Cold War History Archives

The Gorbachev Factor by Archie Brown (2003)

The fall of the Soviet Union is usually understood from two angles. One argues that the Soviet state could not keep up with the United States’ military superiority and, therefore, collapsed under economic strain. The other perspective suggests that western Europe and the U.S., and specifically the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), played a crucial role in pressuring diplomatically for the end of the “Evil Empire.” Archie Brown suggests that there is another interpretation that rules out military or diplomatic pressures in explaining the undoing of the Soviet Union. Brown argues that the end of the system was exclusively due to the political (glasnost) and economic (perestroika) reforms launched to reform the state. In this process, the author contends that the implosion of the Soviet Union had more to do with the will of one man than with any outside forces in play.

The Gorbachev Factor is a compelling and persuasive analysis that underlines the agency of Mikhail Gorbachev as the most crucial factor explaining the end of Soviet rule. The book is a painstaking examination of Gorbachev’s leadership as a head of state, and the importance of his policy reforms in enacting the political transformation of the Soviet system. As the author argues, despite the structural problems of the USSR during the 1980s, there was no sign of an impending collapse. However, the central thesis of the book is that Gorbachev’s interest in seeking political and economic change led him to believe that those goals were unattainable unless the whole system was transformed. By analyzing the changes introduced by the Soviet leader in the political structure of the state, the economy, the center-periphery relations, and in foreign policy, Brown successfully shows how the Soviet system transitioned from a relative stable state of decline into a phase of terminal crisis. Despite failing to prevent the end of the USSR during his term (1985-1991), Gorbachev oversaw the emergence of political pluralism, the democratization of the former Soviet Republics, and the inauguration of a new foreign policy with the west that ended the Cold War.

From the four areas he deemed necessary for a complete transformation of the system, Brown identifies political reforms and the reformulation of Soviet foreign policy as the most successful ones. The introduction of contested elections to create a legislature with real powers in 1988 is perhaps the most significant reform in explaining the growing democratization of the Soviet Union but it also accounts for the gradual erosion of state control over the political process. Domestic political changes also reflected a new foreign policy mentality. Gorbachev reconfigured Soviet diplomacy by emphasizing the freedom to choose and by renouncing violence as a way to sustain other communist regimes in power. As Brown contends, the Gorbachev factor in Soviet foreign policy cleared the way for the overthrow of Communist systems in Eastern and Central Europe from 1989 on.

The liberalization of the system presented Gorbachev with intractable problems. In relations between the central Soviet state and the non-Russian republics within its borders, the delegitimization of Marxism-Leninism triggered by the political reforms, and the revelations of the failures and atrocities of the Soviet system, left an ideological vacuum for which nationalism was the most obvious candidate. Unable, or unwilling to control the centrifugal forces unleashed by his reforms, Gorbachev’s ability to keep the Soviet Union intact imploded when political rivals, such as Boris Yeltsin, torpedoed any opportunity for a union-wide arrangement. In the implementation of economic reforms, Gorbachev’s zig-zag approach not only proved to be ineffective because of the opposition of the ministerial bureaucracy to the full implementation of his policies, but also because the Soviet leader was more hesitant and less clear on how to proceed towards the gradual adoption of a market economy.

Mikhail Gorbechev (left) with President George Bush (right) – (via Wikipedia)

Finally, Gorbachev’s personality played a key role in the political transformation of the system. His status as a consensus-builder served him well to implement several reforms without facing concerted resistance from the Communist Party or the emergent cohort of Soviet dissidents and liberals. However, this same trait later exposed Gorbachev to the attack of radicals on both sides of the political spectrum, undermining his power. This, coupled with the misplaced trust in some of his appointees, seriously complicated Gorbachev’s plans to control the transformation of the system.

Brown’s book succeeds in providing a refreshing and persuasive angle that underlines the domestic causes in the demise of the Soviet Union. The author relies primarily on personal interviews and memoirs from the most influential Soviet political leaders of the time (including Gorbachev) to build his argument. For anyone interested in this momentous historical process of the 20^th century Brown’s insightful interpretation will not disappoint.

Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse (2013)

By Aden Knaap, Harvard University

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 novel The Sympathizer has a thing for squid. (Think less calamari, more American Pie.) The bastard son of a Vietnamese maid and a French priest, he discovers at the age of thirteen that he has a peculiar fetish for masturbating into gutted squid, lovingly—albeit unwittingly—prepared by his mother for the night’s meal. Unfortunately for him, squid are in short supply in working-class Saigon in the late nineteen-fifties, and so he is forced to wash the abused squid and return them to the kitchen to cover up his crime. Sitting down to dinner with his mother late one night, he tucks into one of those very same squid, stuffed and served with a side of ginger-lime sauce. “Some will undoubtedly find this episode obscene,” he concedes. “Not I!” he declares. “Massacre is obscene. Torture is obscene. Three million dead is obscene. Masturbation, even with an admittedly nonconsensual squid? Not so much.” He should know. By the time he is narrating the novel, he has lived through the Vietnam War as an undercover communist agent in South Vietnam, has sought asylum in America, and is now living as a refugee-cum-spy in Los Angeles.

The Sympathizer was published in 2015—three years after Kill Anything that Moves—but it could just as easily have been written as a prompt for historian turned investigative journalist Nick Turse. Indeed, Turse’s central aim in Kill Anything that Moves is to expose the unparalleled obscenity of the Vietnam War: unparalleled both in terms of the devastating scale and variety of harm done and the diabolical levels of premeditation on the part of the U.S. military. Historians of the Vietnam War, as much as the American public, have traditionally remembered the massacre at Mỹ Lai—in which upwards of five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians were hacked, mowed down, and violated by the American military—as an outlier in an otherwise largely acceptable war (at least in terms of American actions). But as Vietnam veteran and whistleblower Ron Ridenhour explains, and Turse quotes approvingly, Mỹ Lai “was an operation, not an aberration” (5).

