisers, including Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and George C. Marshall, sought to portray the expansion of Soviet power in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean as a vital threat to the Western democracies and, by extension, to U.S. national security.
The first significant test of U.S. attitudes on this issue came in early 1947, when Great Britain announced that it could no longer afford to support the royalist government in Greece²which at that time was under attack from a communistbacked insurgency. Fearing that the loss of Greece to the communists would invite Soviet aggression in neighboring countries, including Turkey, President Truman concluded that it was essential for the United States to provide arms and military training to the Greek military. On 12 March 1947, Truman appeared before a joint session of Congress to request funding for this purpose. In what became known as the Truman Doctrine, the president articulated a new guiding principle for American foreign policy: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures."
As noted by many historians since then, this speech shaped U.S. security doctrine for the next several decades. Henceforth it would be the unquestionable obligation of the United States to provide economic, political, and especially military assistance to any nation threatened by Soviet (or Soviet-backed) forces. As the first expression of this principle, Congress voted $400 million in military assistance for Greece and Turkey on 15 May 1947; this was soon followed by the appropriation of even larger amounts for these two countries and for many others in Europe and Asia.
In time the transfer of arms to anticommunist governments abroad came to be seen in Washington as a critical component of "containment," the strategy that governed American foreign and military policy throughout the Cold War. As articulated by its original architects, containment held that the totalitarian Soviet system was forced by its very nature to seek domination over the rest of the world, and thus, in response, the United States had no choice but to join with other nations in resisting Soviet aggression. And because many of the nations on the periphery of the Soviet empire were too poor to provide for their own defense, it was up to Washington to supply the necessary arms and equipment.
This principle was given formal expression in the Mutual Defense Assistance Act (MDAA) of 1949. Signed into law by President Truman on 6 October of that year, the MDAA (later incorporated into the Mutual Security Act of 1950) gave the president broad authority to conclude mutual defense assistance agreements with friendly powers and to provide these countries with a wide range of military goods and services. In its initial authorization Congress awarded $1 billion to members of the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); $211 million to Greece and Turkey; $28 million to Iran, the Philippines, and South Korea; and $75 million for the "general area" of China. These appropriations were increased in subsequent years, reaching a peak of $5.2 billion after the outbreak of the Korean War.
These arms aid endeavors were accompanied, of course, by U.S. efforts to strengthen its own military capabilities. If a full-scale war were to break out, it was believed, the United States would have to provide the bulk of the required forces. But the initial tests of strength were assumed to take place in the border zones between East and West. As a result, much of U.S. diplomacy during the Cold War was directed at the establishment of military alliances with friendly states in these areas and at bolstering the defensive capabilities of their armies. The linkage between military aid programs and U.S. national security was formally articulated in National Security Council policy document number 68 (NSC 68) of April 1950. Described by Representative (later Senator) Henry Jackson as "the first comprehensive statement of national strategy," NSC 68 called on Washington to aid any nation that might conceivably fall under Soviet influence.
At first U.S. arms aid was given primarily to the NATO countries and to other friendly powers on the periphery of the Soviet Union and China, including Iran, South Korea, Turkey, and the Nationalist government on Taiwan. In later years such assistance was also supplied to friendly nations in Africa and Latin America. Between 1950 and 1967 the United States provided its allies with a total of $33.4 billion in arms and services under the Military Assistance Program (MAP), plus another $3.3 billion worth of surplus weaponry under the Excess Defense Articles program. The United States also sold weapons to those of its allies that were sufficiently recovered from World War II to finance their own arms acquisitions; between 1950 and 1967 Washington exported $11.3 billion worth of arms and equipment through its Foreign Military Sales program. (All of these figures are in uninflated "current" dollars, meaning that their value in contemporary dollars would be significantly greater.)
Although the basic premise of American arms transfers²to strengthen the defenses of U.S. allies facing a military threat from the Soviet Union²did not change over the years, many aspects of these programs underwent significant transformation. Thus, while the bulk of U.S. weaponry was originally funneled to the industrialized powers of Europe and Asia, by the late 1950s an increasing portion of these arms was being provided to friendly nations in what was then called the Third World. The primary impetus for this shift was Moscow's apparent success in using arms transfers to establish military links with Egypt (beginning in 1954), Syria (in 1955), Iraq (in 1958), and Cuba (in 1961). In order to combat the growing Soviet presence in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, Washington began supplying vast quantities of arms and ammunition to its own allies in these regions² thereby triggering fresh Soviet arms transfers to its Third World clients, in what was to become an ongoing pattern of U.S.±Soviet arms competition.
