Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  This was a constant angle in the Soviet media. Moscow was obsessed with SDI. Ken Adelman, Reagan's director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, conducted a study in 1984 which showed that 80 percent of Soviet-funded propaganda was being directed solely at SDI.50 Here are merely a few of innumerable examples of the USSR's public ridicule of Reagan's plans for missile defense.51

  During a June 30, 1984, Studio 9 TV news broadcast, Valentin Zorin said: “You know that Reagan is now possessed of dreams of star wars and the militarization of space. This has been his fixation.”52

  Added Viktor Olin in a December 18, 1984, Moscow World Service statement: “Preparations for star wars are under way in the United States.”53

  TASS fired off multiple such statements, sometimes two in one day. In 1985, in the lead-up to the first U.S.-Soviet summit under Reagan—the November 1985 Geneva summit—TASS and other Soviet outlets began driving home the message that the American president was ruining the chance for arms-reduction treaties between the two superpowers. For example, a TASS statement on February 1, 1985, started and ended with the words “star wars,” noting that Reagan's “plan” to build “space weapons” would scuttle all negotiations on missile cuts. A second TASS statement that same day, carrying the byline of a Soviet academician-scientist, lamented that Reagan's “militarization of space” would “put an end” to any viable chance of missile treaties between the USSR and United States.54

  The March 8 edition of Krasnaya Zvezda, the flagship publication of the Red Army, made the same point in a lengthy, foreboding analysis instructively titled “How the ‘Star Wars’ Are Being Prepared.”55

  Later that month, the March 25 Studio 9 broadcast offered a particularly disgraceful example of the Soviets’ anti-Reagan propaganda. Zorin, Falin, and Vitaly Kobysh unloaded on Reagan's “plans” “to fill the space around the entire planet with battle stations”—this despite the fact that SDI was explicitly a defensive system. During that broadcast, Kobysh approvingly cited Senator Kennedy and other liberal critics of SDI. To demonstrate the awful ambitions Reagan had for the program, Kobysh explained that “U.S. politicians call it [SDI] the greatest deception of our time.”56

  During the same broadcast, Falin castigated Reagan's idea by referring to a Washington Post editorial that, in his words, perceived Reagan and SDI as “cuckoo,” “evil,” and a “prospect of fabulous new riches for the [U.S.] military-industrial complex.”57

  The Soviets often made use of the Washington Post in criticizing SDI. To cite just one other case, TASS, on October 28, 1985, used a Post editorial as the basis for a press release. TASS began: “In recent weeks the president of the United States has dismayed even supporters by an insistence on the most simplistic variations of the most complicated issues of his presidency, the Washington Post writes today.… Reagan's simplistic approach to one of the most complex issues of our times, the Washington Post emphasizes, enables him to make the mental leap from fantasy to reality.”58

  In September 1985, Moscow's New Times, which was printed in English, likewise used material from the American press to make the case against SDI. The New Times piece sarcastically noted that the American president felt “hurt” by this application of “star wars” to his pet project and had expressed a wish that the individual who coined the term would retract it. (This was clearly a reference to Reagan's plea to Helen Thomas.) But, the article noted, the president's protests were illegitimate. To support the claim that Reagan had aggressive rather that defensive intentions, the New Times pointed to an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, which it quoted as saying: “The secret of ‘star wars’ is that it is intended to defend weapons, not people. The purpose is not to keep the Soviets from threatening us, but to make sure we can threaten them.”59

  The Soviet Communist press used this particular Los Angeles Times piece repeatedly, over a period of weeks rather than days. TASS, for instance, cited the op-ed in a press release that claimed Reagan's assertions about SDI's being a peaceful system for defensive purposes were simply “clever tricks.” “There is nothing defensive about SDI,” TASS declared. It was an “offensive system.”60

  A week after that shot from TASS, with the Geneva summit quickly approaching, the Moscow Domestic Service fired off another bullet at SDI. In this salvo, TASS commended the likes of Ted Kennedy and Helen Thomas—though not citing them by name—for getting it right on SDI:

  They christened it [“star wars”] with full justification, since this initiative envisages deploying strike weapons systems in space aimed at targets not only in earth orbit, but also on the ground. All the while, the White House has convinced itself that they have been misunderstood, that they have goodwill toward all mankind.… [The White House believes that] certain forces, it seems, have distorted the essence of the Strategic Defense Initiative by labeling it the “star wars” program.… However, Washington is resorting to mediocre verbal balancing acts in vain. There is nothing defensive about it.61

  The Soviets were fortunate to be able to call on so many Americans to prop up their arguments against Ronald Reagan and SDI. From the start, said Moscow, these wise liberals had understood Reagan's real intentions.

  Of course, Moscow's public pronouncements about SDI were very different from its private concerns about the American missile shield, as Herb Meyer had learned. But they kept those fears hidden for the most part, instead adopting the spin of Ted Kennedy and his friends in the American press. It was a classic case of dupery: American liberals were unwittingly helping Moscow advance its interests.