Bodies near a burning hut in My Lai (via Wikimedia Commons).

Murder, rape, abuse, arson, arrest, imprisonment, and torture were, in Turse’s words, a “daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam” (6). More than this, they were carried out on orders issued from the uppermost echelons of the American army. They were “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest level of the military” (6). The outcome? The statistics Turse assembles almost speak for themselves: 58,000 American, 254,000 South Vietnamese, and 1.7 North Vietnamese soldiers dead; 65,000 North Vietnamese and 3.8 million South Vietnamese civilians dead. And these are conservative estimates. Add to that 5.3 million wounded civilians, eleven million refugees, and as many as four million exposed to toxic herbicides like Agent Orange. “[A]ll wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has written in a different context.[1] With Kill Anything, Turse plunges into the fray of this second war, taking aim at staid diplomatic histories that fail to take stock of the purposeful barbarity of the American military’s actions in Vietnam.

Perhaps Turse’s greatest accomplishment in this book is to capture the systematic nature of American wartime savagery. In the Introduction, Turse sets the scene with a series of vignettes, devastating in their unambiguous incrimination of the American military. To take just one of many, an army unit storms a sleepy Vietnamese hamlet occupied by local civilians in February 1968. The captain orders his troops to round up all the civilians. A lieutenant asks what is to be done with them. “Kill anything that moves,” the captain coldly responds.

Victims of the My Lai Massacre (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the chapters that follow, Turse argues that indiscriminate killing was a deliberate strategy of the U.S. military. Basic training conditions of shock, separation, and physical and psychological stress was intended to break troops down, dehumanize the Vietnamese enemy, and render soldiers amenable to killing without compunction. The Pentagon employed a “system of suffering,” a policy of promoting and rewarding troops based on their “body counts.” In the most blisteringly effective section of the book, Turse chronicles the fate of two South Vietnamese provinces over the course of three years. Turse explores the specific effects of widespread bombing and military rule on urban areas in South Vietnam like Saigon, Da Nang, and Qui Nhơn. He spotlights the actions of a single general—Julian Ewell, known as the Butcher of the Delta—whose demand for bodies from his troops led to the mass murder of close to 11,000 mostly civilian Vietnamese in a single operation. He also explores governmental cover-ups of American war crimes and the distortion of public perceptions of the war.

Accusations against Turse of leftist partisanship, of “imbalanced” treatment of American atrocities, and the use of “uncorroborated” source material miss the point. Kill Anything is self-consciously iconoclastic.[2] Turse takes as his target two hallowed American institutions and traditions—the U.S. military and the idea of American exceptionalism—and turns them on their heads. In Turse’s hands, the organized brutality of the American military in Vietnam becomes the very source of American exceptionalism. In order to do this, Turse relies partly on the U.S. military’s own records and reports, most notably that of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group: a Department of Defense task force that catalogued more than three hundred substantiated atrocities, dismissing hundreds more as unfounded. Turse adds flesh to the bones of this governmental archive by amassing an unofficial oral archive, the product of interviews he conducted with American army veterans as well as Vietnamese survivors and their descendants from across Vietnam. Accessing this oral history—a history that frequently stands in contention to the official record, Turse is at pains to point out—lets Turse trace the reverberations of violence from small Vietnamese villages to large urban centers, all the way back to the American military command at the Pentagon. In this way, the deep roots of American cruelty in Vietnam are laid bare.

U.S. army troops taking a break while on patrol during the Vietnam War (via WIkimedia Commons).

But if Turse’s greatest achievement is to reveal the systematic character of American war crimes in Vietnam, he fails to apply the same organizing principle to the American antiwar effort. Turse is clearly aware of the existence of the antiwar movement: his footnotes are littered with references to exposés they published and uncovered. And Turse devotes much of the introduction and conclusion to singling out individual whistleblowers like Jamie Henry, who risked their lives, families, careers, and mental and physical health in speaking out against American atrocities in Vietnam. By isolating individual whistleblowers, however, Turse ignores the collective nature and effectiveness of the American antiwar movement, that coordinated attacks on the military, liaised with the media, and shielded informants. “Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness,” Turse laments. But it was the antiwar movement that first brought American war crimes in Vietnam to public attention.

Antiwar protest in Washington, D.C., 1971 (via Wikimedia Commons).

More concerning still is Turse’s uncritical assumption of an overwhelmingly U.S.-centric vantage point. In the pages of Killing Anything that Moves, we meet a diverse cast of American soldiers and medics, statesmen and lawyers, protestors and patriots. The book itself opens and closes with Jamie Henry, a former U.S. army medic who returned from Vietnam bent on bringing attention to the atrocities committed by his unit. Even as Turse denounces America, however, he places Americans firmly at the heart of the narrative. Some Vietnamese civilians are given space to speak, but the vast majority are raped, stabbed, shot, bombed, and left for dead. Soldiers from South Vietnam, North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front remain largely absent from the text, hovering around the edges but never taking center stage. But Turse, by his own admission, conducted numerous interviews with survivors in Vietnam. And anyway, what could be more affecting than the testimonies of America’s Vietnamese victims themselves? There is a way in which the marginalization of Vietnamese voices itself enacts a kind of violence: a silencing and an erasure. It turns a story of Vietnamese victimhood into one of American guilt. War wounds run deep, and while Turse expertly attends to some, he leaves others untreated. The war in Vietnam awaits its Vietnamese sympathizer, in all his squid-fucking glory.

Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Picador: New York, 2013).

[1] Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4.

[2] Gary Kulik and Peter Zinoman, “Misrepresenting Atrocities: Kill Anything that Moves and the Continuing Distortions of the War in Vietnam,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review No. 12 (2014), 162-198; Gary Kulik, “The War in Vietnam: Version 2.0,” History News Network (2015), < http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/158645>.

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Changing Course in Vietnam — or Not.
A War with Ourselves: How the Media Affected the Vietnam War.
50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective.

How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power

By Jonathan C. Brown

Fidel Castro had two political assets that enabled him to stay in power for a half century. He possessed the knack of turning adversity into an asset and he knew his enemies, particularly the anti-communist politicians of Washington, D.C. His guile and skill became evident early on as he established his revolution under the gaze of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

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Fidel Castro in 1959 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Upon taking control of the Cuban military with his guerrillas acting as the new officer corps, he set out in January 1959 to bring to justice the thugs and killers of the old regime. He ordered Che Guevara in Havana and Raúl Castro in Santiago de Cuba to establish revolutionary tribunals to judge the police and army officers for past human rights abuses. In all, some six hundred convicted men faced the firing squads in a matter of months.

Fidel also instructed the US military mission to leave the country. He accused it of teaching Batista’s army how to lose a war against a handful of guerrillas. Cuba no longer needed that kind of military training, Castro said. “If they are going to teach us that, it would be better that they teach us nothing.”

Castro supporters in Havana joke about US criticism of the executions of Batista’s “war criminals.” (via author)

Cubans applauded these procedures as just retribution for the fear and mayhem that Batista’s dictatorship had caused. But American newspaper editors and congressional representatives condemned the executions as revolutionary terror. Fidel used this criticism to rally his followers. Where were these foreigners, he asked, when Batista’s men were snuffing out “the flower of Cuba’s youth?” Soon thereafter, the guerrilla comandante became the head of government as prime minister.

In his trip to Washington in April 1959, Castro endured the constant questions from reporters about communists showing up his new regime. President Eisenhower found it inconvenient to be in Washington when the new Cuban leader arrived. He arranged a golf game in Georgia, leaving his vice president to meet with the visiting prime minister. It was not a meeting of the minds. Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro differed on just about every subject: the communist threat, foreign investment, private capital, and state enterprise. The vice president tried to inform the new leader about which policies would best serve his people, and he ultimately described the unconvinced Castro as being naïve about communism. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the first Cuban envoys were already in Moscow requesting military trainers from the Kremlin.

Castro and Nixon following their interview in April 1959 (via author).

Then in the summer of ’59, Fidel began the agrarian reform project by nationalizing plantation lands owned by both Cuban and US investors. Without any fanfare whatsoever, communists took control of the new agency that took over sugar production. Chairman Mao sent agrarian technicians to act as advisers. The US embassy in Havana demanded immediate compensation for dispossessed American owners. Instead, they received bonds due in twenty years.

Fidel knew how to provoke yanqui reactions in ways that exposed the big power chauvinism of Washington. He hosted Soviet officials and concluded a deal to take on supplies of Russian crude petroleum. Castro asked the American-owned refineries to process the oil into gasoline, which the State Department advised them not to do. Castro had his excuse to confiscate the refineries.

A French ship filled with Belgium weapons arrived in Havana harbor in March of 1960. It exploded and killed 100 Cuban longshoremen. Castro rushed to the TV station and denounced the CIA for sabotaging the shipment. He gave a fiery anti-America speech at the funeral service in the Plaza of the Revolution to which a host of left-wing personalities flew in to attend. Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre arrived from France, Senator Salvador Allende came from Chile, and ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas traveled from Mexico. At this event, Fidel introduced his motto “Fatherland or death, we will overcome,” and the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took the famous image of Che Guevara looking out over the crowd.

Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960, by Alberto Korda (via author)

At that point that President Eisenhower ordered Director Allen Dulles of the CIA to devise the means to get rid of Castro’s regime in which Washington’s “hand would not show.” Agents attached to the US embassy in Havana contacted Catholic and other youth groups who objected to Fidel’s communist friends. They received airline tickets to leave the country and salaries to train as soldiers in Guatemala. Fidel had spies in Miami and Central America sending him progress reports on the émigré brigade in training. Now he had Eisenhower’s diplomats on the defensive. They had to deny Castro’s accusations about an upcoming CIA invasion.

In the meantime, Castro announced plans to socialize the economy, a project that Che Guevara headed up. What was the White House to do? The 1960 election had swung into full gear. The Democratic challenger in the first presidential debates famously said that he was not the vice-president who presided over the communist takeover of the island just 90 miles offshore from Key West. Eisenhower responded with toughness. He lowered the amount of sugar the United States imported from Cuba, and Fidel seized upon this provocation to nationalize the remaining US-owned properties, especially the sugar refineries.

By now, the exodus of Cuba’s professional classes had been expanding over the preceding year until it reached a thousand persons per week. Middle-class families formed long lines outside the US embassy in order to obtain travel visas. President Eisenhower appointed Tracy Voorhees, the man who handled the refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, to manage the resettlement. He established the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami. A mix of American charities and government offices sponsored evacuation flights, housing, job-hunting services, emergency food and clothing drives, educational facilities, and family subsidies. Let them go, Castro told his followers. He called the refugees gusanos (worms), the parasites of society.