Although the primary objective of U.S. arms transfer policy during this period was to bolster the defensive capabilities of key allies, American leaders did on occasion emphasize other priorities. In the early 1950s, for example, the United States joined with Great Britain and France in restricting arms deliveries to the Middle East. As noted in the 1950 Tripartite Declaration, the aim of this effort was to prevent the outbreak of an uncontrolled and destabilizing arms race in the region. (This effort collapsed in 1954, when the Soviet bloc began selling arms to Egypt and the United States responded by increasing its arms deliveries to Israel and other friendly powers in the area.)
In another attempt at restraint, the Kennedy administration attempted in the early 1960s to dissuade Latin American countries from acquiring expensive, "big-ticket" weapons such as jet fighters and armored vehicles. Believing that persistent underdevelopment²rather than the distant threat of Soviet power²represented the greatest threat to these states' long-term stability, President John F. Kennedy suggested that any funds saved by reducing arms imports be devoted to economic and social development. When supplying U.S. arms to these countries under the MAP program, moreover, Kennedy favored the transfer of "counterinsurgency" gear² small arms, light vehicles, helicopters, and so on.
For the most part, however, U.S. policymakers favored a liberal approach to arms transfers, permitting the flow of increasingly costly and sophisticated arms to American allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. This policy was strongly backed by U.S. military leaders, who saw arms transfers (and their accompanying training and advising operations) as a valuable instrument for establishing and nurturing ties with the military elites of friendly countries. It also enjoyed strong support from the domestic arms industry, which consistently opposed any restrictions on the sales of weapons to friendly powers abroad.
Arms control With the end of the Cold War, huge amounts of various types of weapons from the former Eastern Bloc arsenals became available on the market. At the same time, a number of armed conflicts broke out in the OSCE area that required urgent action to stop the violence. All this gave new impetus to the development of measures aimed at preventing the uncontrolled spread of arms. The Forum for Security Co-operation (FSC), which is the main OSCE body dealing with politico-military aspects of security, contributes to these efforts by developing documents regulating transfers of conventional arms and establishing principles governing non- proliferation. Due to its legal status, the OSCE does not deal with arms control issues directly. However, it is currently involved in various politico-military activities ranging from confidence- and security- building measures (CSBMs) aimed at fostering trust among member states to projects providing assistance on the destruction of small arms and light weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles (known as MANPADS), as well as conventional ammunition. While the FSC in Vienna provides a forum for political dialogue for diplomats from OSCE states, most of the practical work, including training and assistance in the safeguarding and destruction of ammunition and stockpiles of small arms, is conducted through the Conflict Prevention Centre (CPC) at OSCE headquarters and OSCE field operations in such countries as Moldova, Georgia.
Cold War: A Brief History
The Beginnings of the Cold War
As the world began recovering from World War II, the first General Assembly of the United Nations met in London in January 1946, and created the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. Part of their charge was to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction, including the atomic bomb.
America's first effort to define a policy on the control of atomic energy was The Report On The International Control Of Atomic Energy (informally known as the "Acheson-Lilienthal" Report), and was published March 16, 1946. Its premise was that there should be an international "Atomic Development Authority" which would have worldwide monopoly over the control of "dangerous elements" of the entire spectrum of atomic energy.
Drawing heavily on the information in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, the U.S. proposal to the United Nations on international controls on nuclear material (named the Baruch Plan for its author Bernard Baruch) was presented. It called for the establishment of an international authority to control potentially dangerous atomic activities, license all other atomic activities, and carry out inspections.
The Soviets rejected the Baruch Plan, since it would have left the United States with a decisive nuclear superiority until the details of the Plan could be worked out and would have stopped the Soviet nuclear program. They responded by calling for universal nuclear disarmament. In the end, the UN adopted neither proposal. Seventeen days after Baruch presented his plan to the United Nations on July 1, 1946, the United States conducted the world's first postwar nuclear test.
Meanwhile, the control of the U.S. atomic efforts transferred from military control to civilian. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 established the Atomic Energy Commission, putting the AEC in charge of all aspects of nuclear power. The agency consisted of five civilian members who were advised by a scientific panel called the General Advisory Committee and chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Cold War: A Brief History Operation Crossroads
In July 1946, two atomic tests--code named "Operation Crossroads"--were conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. These tests explored the effects of airborne and underwater nuclear explosions on ships, equipment, and material. A fleet of 95 surplus and captured ships were used as targets, including the Saratoga, the Arkansas, and the Japanese battleship Nagato. These tests were witnessed by hundreds of reporters, politicians, and international observers, along with 42,000 military and scientific personnel. The two bombs used in Crossroads were identical in design and yield to the bomb used on Nagasaki.