  Reagan Protests in Vain, and Gets Cornered Again

  While Reagan's critics were oblivious to how the USSR's anti-SDI propaganda campaign worked, the president figured out what Moscow was doing. But because of the American media's inadvertent complicity in the Soviets’ propagandistic spin, Reagan struggled to develop an effective counter-response to the liberal lampooning and Soviet onslaught about “Star Wars”/“star wars.” When he protested that he desired a peaceful defensive system, not an offensive war in space—SDI “isn't about war, it's about peace,” he said62—the Kremlin could easily dismiss his claims, as we have seen.

  Reagan understood that the American press ran with “Star Wars” to make fun of him and “to denigrate the whole idea,”63 whereas the Soviets embraced it to suggest a much more aggressive purpose. He got a good idea of just how Moscow was exploiting the term during an interview with Soviet media personalities shortly before the Geneva summit.

  The Soviet “journalists” quickly ripped into Reagan on “star wars”: Why was he looking to deploy offensive missiles in space?

  The president explained the unfortunate origins of the term “Star Wars” (though he charitably did not cite Ted Kennedy by name), and then he noted that “our press picked it up.” This was all rather regrettable, averred the president, because of the subsequent “misconception” it conveyed. Reagan attempted to set the record straight for the Soviets: “We're not talking about star wars at all. We're talking about seeing if there isn't a defensive weapon that does not kill people.”64

  This was a tough box for the president, and one that he had not constructed. But even after witnessing how the Soviet media were attacking Reagan for a system he had clearly identified as defensive, the White House press corps did not back away from using the term “Star Wars.”

  On November 6, one week after Reagan's interview with the Soviets, Helen Thomas showed her continued preference for the “quite popular” phrase. With the historic summit now only days away, and the U.S. president hoping to arrive at Geneva with confidence and in a position of negotiating strength, Thomas asked Reagan: “Will you negotiate Star Wars at all?”65

  SDI Survives, and Works Magic

  Like Reagan, the president's advisers struggled to deal with this double-barreled assault on SDI. They wondered whether the president could withstand the barbs from both the American press and the Soviet state-run media. How would he hold up under the criticisms and mischaracterizat
ions when in negotiations with Gorbachev in Geneva?

  Former national security adviser Bill Clark conceded that the barrage of propaganda against Reagan was fierce. But he continued to urge the administration's pragmatists—David Gergen, Jim Baker, Dick Darman, Mike Deaver, and Nancy Reagan, all of whom had wanted Clark fired when he was national security adviser—to “let Reagan be Reagan,” meaning that the president would be fine, especially in one-on-one interaction with Gorbachev.66

  At the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger likewise marveled at how Reagan had to battle the politics of his own press corps and liberal politicians as much as he had to combat the Soviet press and Communist apparatchiks.

  One who was especially irritated was Reagan's science adviser, George Keyworth, one of the central figures in formulating SDI. Keyworth would later lament that “the greatest criticism” of SDI came from “leftist elements” in the U.S. press and intellectual establishment. He saw firsthand, daily, how these bedfellows fueled the Soviet assault. “These have been the amplifier for Soviet propaganda more than Pravda has,” he asserted. “Pardon my polarization, but that's the truth.”67

  But when Reagan arrived at Geneva, he immediately learned why the Soviets had been so eager to disparage SDI. Mikhail Gorbachev made abundantly clear at the time (and later in his memoirs) that stopping SDI was his chief priority at Geneva; it would be even more so at the next summit, at Reykjavik a year later. Sensing that the missile-defense program gave him major leverage in negotiations, Reagan carried on in the face of the ongoing attacks. Because of his ability to persevere, SDI persevered.

  And because it did, the Reagan administration thrust deep into the underbelly of the Soviet system. SDI was devastating to Moscow. The Soviets themselves saw it as a core cause in the undermining of their system.

  Vladimir Lukhim, a high-ranking Soviet official, later maintained: “It's clear that SDI accelerated our catastrophe by at least five years.”68 Genrikh Trofimenko added: “99 percent of all Russians believe that Reagan won the Cold War because of his insistence on SDI.”69

  That post–Cold War appraisal from high-ranking Soviet officials is all that one needs to know. Yet even some liberal scholars in the United States today acknowledge SDI's impact on Gorbachev and the Soviets, especially as a bargaining chip that brought them to the table. Strobe Talbott of the Brookings Institution, who was deputy secretary of state under Bill Clinton, has said just that. So has Raymond Garthoff, whose book The Great Transition, as noted, largely credits Gorbachev, not Reagan, with ending the Cold War. Top Reagan biographers like Edmund Morris and Lou Cannon, as well as the most respected of Cold War historians, such as John Lewis Gaddis, cite Reagan's SDI as a major factor in eventual missile cuts with Moscow.70