U.S. Embassy in Havana, 2010 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Castro benefited from such American interference. It cost him nothing to get rid of his opponents, especially as the US taxpayers footed the bill. He utilized the former privilege of these gusanos to recruit peasants and workers to the new militias. The huge military parade on the second anniversary of the Revolution in January 1961 featured army troops with new T-130 tanks and army units armed with Czech weapons. Thousands of militiamen marched with Belgium FAL assault rifles.

He did not shut down the American embassy but utilized Soviet-trained security personnel to monitor the activities of diplomats and CIA men. He waited until the Americans severed diplomatic ties in order to be able to pose as the victim of US malice. Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba to spare the new president, John F. Kennedy. Anyway, the new president very soon would have to preside over the CIA-planned invasion of the émigré brigade whose coming Castro was announcing to the world.

Now the anti-communist onus had passed to Kennedy. He could not shut down the CIA project and return hundreds of trained and irate young Cubans to Miami. Neither could he use American military forces to assist the invasion. Nikita Khrushchev had already threatened to protect the Cuban Revolution with “Soviet artillery men,” if necessary. Also, citizens in many Latin American nations took pride in Cuba’s defiance of US power. Kennedy too was trapped by his own anti-communist bravado during the election campaign. He changed some of the plans and let the invasion proceed.

Kennedy and Eisenhower confer at Camp David following the Bay of Pigs debacle (via author)

The Bay of Pigs landing of April 1961 turned into a disaster. A bomber assault by exile pilots on the Cuba revolutionary air force failed to destroy all of Castro’s fighter planes. The few remaining fighters chased the bombers from the skies and sank the ships that brought the brigade to shore. The fourteen hundred émigré fighters killed as many militiamen as possible before they ran out of ammunition on the third day. Castro put 1200 of the surviving exiles in jail. In the meanwhile, neighborhood watch groups in Havana and other cities cooperated with state security personnel in rounding up thousands of potential opponents, most of whom were processed and returned home in due course.

Che Guevara summed up the result of the Bay of Pigs when he “accidentally” met up with White House aide Richard Goodwin at an OAS meeting in Uruguay. Please convey our thanks to your president for the Bay of Pigs, Che said. “The Revolution is even more ensconced in power than ever because of the US invasion.”

More by Dr. Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another

The Enemy Within: Cold War History in FX’s The Americans

By Clay Katsky

Those who watch the television show The Americans share a secret with its protagonists: they are not a quintessential American couple living in the suburbs of D.C.; they are, in fact, spies for the Soviet Union. Set against the backdrop of a resurgent Cold War in the early 1980s, this serialized spy thriller and period drama follows the fictional lives of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who were born in Russia and trained as KGB officers to be “sleeper” agents in America. Activated when Reagan throws détente out the window, no one suspects that they have two deeply separated lives, one as travel agents who live in Northern Virginia with two young children, and a second filled with spy missions where they don disguises to seduce and assassinate targets and gather intelligence by blackmailing officials and recruiting assets. The dichotomy of their lives is by day marked by their genuine devotion to their children and to each other, and by night by the violent and frequently murderous clandestine missions directed by their Russian handlers. These Americans are not what they seem to be.

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Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys star in The Americans (via FX).

Ultimately, it is Reagan’s hardline against the U.S.S.R. that gives the show context. The first season begins as Reagan assumes the presidency and the third ends with the Jennings family watching his “evil empire” speech together. During the most recent fourth season, a family viewing of the TV movie The Day After, which is about nuclear Armageddon, adds another dimension to a subplot involving powerful bioweapons. The writers of The Americans do a good job of using 1980s popular culture and history to add contextual drama to the show, but sometimes ignore chronological specifics and the technical aspects of espionage tradecraft for the sake of storytelling. Regardless, the late Cold War works well as a general guide for the narrative arc of the series; the escalating tension between superpowers is directly responsible for the increasing drama in the lives of its main characters.

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President Reagan in 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Perversely, The Americans sometimes makes you root for the enemy within. Fueled by terrific performances from Russell and Rhys, the Jennings can come off as sympathetic, and patriotic in their own way. Reminiscent of James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, these are bad people with redeeming qualities. She is an ideologically driven cold-blooded killer who is loyal to her family, while he is more sensitive and compelled by emotion, yet also capable of extreme violence. Both struggle with the conflict between their mission as spies and their duty as parents, which is a major plot device of the show. The tension of the first season is driven by their fear that the FBI will catch them. Right away evading capture is set up as synonymous with protecting their family. The second season expands on the theme of protecting their family from their world – after two other sleeper agents and their young children are murdered the Jennings fear they are next. The danger in the third season comes from within the family, with their daughter suspecting her parents are way more than just travel agents. And in the fourth season an assignment to steal bioweapons puts the whole world in jeopardy, pitting their loyalty to their country against their instinct to protect their children. Making the show about more than just spying and the Cold War, there are strong subplots involving the family’s next door neighbor, the FBI agent who works in the counter-intelligence division, and their daughter’s increasing devotion to Christianity, which comes to a head when she over shares with her pastor. The drama is about the characters, how they develop and how they react to one another in the context of the world around them.

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The images of nuclear destruction in The Day After (1983) were troubling to many American families (via Wikimedia Commons).