Operation Crossroads ABLE test
The first test, ABLE, was dropped on July 1, from a B-29 and detonated over the target fleet. The bomb was exploded between 1,500 and 2,000 feet off target, perhaps due to a collapsed tail fin. The radioactivity created by the burst was minor, and within a day nearly all the ships could be reboarded.
Operation Crossroads BAKER test
The second test, BAKER, on July 25, was exploded underwater; it formed a 1/2-mile-wide column of water over a mile and a half into the sky. Serious contamination of the lagoon occurred. Bikini Island, some 3 miles from surface zero, could not be safely landed on until a week had passed. The blast sunk or capsized eight ships and severely damaged eight more. The Soviet Atomic Bomb
The Soviet effort was led by Igor Kurchatov at a secret site known as Arzamas-16. Early efforts were greatly aided by spies inside the Manhattan Project, most notably by Klaus Fuchs. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the program accelerated into high gear. The Soviets began construction of a near copy of the Fat Man bomb, using the detailed design descriptions provided by Fuchs. This replica, named Joe-1 by the West, was detonated at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. Its estimated yield was about 22 kilotons.
Russia's first nuclear test, named Joe-1 by the west
A few weeks later, a specially-equipped U.S. weather plane flying off the coast of Siberia collected radioactive debris suggesting a recent atomic explosion. President Truman was slow to accept the news. Although this event shocked most of the world, many scientists had pointed out that given sufficient time, any industrial nation could construct an atomic bomb.
The Soviets did not test another atomic bomb for more than two years.
The Hydrogen Bomb
After the Soviet atomic bomb success, the idea of building a hydrogen bomb received new impetus in the United States. In this type of bomb, deuterium and tritium (hydrogen isotopes) are fused into helium, thereby releasing energy. There is no limit on the yield of this weapon.
The scientific community split over the issue of building a hydrogen bomb. Edward Teller, who had explored the idea of a 'super' during the Manhattan Project, supported its development.
Edward Teller
Men like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and I.I. Rabi opposed its development. Fermi and Rabi wrote, "Since no limit exists to the destructiveness of this weapon, its existence and knowledge of its construction is a danger to humanity as a whole."
However the Cold War was beginning to escalate. A group of scientists led by Edward Teller supported its development. They made direct approaches to the military and the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
In 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced work on the hydrogen bomb was to continue. Savannah River, South Carolina, became the site for the nation's hydrogen bomb production facility the following year. The facility produced tritium for the nation's nuclear arsenal until safety concerns halted production in 1990.
The MIKE Test
On November 1, 1952, the United States detonated a 10.4-megaton hydrogen device in the Pacific on the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The test, code-named "Mike," was the first successful implementation of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam's concept for a "Super."
The MIKE Test
Since scientists had limited information on how well lithium deuteride would work, they chose instead to use liquid deuterium, which needed to be kept below -417° F (-250° C). A six-story cab was built to house "Mike" with its complex cooling system. Weighing 65 tons, the apparatus was an experimental device, not a weapon. A two-mile-long tunnel that extended from the device to another island was filled with helium that would provide data on the fusion reaction.
Even those who had witnessed atomic tests were stunned by the blast. The cloud, when it had reached its furthest extent, was about 100 miles wide and 25 miles high. The explosion vaporized Elugelab, leaving behind a crater more than a mile wide, and destroyed life on the surrounding islands.
The BRAVO Test
Fourteen months later, on March 1, 1954, a deliverable hydrogen bomb using solid lithium deuteride was tested by the United States on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. By missing an important fusion reaction, the scientists had grossly underestimated the size of the explosion.
The BRAVO Test
The predicted yield was 5 megatons, but, in fact, "BRAVO" yielded 14.8 megatons, making it the largest U.S. nuclear test ever exploded.
The blast gouged a crater more than 1/2 mile wide and several hundred feet deep and ejected several million tons of radioactive debris into the air. Within seconds the fireball was nearly 3 miles in diameter.
