Cold War Hot: Alternate Decisions of the Cold War

by Tsouras, Peter

  Minister of National Defence: “We are hearing disturbing things from our counterparts in West Germany. Some bright light in the Bonn government named Egon Bahr is proposing the eventual unification of East and West Germany after a warming up period he calls Ostpolitik. We understand that there are many who support such a move.”

  Secretary of State for External Affairs: “Our embassy in Bonn confirms this. Furthermore, our intelligence sources in West Germany tell us that there was a secret meeting between representatives of the West German government and the Soviet Union. We can only speculate about what this means, but it will mean the end of NATO as we know it.”

  Chief of Defence Staff: “West Germany about to go, France gone, the Scandinavians questionable, Turkey and Greece at each other’s throats over Cyprus. Italy marginalized by its revolving door government. The Americans distracted… That leaves us, the Dutch, Portuguese, and the British.”

  Justice Minister: “Is your briefer here yet?”

  Chief of Defence Staff: “He was delayed. The transport he was on was hit by anti-aircraft fire coming out of St Hubert.”

  Colonel Enfield: “Gentlemen.”

  Chief of Defence Staff: “Please continue, Colonel.”

  Colonel Enfield: “Discussions with the Americans in the Military Cooperation Committee have given us a better appreciation of the situation. Word came through this morning that Bonn has ordered the withdrawal of all NATO-tasked forces from West Germany.”

 

  Unidentified: “Shit!”

  Colonel Enfield: “The American view (Administration and Joint Chiefs of Staff) is that we no longer have a credible deterrent system in place. First, the deterrent forces in the NATO Central Region, with the withdrawal of the Canadian Brigade Group from NORTHAG, are no longer able to defeat a Warsaw Pact attack and would have to resort to theater nuclear weapons’ use.”

  Chief of the Defence Staff: “So? We have that capability.”

  Colonel Enfield: “Bonn will no longer permit the use of nuclear weapons on its soil and is trying to revoke strike plans which include dumping about 100 MT-yield weapons on targets in East Germany. There are other problems. The destruction of NORAD-tasked air defence facilities in Quebec compromises the ability of the continental air defence system to protect the SAC bombers in the short term. This degrades the strategic nuclear deterrent, which we need to back up any military action we take in Europe. In short, we don’t have the means to deter Warsaw Pact actions in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. Intelligence projections suggest that Moscow is going to move on Prague and crush the ‘socialism with a human face’ experiment there. They could just as easily take those forces and direct them into West Germany if Bonn ‘invited’ them in.”

  Justice Minister: “So: we are faced with Fortress North America with its British outpost near Europe. Remarkably like 1940?”

  Chief of Defence Staff: “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”19

  Associated Press, Berlin, October 17, 1968: “A Neutral Germany Reunifies, with Soviet Security Guarantees.”

  Reuters, October 17, 1968: “North Atlantic Treaty Organization Dissolves.”

  Reuters, October 20, 1968: “Greece signs mutual defence pact with Soviet Union, Turkish forces invade Cyprus.”

  Associated Press, October 21, 1968: “Italy, France and Spain invited to join European Peace Community in Berlin.”

  Staff Sergeant Bob Dolan and his team from Hereford worked their way slowly through the forest in the hills north of Hull. The Australians were operating to their west and he was concerned that there be no “blue on blue” action. Fratricide would screw up this very important mission. The SAS were leading the final stages of Operation Shelf Life, designed to wipe out guerrilla activity north of the capital. Using the techniques he learned in Malaysia when operating against the Indonesians, Dolan was able to identify two enemy company group areas. Air strikes were called in on the largest group because it was located in several buildings. The CF-5s rolled in and dropped napalm, which made that group of guerrillas “combat ineffective.” The Quick Reaction Force, which consisted of a company from Deryk Gravelle’s Black Watch battalion flown in by Iroquois choppers, swept in on another and made short work of them in a sustained firelight.20

  Far, far to the east, the Centurion tanks of the 8th Canadian Hussars and the Fort Garry Horse supported the Queen’s Own Rifles in vicious house-to-house fighting in Montreal. An American mechanized brigade from the 23rd Americal Division was making slow progress on their right flank and a breakthrough was desperately needed. New units had been raised and trained: the 2nd Canadian Sikh Battalion from Toronto was deploying to the eastern townships to root out FLQ activity there, while The Oka Rangers, a special operations unit consisting mostly of native North Americans, provided critical reconnaissance information for their efforts.