In The Americans, history is used as the setting. The show underscores Reagan’s determination to defeat the forces of Communism using clips from his speeches – as Soviet agents, the Jennings find the rhetoric palpable. And at their house, the news always plays in the background at night, helping to give a timeline of events while also highlighting the television culture of the time – pop culture events like David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear are drawn on to both diffuse the tension and offer social nostalgia. But the headlines are also used to drive the drama. When Reagan gets shot, the Jennings go on high alert because they are not sure if their government was involved; and when Yuri Andropov, their former leader at the KGB, takes power in 1982, they know their lives are about to get busier. The writers incorporate the shift towards renewed hostilities that occurred during the late Cold War in order to give the viewer the sense that the Jennings mission is important. The rivalry between the superpowers could have spun out of control very quickly and at any moment, and the “the Americans” are caught in the middle of it.

The show begins as Reagan kicks the Cold War into high gear in 1981 and it will end with the collapse of the Communist superpower – having been renewed for a final two seasons, the story will be told to its conclusion. The Soviet fear of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s anti-ballistic missile “Star Wars” project, is a centerpiece of the first few episodes. In reality, 1981 is too early for the Russians (or even Reagan) to be thinking seriously about SDI, but it works as an easy set up. At that time, however, it was mostly Reagan’s rhetoric that threatened to turn the Cold War hot. Nicaragua comes to the fore in the second season, again a little early in terms of chronology, but it works well because the Jennings’ sympathy for the Sandinista movement helps humanize them. Oliver North is credited as a technical advisor on an episode where the Jennings infiltrate a Contra training base. Empathy for the Jennings continues to build as they assist the anti-apartheid movement during the third season, while meanwhile the seeds of mistrust in their government are sown with the opening of the war in Afghanistan. In the fourth season, as their government pushes them to recruit their own daughter, the Soviet mismanagement of that war feeds their growing disillusionment and dovetails with a risky mission to acquire an apocalyptic bioweapon. While this past season was it’s least historically based, it was also its best because it dealt with larger, more existential issues.

A Soviet Spetsnaz (special operations) group prepares for a mission in Afghanistan, 1988 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The technical focus of the show is on tradecraft, not history. The thrills come from watching the spies operate; and from making dead drops and cultivating assets to planting listening devices and evading surveillance, the Jennings are very busy. But the show’s most exciting aspect is also its least plausible. It is hard to believe that such well-placed agents would be used as workhorses for the KGB. Especially in the first two seasons, the Jennings juggle multiple assignments at the same time and go on a wide variety of missions – simultaneously they are assassins, saboteurs, master manipulators, and experts in surveillance, counterespionage, and combat. As valuable as they would have been to their government, the Jennings are asked to take too many risks and expose themselves too often. But even in its most exaggerated aspects, The Americans feels realistic due to the expert performances from Russell and Rhys, who are so believable in their roles as skilled spies and as doting parents that one cannot help but trust in their inhuman ability to be an expert in anything they need to be.

Two Soviet era subminiature cams. The one to the left is a Kiev-30 (1974-1983), the other one is a Kiev Vega 2 (1961-1964).

Two miniature Soviet spy cameras form the late Cold War (via Wikimedia Commons).

Overall, The Americans is a highly engaging and richly thought out show set in the waning years of the Cold War. It is very exciting to watch two highly trained KGB operatives as they navigate the complexity of staying ideologically loyal to their cause while raising an American family and living a lie. People who remember the 1980s firsthand will enjoy the references and set pieces, and anyone who likes spy thrillers will be instantly hooked on the slow boiling but constant action and drama. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming fifth season incorporates the Able Archer war scare, when the Soviets mistook NATO war games for the start of real life a nuclear engagement. Will it be the Jennings who witness an increase in late night pizza deliveries to the Pentagon and report back to Moscow that nuclear war is imminent? They seem too savvy to drop the ball like that. But what will happen in the end? Will they survive or be caught by the FBI, or will they get called back to Russia to be punished for some failure or perceived disloyalty?

Read more by Clay Katsky on Not Even Past:
Kissinger’s Shadow, By Greg Grandin (2005)

Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

By Josephine Hill

Today we often associate hybrid or genetically modified corn with agricultural monopolies, big business, and capitalism, in the early Cold War some feared that the rise of hybrid corn would sow the seeds of Communism in the United States. Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick’s editorial cartoon, “Alien Corn,” published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on April 28, 1948, shows Henry A. Wallace grinning at a corn plant, whose leaves bear hammers and sickles and whose tassel sports a Soviet star –- the fruits of Communism.

Alien Corn (04-28-1948), by Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick. The cartoon is held at The St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Cartoon Collection. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri.

Wallace was the founder of the Hi-Bred Corn Company (today owned by the Dupont Corporation). He was also vice president to Franklin Roosevelt, Secretary of Agriculture (1933-1940), Secretary of Commerce (1945-1946), and 1948 presidential nominee of the Progressive Party. Appearing during the 1948 election season, the cartoon most directly reflects contemporary suspicions about Wallace’s possible Communist sympathies, which were fueled by his endorsement from the U.S. Communist Party, his progressive platform that included universal health care, voting rights for African-Americans, and an end to segregation, and his interest in Eastern religions. Here, the fear of the “alien” seems to have stronger political than environmental implications, yet this title presciently describes the many ways in which these two concerns would become more and more closely intertwined.

Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick at work. Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri, Photograph Collection.

The cartoon also seems to reference concerns about the role that Wallace originally envisioned for hybrid seeds in the American agricultural landscape. During his early experiments in western Iowa in the late 1920s, Wallace invented and distributed hybrid corn seeds to farmers across sixteen counties. He imagined that the seeds could provide a means of developing a non-profit, quasi-cooperative agricultural model, that would allow many farmers to contribute a consistent product to a common pool, keeping fifty percent for themselves and donating the other half towards research that would in theory improve the quality of their future crops. Wallace’s model, therefore, for some evoked the ideological spirit of Soviet collectivism. However, in “Alien Corn,” Wallace’s hammer and sickle-laden corn stalk is ironically enclosed by a cement wall and a spiked iron fence, perhaps intended to portray Wallace as a personal profit-seeking hypocrite.