Effects on Islanders
No one was living on the Bikini atoll at the time of the BRAVO blast. However, a total of 236 people were living on the atolls of Rongelap and Utirik, 100 and 300 miles east of Bikini, respectively. The residents of Rongelap were exposed to as much as 200 rems of radiation. They were evacuated 24 hours after the detonation. The residents of Utirik, which were exposed to lower levels of radiation, were not evacuated until at least two days later. After their evacuation, many experienced typical symptoms of radiation poisoning: burning of the mouth and eyes, nausea, diarrhea, loss of hair, and skin burns.
Ten years after the blast, the first thyroid tumors began to appear. Of those under twelve on Rongelap at the time of BRAVO, 90% have developed thyroid tumors. In 1964, the U. S. Government admitted responsibility for exposing the islanders to radiation and appropriated funds to compensate them.
Effects on Fishermen
The Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) was a small Japanese tuna boat, fishing about 90 miles east of Bikini at the time of the test. About two hours after the explosion a "snow" of radioactive ash composed of coral vaporized by BRAVO began to fall on the ship. Within hours, the crewmembers began to experience burning and nausea. Within a few days, their skin began to darken and some crewmembers hair started to fall out. Upon returning to Japan, many were hospitalized and one eventually went into a coma and died. Though the U.S. denied responsibility, it sent the widow a check for 2.5 million yen "as a token of sympathy."
The Soviet Response
The Soviet Union also pursued the development of a hydrogen bomb. Initial Soviet research was guided by the information provided by Klaus Fuchs. Then Andrei Sakharovsuggested a different idea. This design, known as, the "Layer Cake", consisted of alternating layers of hydrogen fuel and uranium. However, this design limited the amount of thermonuclear fuel that could be used and therefore the bomb's explosive force.
On August 12, 1953, the Soviet Union tested its first fusion-based device on a tower in central Siberia. The bomb had a yield of 400 kilotons. Though not nearly as powerful as the American bomb tested nine months earlier, it had one key advantage: It was a usable weapon, small enough to be dropped from an airplane.
The mushroom cloud from the Soviet's first hydrogen bomb
Shortly after the "BRAVO" test, Sakharov's team had the same idea of using radiation implosion. Work on the "Layer Cake" design was halted. On November 22, 1955, the Soviet Union exploded its first true hydrogen bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site. It had a yield of 1.6 megatons.
This began a series of Soviet hydrogen bomb tests culminating on October 23, 1961, with an explosion of about 58 megatons. Khrushchev boasted, "It could have been bigger, but then it might have broken all the windows in Moscow, 4,000 miles away."
Reagan's Star Wars
On March 23, 1983, President Reagan proposed the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an ambitious project that would construct a space-based anti-missile system. This program was immediately dubbed "Star Wars."
An artist's rendering of an X-ray laser hit an incoming missile.
The SDI was intended to defend the United States from attack from Soviet ICBMs by intercepting the missiles at various phases of their flight. For the interception, the SDI would require extremely advanced technological systems, yet to be researched and developed. Among the potential components of the defense system were both space- and earth-based laser battle stations, which, by a combination of methods, would direct their killing beams toward moving Soviet targets. Air-based missile platforms and ground- based missiles using other non-nuclear killing mechanisms would constitute the rear echelon of defense and would be concentrated around such major targets as U.S. ICBM silos. The sensors to detect attacks would be based on the ground, in the air, and in space, and would use radar, optical, and infrared threat-detection systems.
This system would tip the nuclear balance toward the United States. The Soviets feared that SDI would enable the United States to launch a first-strike against them. Critics pointed to the vast technological uncertainties of the system, in addition to its enormous cost.
Although work was begun on the program, the technology proved to be too complex and much of the research was cancelled by later administrations. The idea of missile defense system would resurface later as the National Missile Defense.
Chernobyl
On April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear-power accident occurred at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. The accident occurred when technicians at reactor Unit 4 attempted a poorly designed experiment. The chain reaction in the core went out of control. Several explosions triggered a large fireball and blew off the heavy steel and concrete lid of the reactor. This and the ensuing fire in the graphite reactor core released large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. A partial meltdown of the core also occurred.
Chernobyl
A cover-up was attempted, but on April 28, Swedish monitoring stations reported abnormally high levels of wind-transported radioactivity and pressed for an explanation. The Soviet Union finally acknowledged that the accident had occurred.
An estimated 100 to 150 million curies of radiation escaped into the atmosphere before cleanup crews were able to bring the fires under control and stabilize the situation some two weeks later. The radioactivity was spread by the wind over Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine and soon reached as far west as France and Italy.
