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Home , Able Archer 83, Harvey Klehr, Helsinki Accords

Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Ariane Knüsel discussing the counterintelligence operations of the Swiss Federal Police against spies working for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the . Because was one of the first Western countries to recognize the PRC’s Communist regime as the government of China, Chinese intelligence services used the PRC’s diplomatic outpost in Bern and consulate Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/22/3/1/1860600/jcws_e_00947.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 general in Geneva for political and commercial espionage throughout Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. The role of counterintelligence in Cold War Europe has received little scholarly attention, and the role of Swiss counterintelligence has been largely ignored, in part because of lack of archival access. Knüsel shows that even though Switzerland embraced neutrality in its foreign policy, the Swiss Federal Police worked closely with Western counterintelligence agencies to counter and disrupt espionage by Chinese and Soviet-bloc agents. This cooperation was undertaken quietly to avoid controversy, but it proved to be highly beneficial for all parties involved. The next article, by Toby Matthiesen, looks at the role of the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia (CPSA) in the politics of the Middle East during the Cold War. Saudi Arabia, as the site of the two holiest places in Islam under the rule of a brutal Islamic regime, was not the most propitious site for a pro-Soviet Communist Party to take root. Yet, even though the CPSA was small and faced severe repression, it functioned from 1975 through the end of the Cold War as the only orthodox Marxist-Leninist party in the Middle East. Because the had no diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia until 1990 and therefore had no embassy, Soviet support of the CPSA (financial and otherwise) came through various channels tied to international far-left organizations. Soviet and East German links with the CPSA were especially close, and CPSA delegations regularly came to events and consultations in the USSR and . Defying harsh strictures in Saudi Arabia, the CPSA sought to recruit women into its activities and also worked with the Shia minority in Saudi Arabia, including during the November 1979 rebellion in the country’s Eastern Province. The failure of that uprising, and the reprisals that ensued, did not initially paralyze the CPSA, but in 1982 the Saudi regime launched a devastating crackdown on the Communists and an allied far-left party. From exile, CPSA leaders continued to build ties with Soviet-bloc parties and to build new networks within Saudi Arabia, but the party’s concrete effectiveness after the 1982 crackdown was much reduced, especially in light of the rise of an ultra-Islamist reform movement known as Sahwa (Awakening), which increasingly became the locus of opposition activity. The waning and end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet bloc, and the gradual emergence of other peaceful reform movements further accelerated the CPSA’s disintegration.

Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer 2020, pp. 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1162/jcws_e_00947 © 2020 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The next article, by and , shows how and why the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) secretly convinced the leaders of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) that one of their party’s top members, William Albertson, was an FBI informant. The rumors the FBI circulated about Albertson were untrue, but CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall and other leading party officials were duped into believing that Albertson was betraying them. Hence, despite Albertson’s strong denials of culpability, he was expelled from the party. Only recently, with the declassification of the FBI’s Operation Solo files, has it become possible to understand why the FBI framed Albertson. Haynes and Klehr demonstrate that the false rumors Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/22/3/1/1860600/jcws_e_00947.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 not only stoked disarray in the CPUSA’s highest ranks but also, more importantly, protected the identities of two real informants, and Jack Childs, who were among Hall’s closest confidants. For some 25 years, from 1952 through 1977, the Childs brothers provided extremely sensitive information to the FBI about the inner workings of the CPUSA, including the party’s financial and political links with the Soviet Union. This relationship was formalized as Operation Solo from 1958 to 1977. Two leaks to the press in April 1964 threatened to compromise Solo, and the FBI scrambled to protect the Childs brothers. The framing of Albertson proved remarkably successful and allowed Operation Solo to continue for many more years. The next article, by Simon Miles, examines the widely misunderstood events of 1983. Over the past 30 years, numerous scholars and journalists have averred that a dangerous nuclear crisis took place behind the scenes in November 1983 because Soviet political and military leaders supposedly feared that the would use the command-post exercise (CPX) of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as cover for launching a nuclear strike against the USSR. In an article I published eight years ago, I drew on Soviet Politburo documents and other declassified records to debunk these claims, and Miles’s article adds further evidence to show how fanciful and misguided the alarmist assertions were. Miles demonstrates that the RYaN intelligence alert, proposed by Soviet intelligence agencies for the in May 1981, was much less significant and much more rudimentary than the alarmist depictions suggest. He also reinforces what I showed earlier—namely, that Soviet and East European political leaders and military commanders at no point feared that the United States was planning to launch a nuclear strike. On the contrary, the few Warsaw Pact officials who knew about Able Archer 83 understood that it was purely a CPX and posed no security threat to the Soviet bloc. The next article, by Frédéric Bozo, examines a crucial dimension of French-West German relations in the 1980s, namely, the efforts by the two countries to establish greater commonality between them on strategic matters, especially nuclear weapons. Because possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons whereas the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear weapons state, the nuclear issue entailed an inherent degree of inequality. But the FRG, for its part, was a key member of NATO’s integrated military command, including the alliance’s Nuclear Planning Group, whereas France stayed out of the integrated mili- tary command for 43 years, from 1966 until 2009. France and the FRG overlapped

2 Editor’s Note in their aspirations for a more fully integrated Europe, but they diverged in how they viewed conventional and nuclear dimensions of modern warfare. The two countries made some headway in the 1980s in bridging their differences on these matters, but ultimately the strategic divide between them could not be fully overcome. The next article, by Christian Philip Peterson, focuses on the role of U.S. anti- nuclear activists and their links with transnational advocacy networks promoting hu- man rights as promised under the Accords of 1975. Tracing the work of Helsinki Watch and lesser-known groups such as the Campaign for Peace and Democ- racy West/East, Peterson shows that these advocacy groups invoked the Helsinki Final Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/22/3/1/1860600/jcws_e_00947.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Act as they urged U.S. anti-nuclear organizations to defend anti-nuclear activists in the Soviet bloc who had been imprisoned by the Communist authorities. Many West- ern anti-nuclear activists were wary of speaking up in support of , fearing that it would damage relations with Moscow and mitigate the prospects of nuclear dis- armament. But key groups in the United States insisted on pushing for the release of activists in the Soviet bloc who had been wrongly imprisoned, seeing the two causes (human rights and nuclear disarmament) as inextricably linked. Peterson maintains that exchanges between U.S. anti-nuclear activists and human rights organizations were important illustrations of how human rights, opposition to nuclear weapons, and support for détente came together in transnational networks. The article thus sheds light on academic debates about the purported “Helsinki effect” and its actual impact. The final article, by Reed Chervin, shows how the border dispute between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the two countries to go to war in October 1962, was waged not only on the battlefield but also in the mass media. Even though the two countries differed in their political complexion—the PRC was a repressive Communist dictatorship whereas India had a largely democratic system—they used similar means to stake out their claims in the territorial dispute. Both countries exercised tight control over their media’s coverage of the issue and banned books and other printed items that deviated from the offi- cial position. Portrayals of the border demarcation in the two sides’ official maps and mass media were fundamentally divergent, spurring each to accuse the other of “ag- gression.” These elements of the Sino-Indian conflict were typical of Cold War–era border disputes in which information became a means of warfare. The issue concludes with ten book reviews.

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