Henry Agard Wallace, 1888–1965. Via Wikipedia

The fence also points towards Pioneer Hi-Bred’s rising profitably and increasing corporatization. In 1949, a year later, it would sell one million units. Much of this expansion had occurred due to the environmental and economic events of the twenty years since Wallace began distribution. During the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, the Department of Agriculture bought and regulated the drought-resistant hybrid seeds in order to stabilize food prices, a program that proved popular and contributed to Wallace’s rising political success. This remarkably rapid growth, combined with the marriage of hybrid seed companies with the chemical companies Dupont and Monsanto (who would provide the pesticides and fertilizers compatible with hybrid seeds), accounts for the major ideological shift in political conceptions of the role of hybrid seeds between the early 1920s and mid-century. Originally envisioned as lynchpins in a cooperative agricultural model, under control of the government, the seeds became essential to the success of a regulated capitalism that would position itself as an antidote to Soviet Communism.

The cartoon also foreshadows an important political moment that occurred about ten years later, as tensions with the Soviet Union escalated. Wallace’s head salesman, Roswell Garst, hosted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to Iowa. There, the two powers exchanged ideas for agricultural innovations and the Soviet Union acquired U.S. patented seeds to be planted on Russian soil. Described in a newsreel as one of the “most folksy and jovial days” of an otherwise fraught diplomatic visit, Garst’s and Hi-Bred’s participation signaled the importance of hybrid seeds as geopolitical instruments, through which the United States could assert its technological and ideological power.

“Alien Corn” highlights the ambiguous position of United States agricultural products as both public and private resources in a moment that in many ways represented a turning point in American agriculture. Today, while agricultural industries are intensely corporatized, they also receive state subsidies and the protection of the FBI, which is becoming increasingly invested in patented seeds as geopolitical bargaining chips to be used in diplomatic relations with national powers such as India and China. At the same time, there is mounting public concern over the environmental and health effects of the widespread cultivation and consumption hybrid seeds. The cartoon then prompts us to think about how the environmental conditions inherent to hybrid seeds –including their ability to thrive as monocultures and their dependence on chemical pesticides— affect their local and transnational ideological implications.

Smallpox: Eradicated but Not Erased

By Cali Slair

In The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Alfred W. Crosby Jr. writes that, of all the diseases brought from the Old World “the first to arrive and the deadliest, said contemporaries, was smallpox.”^[1] Smallpox is a contagious, disfiguring, and potentially fatal disease whose origin in Europe can be traced as far back as 300 CE, with some researchers noting evidence of a smallpox like virus even earlier, in Egyptian mummies, around 1157 BCE. On May 8, 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared that smallpox was eradicated, making it the first infectious disease to reach a global prevalence of zero due to human efforts. The eradication of smallpox was made possible through global vaccination campaigns and surveillance led by the World Health Organization’s Smallpox Eradication Programme (1966-1980).

This 1980 photograph taken at the Centers for Disease Control, depicted three former directors of the Global Smallpox Eradication Program as they read the good news that smallpox had been eradicated on a global scale. From left to right, Dr. J. Donald Millar, who was Director from 1966 to 1970; Dr. William H. Foege, who was Director from 1970 to 1973, and Dr. J. Michael Lane, who was Director from 1973 to 1981. Via Wikipedia.

While May 8, 1980, is often celebrated for marking the eradication of smallpox, members of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication actually concluded that smallpox had been globally eradicated in December 1979. This commission consisted of a team of twenty-one distinguished doctors from around the world such as the Deputy Minister of Health of the USSR, the Dean of the School of Health and Hygiene at Johns Hopkins University, and the Director-General of the National Laboratory of Health in France to name a few.

This young girl in Bangladesh was infected with smallpox in 1973. Freedom from smallpox was declared in Bangladesh in December, 1977 when a WHO International Commission officially certified that smallpox had been eradicated from that country. Via Wikipedia.

The success of the Smallpox Eradication Programme meant the removal of a disease that had threatened human beings for thousands of years and claimed the lives of millions. There were approximately 300 million smallpox related deaths in the twentieth century alone. Although smallpox cases were extremely rare in North America and Europe by the mid-twentieth century, in 1967 smallpox was still prevalent in 33 countries in Africa, Asia, or South America. In 1967 alone there were approximately two million smallpox related deaths. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that the Smallpox Eradication Programme is considered to be one of the WHO’s greatest achievements. Following the successful eradication of smallpox, campaigns for the eradication of other infectious diseases gained support. Unfortunately, only one other disease, rinderpest, which affects livestock, has been eradicated since 1980.

While the smallpox virus has been eradicated for decades, smallpox continues to attract popular and scholarly attention today. One of the main topics is the debate between the WHO, the United States, and Russia on whether to destroy the last remaining live smallpox virus stockpiles. While the WHO originally called for the live virus stockpiles to be stored by the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta and the State Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow, since 1990 the WHO has called for the destruction of the last remaining stockpiles on the basis that they are no longer necessary for public safety, diagnostics, vaccines, or genome sequencing. The U.S. and Russia have continued to reject and postpone the implementation of this declaration since the start, arguing that the live virus is necessary for further research and the development of new medications even though DNA sequencing of all the known live virus stocks is complete. As a result the WHO has assembled three different committees to settle this debate.