Finally, workers erected an enormous concrete-and-steel shell or "sarcophagus" over the damaged reactor to prevent radioactive materials, including gases and dust, from further escaping.
Initially, the Chernobyl accident caused the deaths of 32 people. Dozens more contracted serious radiation sickness; some of these people later died. Millions of acres of forest and farmland were contaminated; and although many thousands of people were evacuated, hundreds of thousands more remained in contaminated areas. In addition, in subsequent years many livestock were born deformed, and among humans several thousand radiation-induced illnesses and cancer deaths were expected in the long term.
In December 2000 the last of the four reactors at Chernobyl was shut down.
The End of the Cold War
With the passing of several Soviet leaders, Mikhail Gorbachev assumed control of the Soviet Union. His rise to power ushered in an era of perestroika (restructuring) and of glasnost (openness).
Reagan and Gorbachev leaving the Reykjavik Summit
U.S.-Soviet relations improved considerably during the middle 1980s. At a dramatic summit meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, Gorbachev proposed a 50- percent reduction in the nuclear arsenals of each side, and for a time it seemed as though a historic agreement would be reached. The summit ended in failure, owing to differences over SDI. However, on December 8, 1987, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treatywas signed in Washington, eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons. The INF Treaty was the first arms-control pact to require an actual reduction in nuclear arsenals rather than merely restricting their proliferation.
As the decade came to an end, much of the Eastern Bloc began to crumble. The Hungarian government took down the barbed wire on its border with Austria and the West. The Soviet Union did nothing in response. Although travel was still not completely free, the Iron Curtain was starting to unravel. On November 10, 1989, one of the most famous symbols of the Cold War came down: the Berlin Wall. By the end of the year, leaders of every Eastern European nation except Bulgaria had been ousted by popular uprisings. By mid-1990, many of the Soviet republics had declared their independence. Turmoil in the Soviet Union continued, as there were several attempts at overthrowing Gorbachev. On December 8, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.). After 45 years, the Cold War was over.
Nations on the Threshold
Just as India and Pakistan have come out of the nuclear shadows, several other nations also have advanced nuclear programs.
World's Nuclear States (2006)
South Africa
South Africa is the only nation to have successfully developed nuclear weapons and then voluntarily dismantled its entire nuclear-weapons program. In March 1993, then-President De Klerk announced that the nation had produced nuclear weapons, but destroyed them before signing the NPT in 1991. South Africa also became a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in 1995.
It was further revealed that on the night of September 22, 1979, the flash detected by the U.S. VELA satellite was from a nuclear explosion. South Africa also acknowledged that it had received assistance from Israel in exchange for 550 tons of raw uranium. Israel
Israel is not a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has not acknowledged that it has nuclear weapons, but generally is regarded as a de facto nuclear-weapon state. Based on the real or perceived threat from its Arab and Persian neighbors, Israel continues to maintain a highly advanced military, a nuclear-weapons program and offensive and defensive missiles.
Israel's nuclear program, the most advanced in the Middle East, began in the late 1950s to meet the perceived threat to the state. Its missile program began in the 1960s with French assistance. Its nuclear arsenal is estimated at between 20 and 100 Nagasaki-sized bombs. The country has formally stated that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Israel has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
Iraq
After Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) discovered that Iraq had violated the NPT by secretly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. The IAEA investigation revealed details of Baghdad's efforts to design an implosion-type nuclear explosive device and to test its non-nuclear components, including Iraq's plans to produce large quantities of lithium-6, a material used usually for the production of "boosted" atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs. IAEA officials estimated that Iraq might have been able, had the war not intervened, "to") to manufacture its first atomic weapons, using indigenously produced weapons-grade uranium, as early as the fall of 1993.
IAEA inspectors returned to Iraq in November 2002 after a four-year lapse and stayed until their March 2003 evacuation, which preceded the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The subsequent invasion by U.S.-led coalition forces was rooted in the belief that Saddam Hussein's regime had been deceiving the IAEA and hiding its WMD arsenals and capabilities.
Although investigations confirmed that Iraq's nuclear programs were destroyed after the first Gulf War, it was believed that Iraq had not abandoned its quest for nuclear weapons. It was estimated that Iraq could probably rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and manufacture a device in five to seven years, if United Nations sanctions were removed. While Iraq's WMD arsenals and capabilities were never discovered, troubling reports have emerged about missing nuclear-related equipment and materials in Iraq that, according to the IAEA, has been disappearing from previously monitored sites since the start of the war in 2003.