  Reagan secretary of state George Shultz has also highlighted the vital role of SDI. Shultz is the Reagan cabinet official whom liberal historians routinely cite as the most crucial in securing an end to the Cold War, in spite of (in their view) hardliners like Caspar Weinberger. Shultz was initially an SDI skeptic, but he later wrote: “The Strategic Defense Initiative in fact proved to be the ultimate bargaining chip. And we played it for all it was worth.”71

  For the record, too, SDI did not prevent the United States from achieving limitations on nuclear arms. Many liberals had warned that “Star Wars” would backfire when it came to arms-limitation negotiations. Ted Kennedy had used heated rhetoric to make this case, while more measured counsel came from authorities like Harold Brown, secretary of defense under President Jimmy Carter; Robert McNamara, LBJ's defense secretary; and diplomat George Kennan—all of whom Moscow quoted in support of the Soviet position.72 But in fact, Reagan achieved much more than missile limitations; he got actual missile reductions (the START treaties) and even eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons via the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.

  Those stupendous achievements likely would not have happened had American liberals—and the Soviet propagandists—succeeded in their relentless campaign to get the Reagan administration to abandon SDI.

  “We're Going to Win the Cold War”

  In November 1983, Herb Meyer—the CIA official who, on the morning of March 24, 1983, caught a glimpse of the Soviet apoplexy generated by Reagan's SDI announcement—wrote a prophetic secret memo. The USSR, Meyer wrote, was entering a “terminal phase.” “If present trends continue,” he predicted, “we're going to win the Cold War.”73

  Reagan, too, foresaw that scenario. He grasped the inherent, fatal flaws of the Soviet system, and the potential for America to help collapse the whole house of cards. It was a prescient understanding that stood in marked contrast to that expressed by “expert” Sovietologists at esteemed Ivy League institutions. “The Soviet Union is not now, nor will it be during the next decade, in the throes of a true systemic crisis,” predicted Columbia professor Seweryn Bialer in the elite journal Foreign Affairs in 1982. “The Soviet economy, like any gigantic economy administered by intelligent and trained professionals, will not go bankrupt.… Like the political system, it will not collapse.” For the Reagan administration to think it had “the capacity seriously to affect” the Soviet system, was, by Bialer's expert estimation, “simply fallacious and … unrealistic.”74

  Columbia University was wrong and Ronald Reagan was right.75 That's the blessed lesson of the twentieth century.

  And Ronald Reagan's SDI was crucial to securing victory against Soviet Communism, despite attempts by American liberals to make it the laughingstock of the universe.

  With weapons like SDI, and much more, President Reagan plotted a course to win the Cold War. The likes of Senator Ted Kennedy and the nation's leading media outlets did little to help, and too often did everything to hurt.

  In 1989, Ronald Reagan's final year in the White House, Communism crashed in the evil empire, beginning with free and fair elections in Poland in June, continuing with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, and ending with the eradication of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauçescu in December. It was the close of more than just a war; it was, as historian John Lukacs has noted, the end of the twentieth century. The Communist menace born in Russia in October 1917 would not survive the century.

  And as the twentieth century ended in 1989, the twenty-first century arguably did not begin until September 11, 2001.

  21

  SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  On September 11, 2001, the Cold War was relegated to distant memory by a burning image. On that new day of infamy, a group of suicidal Islamic fanatics, backed by a homicidal Islamic extremist with billions of dollars, pulled off the worst attack ever on American territory. Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network pulverized thousands of Americans, blowing to pieces innocent human beings in New York City; in Washington, D.C.; and across a farmer's field in western Pennsylvania.

  “Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature,” the president of the United States, George W. Bush, plainly told a sickened nation.1

  In New York City a breathtaking historical coincidence was being played out on September 11. At least some of the victims in the World Trade Center towers, and other New Yorkers forced to flee for their lives in ash-strewn streets, would have read that morning's New York Times and noted an incendiary article. The Times piece was titled “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives: In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen.” The article opened with these chilling words, so ominous in light of what was happening in New York that morning: “I don't regret setting bombs,” said an unrepentant Bill Ayers. “I feel we didn't do enough.”2

  The former SDS member and fugitive of the Weather Underground had spoken to Times reporter Dinitia Smith from his tony nineteenth-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. Still visible was the tattoo on his neck of the rainbow-and-lightning Weatherman logo that appeared on the letters that took responsibility for bombings in the 1970s. The Times reporter was not exactly appalled; she admitted being taken
by Ayers's “ebullient, ingratiating manner” as he discussed his newly released memoir, the aptly titled Fugitive Days.

  In those New York Times pages of September 11, 2001, as New York City and Washington, D.C., smoked and bled from the strikes by foreign terrorists, Ayers boasted of how he had participated in bombings in New York City and Washington, D.C. He and his network of domestic terrorists in 1970 had bombed New York City Police Headquarters—the “pigs” who, the very day this article appeared, were risking, and in some cases sacrificing, their lives to rescue innocents inside the World Trade Center. Like the 9/11 attackers, Ayers and friends had also hit Washington: in 1971, the U.S. Capitol, where Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin planted a bomb in the ladies room;3 and in 1972, the Pentagon.4