The unexpected discovery of the live smallpox virus at various unauthorized laboratories has piqued interest in the security of the stockpiles. Furthermore, in 1992 a high-ranking official in the Soviet biological warfare program revealed that during the Cold War the Soviet Union had developed a highly lethal strain of the smallpox virus as a biological weapon and had secretly stored a large amount of the virus. In 1993 Russia moved its stockpiles without receiving prior authorization from the WHO. The WHO technically controls the stockpiles and entrusts the U.S. and Russia to store the stockpiles but, without the means to enforce its call for destruction, the WHO may find it difficult to ensure U.S. and Russian compliance with its final recommendation.

Why are the live virus stockpiles such a big deal? The main concern of “destructionists,” those in favor of destroying the stockpiles, is the possibility of laboratory-associated exposure, accidental release, or theft or purchase of the live virus by terrorists. Given that the smallpox virus is easily spread and potentially fatal, the risk that terrorists could acquire the live virus and use it as a biological weapon is a valid concern. Furthermore, the fact that smallpox vaccination ceased after its eradication makes its potential as a biological weapon even more grave. Nevertheless, the WHO has made remarkable strides in improving public health with its Smallpox Eradication Programme and will undoubtedly continue to call for efforts to help ensure public safety and limit the potential for exposure of the virus it worked so hard to eradicate.

The First Rule of Flight Club

By Elizabeth Fullerton

In July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 went down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. In October 2015, Russian passenger plane KGL9268 plummeted to the earth over the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 passengers and crew. In November, a Russian warplane flying along the Syria-Turkey border fell from the sky. The world was shocked by these events as it soon became evident that all three planes had been intentionally destroyed. Two were shot down, and one was bombed. What makes these situations even worse was the blame game that ensued, deeply affecting international relations. No one has admitted to shooting down Flight 17. Multiple militant organizations have claimed responsibility for the downing of Flight 9268. Both Russia and Turkey insist that the other is at fault for the warplane’s demise.

In this region of the world, the mysterious destruction of aircraft is not an entirely new occurrence. On December 14, 1965 another aircraft went missing and to this day there remains speculation about its fate. The plane in question was an American RB-57, a highly specialized military aircraft designed specifically for reconnaissance missions. The plane had departed from a base in Incirlik, Turkey and was engaged in a routine training flight. After failing to return from its exercise, the United States Air Force launched search operations. According to a document dated December 15, 1965, wreckage from the missing RB-57 was sighted in the Black Sea, 90 miles from the Soviet Union. As the plane had not violated the Soviet border, officials did not assume Soviet involvement in the incident.

RB-57F Rivet Chip 63-13296 of the 58th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron at Webb AFB, Texas on 8 March 1965. Via Wikipedia.

A Turkish newspaper caught on to the story, but boldly claimed that the American plane was likely to have been shot down by Russian aircraft. Moreover, the story asserted that Russians captured the pilots. Other documents in the government file, however, dispute this claim. A telegram from the day after the incident states, “Early reports (now discounted) indicated the possibility of Soviet fire responsible.” Until nine days later, most people interested in the case were satisfied that the plane had simply crashed.

Foy D Kohler. Via Wikipedia

Only one report, the latest dated document in the file, questions involvement of the Soviet Union. The Ambassador to the USSR, Foy D. Kohler, recounts the statement made by Deputy Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union, Vasily Kuznetsov:

“It is known that flights of American aircraft for [the] purpose [of] conducting reconnaissance against [the] Soviet Union have already repeatedly led to serious incidents… [It] should also be recalled that in connection with such incidents [the] American side has given assurances that it… was taking steps to prevent such incidents in [the] future… However, as facts show, American aircraft continue to make reconnaissance flights which are fraught with danger of new serious incidents and complications for Soviet-American relations… [The] Soviet government directs serious attention [to the] US government to [the] danger… and warns that all responsibility for their possible consequences rests on [the] American side.”

During the same meeting Kuznetsov clarifies that he was not discussing an act of border violation, but the issue of reconnaissance flights against the Soviet Union. He then refuses to give further information other than the official statement. Ambassador Kohler concludes the report with his own assertion: “Kuznetsov’s careful statement and refusal to be drawn beyond its text leads me to suspect that RB-57 was downed in some fashion by Soviet action over international waters, and that [the] Soviet government believes that we are equally aware of circumstances surrounding [the] incident.” This document is dated December 24, 1965. Merry Christmas indeed.

It is up to the reader to interpret these governmental interactions, but it must be said that regardless of the circumstances, the official statement given by the Soviet Union leaves much to be desired. It is possible the Minister Kuznetsov was bluffing, intentionally provoking the Americans who wanted answers. Conversely, it is possible that Kuznetsov’s statement, without blatantly lying, confirmed that the Soviets were involved. Even fifty years later, there are still many missing pieces to this puzzle, and it seems likely that the corresponding government file still has omitted documents of the incident. Still, the seemingly deliberate lack of information surrounding missing aircraft in this part of the world – be it military or civilian passenger planes – is disturbing.

The documents mentioned in this essay were all accessed from:

Box 229, Folder USSR RB-57 Incident. National Security File. Papers of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas. 18 Sept. 2015.

Call Pest Control: The Bug Problem at the US Embassy in Moscow

By Brian Selman

Every popular American spy novel and film of the past half-century has had to contain a Russian character, usually in the form of a femme fatale or a burly, deep-voiced brute. Is there a strong historical basis for this? Did the US and Soviet Union conduct espionage as extensively as the movies would make us believe? The short answer is “yes.” While it is true that there were far fewer explosions and self-destructing messages than portrayed in this particular sub-genre, both superpowers employed vast intelligence and espionage networks in order to gather information about each other. The 1964 bugging of the US embassy in Moscow is a good example of this, as it served as one of the most pervasive and prolonged acts of espionage discovered during the Cold War.