Iran
Iran is another threshold nation. Although Iran had been a party to the NPT since 1970, it is believed to have pursued a secret nuclear-weapons program since the mid-1980s. China and Russia have been Iran's main suppliers of nuclear technology.
As Iran's nuclear capabilities grew, the EU-3 (France, Great Britain and Germany) sought to negotiate with Iran about the issue of peaceful nuclear-research activities, including the development of a nuclear fuel-cycle infrastructure in mid-2005. Attempts were made to persuade Iran to give up its fuel-cycle ambitions and accept nuclear fuel from abroad, but Tehran made it clear that any proposal that did not guarantee Iran's access to peaceful nuclear technology would lead to the cessation of all nuclear-related negotiations with the EU-3. Tensions were further heightened when highly enriched uranium (HEU) particle contamination was found at various locations in Iran. In August 2005, the IAEA announced that contamination was found to be of foreign origin and concluded that much of the HEU found on centrifuge parts was from imported Pakistani equipment, rather than from any enrichment activities conducted by Iran. However, The EU said Iran had lost its right to nuclear energy under Article 4 of the NPT because it violated Article 2-"not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear-related weapons or other nuclear explosive devices." The country refused to comply with the resolution from the IAEA to halt its nuclear program. The next month, the IAEA found Iran in non-compliance of the NPT. The resolution passed with 21 votes of approval, with Russia and China among the 12 who abstained from voting.
The IAEA's report on Iran's nuclear ambitions topped the agenda of a closed-door meeting of the United Nations Security Council on March 17, 2006. After the meeting, the Council announced that it was close to agreement on elements of a text reaffirming that Iran should comply with calls from the IAEA Governing Board and was seeking a report from the agency's director-general on the matter.
Iran is attempting to finish its Bushehr reactor and "establish a complete nuclear fuel cycle." Though it is not clear how close Iran is to developing a nuclear device, estimate range from a few years to nearly a decade.
North Korea
Although North Korea signed the NPT in 1985, it is believed to have pursued an active nuclear-weapons program, in violation of the Treaty. The country did not permit the IAEA to conduct required inspections, until May 1992. It is assumed that North Korea has made enough plutonium for one to two nuclear weapons. In a tentative agreement with the U.S. in 1994, North Korea agreed to suspend further development of nuclear weapons in exchange for increased aid and heating oil.
In February 2005, a spokesman for the North Korean Foreign Ministry announced that North Korea had manufactured nuclear weapons. This announcement followed Pyongyang's January 2003 declaration that the country was withdrawing from the NPT. In early April 2005, North Korea shut down its 5MW(e) reactor in Yongbuon-kun and declared that the spent fuel would be extracted to "increase North Korea's nuclear deterrent." Since North Korea had been operating the reactor since late February 2003, its technicians should be able to extract enough plutonium from the spent fuel for 1-3 nuclear bombs.
In September 2005, the North Korean delegation to the Six-Party Talks in Beijing signed a "Statement of Principles" whereby Pyongyang agreed to abandon all nuclear programs and return to the NPT and IAEA safeguards. However, on the following day a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry declared that the U.S. would have to provide a light-water reactor to North Korea in order to resolve the lack of trust between the two countries. The Six- Parties agreed to meet again.
Additionally, in mid-2002, U.S. intelligence discovered that North Korea had been receiving materials from Pakistan for a highly enriched uranium-production facility. In October 2002, the U.S. State Department informed North Korea that the U.S. was aware of this program, which is a violation of Pyongyang's nonproliferation commitments. North Korean officials initially denied the existence of such a program, but then acknowledged it. The IAEA has not been able to verify the completeness nor correctness of North Korea's initial declaration submitted in 1992, and the agency cannot verify whether fissile material has been diverted to military use. Libya
Another nation of concern was Libya. In December 2003, Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qadhafi publicly confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle WMD programs in his country following a nine-month period of negotiations with U.S. and UK authorities. He also pledged to adhere to the NPT, which Libya had ratified in 1975, and to sign the Additional Protocol, which was done on March 10, 2004. He then invited the IAEA to verify the elimination of nuclear-weapon-related activities in Libya, which the agency did in December 2003. Inspectors found imported equipment and technology at a number of previously secret nuclear facilities in and around Tripoli. It has been revealed that Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan is responsible for providing Libya with its nuclear warhead plans, raw uranium and enrichment centrifuges through his black-market network.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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http://www.johnearlhaynes.org/page64.html
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/20th/coldwarspies.html
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