  It would be a long, savage fight.

  The Reality

  Practically all of the American and British literature dealing with counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism ignores the fact that Canada was probably the only NATO country which disrupted and destroyed a cell-based revolutionary terrorist movement before it could cause serious damage to the polity. Canadian planners believed that the FLQ and its related support structures were progressing through a four-step revolutionary programme that would progress from political mobilization to open armed conflict. Canada’s strategy was to disrupt the transition from urban terrorism to small-unit operations in the hinterlands. The sudden mass deployment of the armed forces in 1970 to support intelligence and police operations in Quebec administered the coup de grace to a revolutionary effort which started in 1963.

  In addition to carrying out an ambitious seven-year bombing campaign, kidnapping a British diplomat and murdering a Cabinet minister, the FLQ infiltrated the Militia to get training and stole vast numbers of military weapons including anti-tank weapons and assault rifles. An FLQ attack against the nuclear weapons facility at CFS Lamacaza was disrupted before it could be executed. Some FLQ members were, in fact, trained in Algeria by the FLN, and de Gaulle gave public moral support to that enterprise. At the height of the 1970 crisis, an Arab terrorist cell was intercepted infiltrating Canada. The Black Guard group did exist. American covert military support to Canadian Army operations was also a factor in the 1970s’ operations.

  If, however, the FLQ had significantly more political and diplomatic support from external sources, particularly a destabilized and alienated France, the situation would have been very different. France herself was in a great deal of turmoil at the time and the list of reasons is nearly endless: Algeria, American dominance of NATO strategy, the Berlin and Cuban crises, nuclear weapons command and control, the exclusion of the United Kingdom from the new economic relationship in Europe. It is clear that the social dislocation generated during the 1960s was widespread in Europe and North America and did not necessarily need an abundance of direct support from the Soviet Union. Indirect support, however, in the form of training, propaganda, diplomatic manipulations and the right circumstances could produce a situation benefiting the Soviet Union far beyond its expectations or planning. It would only take the will to exploit such a situation. Linking the French situation with Soviet aims could have easily produced the catastrophe depicted herein, if it occurred at a critical time coincident to developments in Quebec.

  Author’s note. Bruce Powe (under the pseudonym Ellis Portal) generated a similar scenario in his well-written and fascinating but unjustifiably obscure 1968 novel Killing Ground. My take on events, though similar in some ways to Powe’s, differs significantly in the effects of such a crisis on NATO, NORAD, and the Canada-US relationship. I have also drawn on my knowledge of Canadian national security policy formulation and military capabilities during the Cold War era, including recent access to declassified Cabinet and intelligence sources.

  Bibliography

  Black, Eldon, Direct Intervention: Canada-France Relations, 1967–1974, Carleton University P
ress, Ottawa, 1996.

  Bosher, J.F., The Gaullist Attack on Canada 1967–1997, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, Ontario, 1999.

  Lisee, Jean-François, In The Eye of the Eagle: Secret Files Reveal Washington’s Plans for Canada and Quebec, HarperCollins, Toronto, 1990.

  Maloney, Sean M., War Without Battles: Canada’s NATO Brigade in Germany, 1951–1993, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Toronto, 1997.

  Maloney, Sean M., “A Mere Rustle of Leaves: Canadian Strategy and the 1970 FLQ Crisis,” Canadian Military Journal, Vol. 1 No. 2. Summer 2000, pp. 73–86.

  Porch, Douglas, The French Secret Services: A History of French Intelligence from the Dreyfus Affair to the Gulf War, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1995.

  Powe, Bruce, Killing Ground: The Canadian Civil War, Peter Martin Associates, Toronto, 1968.