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow. Courtesy of the LBJ Library

Image of a bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow in 1964. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

On the morning of April 29, 1964, the American embassy in Moscow sent a telegram to the Department of State in Washington detailing the discovery and the beginning of the removal of microphones, eventually found to total more than forty, hidden within their walls. According to a situation brief from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to the American embassy, the U.S. had long suspected that their facilities in Moscow were bugged. Regular sweeps and frequent probing of the embassy’s walls, however, had never shown any evidence of the presence of microphones. According to Rusk, they had done everything “short of physically destroying a room.” Rusk states in this telegram that the hidden microphones were only discovered as a result of a ”decision to do some extensive physical damage to an area in Embassy.” According to this telegram and as reported in “Red ‘Bugs’ Found in U.S. Embassy,” an article in Long Island’s Star-Journal, after demolishing an inner wall, embassy staff discovered the first covert listening device located inside a wooden tube 8-10 inches behind the wall’s surface. It was only after finding this first microphone and following its wires that they realized the pervasiveness of the bugging. The foundations of every single room, including the bathrooms, were bugged, with the exception of a specially designed “room-within-a-room.” As the Star Journal report states, due to the age and obvious rusting on some of the microphones, it was clear that the embassy had been bugged since the Soviet government had leased the facility to Americans over a decade prior to their discovery.

L-R: US Ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967 during the Glassboro Summit Conference. Courtesy of the LBJ Library.

In a press conference on May 19,1964, James L. Greenfield of the Public Affairs Bureau and Marvin Gentile, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Security at the time, announced that more than 130 microphones had been found in American embassies in Eastern Europe between 1949 and April 1964 when the Moscow bugs were detected. However, none of these other microphones were part of such an extensive system. After the removal of these microphones, embassy staff there evaluated the size of the security breach resulting from the unprecedented 12-year Soviet bug infestation. Many reports were sent to the White House by different members of staff at the embassy detailing the precautions they took in their correspondences and conversations. In fact, as a circular telegram sent out by Rusk to numerous embassies in Europe states, all members of staff at the Moscow embassy were instructed as a matter of procedure to always assume they were being watched and listened to by the KGB (Soviet secret police). At the press conference Gentile stated that, “We will never operate in any post behind the [Iron] Curtain except under the assumption that a place is bugged.” He then claimed, “That is the only way we can operate in Eastern European countries.” In a report to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, Rusk claims that he often made statements “in the hope, if not expectation” that they would be overheard by the Soviets. All these reports stated that, to all embassy staff members’ knowledge, no ultra-sensitive information was leaked. However, according to the article in the Star Journal, a meeting of U.S. consular officials had been proposed to take place at the American embassy in Moscow. The “room-within-a-room” where most important meetings were held was not large enough to accommodate all of the meeting’s members. Therefore, if this proposal had gone through, they would have convened in a larger, and therefore bugged, room. Because the hidden microphones were discovered first, Rusk rejected the meeting’s proposal and it never took place. If it had, unbeknownst to the US, the Soviet Union would have gained profound insight in American consulate operations during the peak of Cold War tensions.

Replica of the Great Seal which contained a Soviet bugging device concealed inside a gift given by the Soviets to the US Ambassador to Moscow on August 4, 1945. The device is displayed at the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. Via Wikipedia

Another problem at the time was how to officially declare the discovery of these bugs to the Soviet government. A memo for Bundy from Benjamin H. Read, Rusk’s Executive Secretary, states that it was likely that the Soviets already knew that the bugs at the American embassy had been discovered; it was assumed that they heard the moment of detection through the bugs themselves. However, the U.S. needed to inform the Soviet government that such blatant acts of espionage would not be taken lightly. Embassy staff drafted a formal protest intended for U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Foy D. Kohler, to present to Soviet Foreign Minister, Vasily Kuznetsov. The first draft is written in flowery complimentary language, giving Kohler the “honor” of informing Kuznetsov and the Soviet government about the discovery of the bugs. After edits, the official protest was written in much sterner and stronger language, detailing the U.S.’s serious displeasure of the USSR’s “flagrant contravention” of Article 22 of the Vienna Convention, which invested the host state with the responsibility of assuring diplomatic missions safety against intrusion. As Kohler reported to Rusk, Kuznetsov openly wondered why such a “strong” protest was issued. He recalled several prior occasions, when Soviets found similar bugs in their facilities in Washington, but Soviet government had issued no such protest. According to the memorandum to Bundy, Kohler replied to Kuznetsov that due to the extent of this particular bugging, a “strong” protest was indeed warranted. However, later, after the Soviet Union’s subsequent official rejection of the U.S. protest, Kohler privately confirmed Kuznetsov’s claim, listing multiple cases of American espionage that the Soviet Union cited in its rejection of the U.S. protest including the discovery of listening devices in a table leg in the USSR mission to UN and microphones discovered in vehicles belonging to both a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington and of the Third Secretary of Soviet UN mission.

While the Moscow embassy bugging and the American bugs mentioned by Kuznetsov were by no means the only large-scale acts of espionage between the two superpowers during the Cold War, they demonstrate the lengths that both sides were willing to go to in order to gain an edge in their worldwide struggle for supremacy.

The image of the bug and all cited documents were taken from box #9 of the NSF Intelligence File at the LBJ library, file name: “USSR-Hidden Microphones in Moscow Embassy.”

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