  Notes

  *1. I would like to thank Major-General John Grodzinski of the Directorate of Corporate Memory for access to valuable primary sources used in the production of this study.

  2. CFS: Canadian Forces Station.

  *3. See Peter Archambault, Between Faith and Reality: The Impact of Ayn Rand on Canadian National Security Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 232–45.

  *4. I am indebted to my student Jason Blake for this insight into Afro-Caribbean political connectivity during the Cold War from his unpublished PhD dissertation: “Death to Truth: The Untold Story of Cold War Africa.”

  *5. Michael Hennessy and Michael Whitby, Uncle Louis’s Destroyers At War: The St Laurent Class from Design to Dismemberment, 1950–1990 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printers, 2010), pp. 231–34.

  *6. Richard Martin: “The Origins of Canadian Stabilization Operations: Licking the Coin, 1955–1975,” unpublished PhD dissertation, Royal Military College, 2005.

  7. For more on Sapphire, see Porch, The French Secret Services, pp. 410–17.

  *8. National Archives of Canada, Manuscript Group 666, volume 107 file: “Political Violence in Occupied Quebec.”

  *9. Ibid.

  *10. As quoted in David A. Rosenberg’s “Operation RIVET: Arleigh Burke, Nuclear Weapons, the FLQ Crisis, and the Collapse of NORAD,” International Security, Vol 900 No. 4 Winter 2006, pp. 392–96.

  11. Secretary of State for External Affairs: Canada’s equivalent to the Secretary of State or Foreign Secretary.

  12. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation: Government-run propaganda department like the British BBC, but not as insightful and much more prone to bias.

  *13. The full version of this transcript, which included blood and coffee stains, was sent to the author anonymously in a brown envelope. A version with sections redacted by Access to Information officers from the Ministry of Truth also acquired by the author conforms to the brown envelope version.

  *14. National Defence, Directorate of Corporate Understanding, RG 200, file “NATO and Canada.”

  15. This quote is based on part of a real message sent by SACEUR (General Andrew Goodpaster) to Canada’s Minister of National Defence (Leo Cadieux) in 1969. In reality it contributed to preventing the pull out of Canadian forces from NATO commands in Europe. See Maloney, War Without Battles, Chapter 4.

  *16. John Llambias and Deryk Gravelle, Up Yer Kilt! The Black Watch Goes to War 1951–69 (Vanwell Publishing, St Catherines, 2006), p. 450 and its sequel, If It Isn’t Scottish, It’s Crap! The Black Watch Goes to War 1970–2001 (Vanwell Publishing, St Catherines, 2008), pp. 8–25.

  *17. As quoted in Scott Robertson’s in-progress unpublished monograph: “Strike Hard, Strike Sure, Strike Now, Or Else: The RCAF and the FLQ War.” (Directorate of Corporate Memory, 2003).

  *18. Interview with Brigadier-General G. Ohlke, Directorate of Counter-subversion and Defender of the Faith, 23 May, 2005.

  *19. This transcript was located in the McGovern Papers manuscript group at the McGovern Commemorative Library and Shrine, file 1970. The usefulness of Canada’s critical and important relationship to the United States during the Cold War was violently questioned by representatives of the moribund US diplomatic historical establishment during a Temple University conference in the spring of 1998. The author was present for the exchange and instrumental in demonstrating that such negative views were patently false and based on an arrogant and narrow-minded conception of North American affairs.

  *20. Andy Maloney, Bravo Uniform Lima Lima: The Untold Story of the SAS in Canada, 1969–1975 (Winged Dagger Press, Lausanne, 2004), p. 112.

  6

  A FRATERNAL WAR

  The Sino-Soviet Disaster, 1968

  Forrest R. Lindsey

  “We will not conceal [that] we are seriously concerned with the fact that differences which have arisen are constantly becoming deeper and the scope of the questions under debate is constantly widening, while the sharp public polemics are assuming forms impermissible in relations among Marxists-Leninists.”

  Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Peking Review, November 29, 19631

  Sergei Efremovich Ivanov was in a hurry. A short, white-haired man with a cigarette in his stained hand and a perpetual stooped-forward posture, he moved with little grace to collect his materials and get to the parking lot where his driver awaited him. In less than an hour he was expected to present to the full Presidium and the Central Committee a definitive prediction of American responses to a set of Soviet courses of action. Ivanov was no stranger to these upper echelons of Soviet power since he had been uncannily accurate in his assessments of American intent in the past. From his office in his branch of the Committee for State Security, he had correctly framed the American responses or lack of responses to potentially dangerous international situations many times before and each time he had provided exactly the correct assessment. Each time he was rewarded with yet another step upward in rank and another office closer to the Kremlin. His kind of prescience was rare and the decision makers of the Soviet Union kept him close by, so close that he had not spent a weekend at his dacha with his family in nearly a year. Crisis tended to follow crisis lately as the Cold War waxed and waned. Today the rumors of war were again in the wind and the clear, unvarying accuracy of Ivanov’s analyses was needed.

  The United States of America and its allies, the member nations of NATO and SEATO, had formed a formidable block to Soviet power since just after the end of the Great Patriotic War. On the surface, they appeared to form an unbreakable wall around the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact countries and their socialist allies. However, various episodes, starting with the posturing around the blockade of West Berlin, then the ineffectual threats against the suppression of the Hungarian counter-revolutionaries, then their withdrawal of intermediate range nuclear missiles from Turkey in the face of Soviet missiles in Cuba, demonstrated that the capitalist powers were weak. The final pièce de résistance was America’s removal of its military advisors and aid from Vietnam and the unopposed success of the communist revolution there. Ivanov had already made his mark before this, but it was his flawless prediction that President Johnson would refuse to commit American ground forces to a war in Vietnam that guaranteed his fame. With this assessment, the Soviets moved to ramp up their support of the forces under Ho Chi Minh and, surprisingly quickly, the Saigon regime was overrun.

  A unified and grateful People’s Republic of Vietnam placed the superb port facilities at Cam Ranh Bay, Da Nang, Haiphong, and Vung Tau at the disposal of the Soviet fleet and the positioning and rapid growth of Soviet power in that sector gave effective control of the waters of Southeast Asia and all of the vital traffic that flowed through them.

  A powerful socialist Vietnam was very helpful to the revolutions in Indonesia, Laos and Kampuchea, and soon after the red flag rose over Saigon successful new movements, augmented with first-rate arms and experienced advisors, overthrew the capitalists in all these countries.

  For the first time, a warm water year-round set of ports sustained the Soviet Navy and the fleet grew to support its new responsibilities. Control of the Straits of Malacca gave control of the connecti
ons between the western Pacific and the oil of the Persian Gulf. This, in effect, meant that the growing power of the Japanese and South Koreans was checked. It also meant that Australia and New Zealand were unimportant to the overall equation of world power and most importantly, America and its alliances were firmly excluded from nearly half of the world.

  The present situation was an annoying side effect to this new ordering of socialist strength. The People’s Republic of China, which had been a close ally of the Soviet Union during the days of the Korean War, was undergoing the throes of a Cultural Revolution. In the process, hundreds of thousands of Chinese had died and hundreds of thousands more Chinese were displaced or in prison. The festering border conflicts between the Soviet Republics and China were gaining in violence and a steady reinforcement of the troops in these desolate places was taking place. The anti-Soviet propaganda of the Mao regime had gotten more and more strident and incidents between fleet elements of the two socialist powers occurred weekly as naval forces met each other in the narrow waters around Hainan Island and the Spratleys, and many other places. Of all things, the gains enjoyed by the Soviet government and its many allies had proven to exacerbate the tensions between Mao’s China and its socialist brothers.

  To himself, Ivanov admitted that he had been surprised about Johnson’s decision not to oppose the Vietnamese revolution. His predecessor had introduced American military advisors to assist the Saigon regime and had spent a lot of money propping up that set of leaders. Once Kennedy had been killed, Johnson reversed his policies and withdrew all direct support of the Vietnamese puppets. For an area that was so critical to American strategy, it was surprising to see them hand it over so easily.