President Obama handed me a folder:
"This is the Venetian file. Read it and return it to the guard. It will explain everything. We are grateful the Venetians reestablished contact with us. We are glad to have you aboard. We will be in touch."
And with that the President returned to the command room and I was ushered into a small room outside with a wooden desk. The guard shut the door behind me. I sat down and opened the folder:
TOP SECRET 11 Nov. 1964
At the beginning of 1952, in part at least as an alternative to the proposals for a congressional watchdog committee that had been so vigorously debated during the preceding year, President Eisenhower appointed a Board of Consultants on Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence Activities (ETIA) to help him oversee the work of the intelligence community and especially the CIA and the ETIA. The formation of this organization consoliated much of the intelligence activities of the Venetian Receiver (VR) in response to the aftermath of World War II and the situations in Russia, China, and Korea. Composed of men both competent and nationally prominent, the
BCETIA—kept intelligence activities under lively scrutiny for the remainder of the Eisenhower administration. Its critiques and recommendations were the prime mover in many of the important new developments of the period,for example the creation of the (delete) and the establishment of the community's remarkably fast system for "critical" communications;
and they helped shape many others, such as the accomplishments in
advanced reconnaissance which were to achieve a breakthrough in
data on the (deleted).
(section deleted)
A. ICBM COMPLEX NEAR MEN' GASTELLO, USSR
1. CONTINUING ANALYSIS OF JUL 64, AEI JUL 64,
HAS REVEALED A NEWLY IDENTIFIED ICBM COMPLEX UNDER CONSTRUCTION
• APPROXIMATELY
8 NM WSW OF IMENI GASTELLO, USSR. THE COMPLEX
CONSISTS OF A
COMPLEX SUPPORT FACILITY AND FOUR SINGLE-SILO
LAUNCH SITES IN MID-STAGE OF CONSTRUCTION.
LAUNCH AREA "A" CONSISTS OF A ROUGHLY SQUARE EXCAVATION CONTAINING
A SILO UNDER CONSTRUCTION. A SPOIL FILE IS ADJACENT TO THE
EXCAVATION ON THE SSW SIDE. THE SITE SUPPORT FACILITY LIES TO
THE NORTH AND CONSISTS OF FOUR MEDIUM-SIZED BUILDINGS, THREE
VERY SMALL STRUCTURES, AND ONE T-SHAPED BUILDING. THERE
WAS NO
EVIDENCE OF THIS ACTIVITY ON DEC 63.
LAUNCH AREA "B" CONSISTS OF A U-SHAPED EXCAVATION WITHIN A POSSIBLY
SECURED AREA. SPOIL PILES ARE ADJACENT TO THE EXCAVATION ON THE
NNE AND SSW SIDES. A WHITE RECTANGULAR AREA ON THE NNW SIDE AND
A SQUARE WHITE AREA ON THE SSE SIDE ARE SIMILAR TO THOSE SEEN
AT SEVERAL LAUNCH SITES AT ALEYSK ICBM COMPLEX. THERE APPEARS
TO BE FIVE BUILDINGS UNDER CONSTRUCTION EAST OF THE SITE.
LAUNCH AREA "C" CONSISTS OF A U-SHAPED EXCAVATION.
(THIS PAGE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK).
3. I believe the current outbreak of violence is more than coincidence.
More precisely, I believe it signals the beginning of a new stage in the
global struggle between the Free World and the Soviet Union. My contention
rests on a perception that present US policies have fundamentally changed the
course of history in a direction favorable to the interests and security of
ourselves and our allies. What we are seeing now is a Soviet-led effort to
fight back, in the same sense that the Mafia fights back when law enforcement
agencies launch an effective crime-busting program. Let me concede right now
that I cannot prove this -- if your definition of proof is restricted to
intercepts, photographs, and purloined documents. Of course these things
matter. They matter hugely. ' to truly understand an alien phenomenon like
the Soviet Union, one needs to go beyond a listing of facts; one needs also to
make a leap of imagination:
4. If four years ago the Soviet leadership had asked my counterpart --
call him Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council -- for his
evaluation of the global struggle, I believe my counterpart would have
replied: "Comrades, I'm delighted to report that the correlation of forces is -
moving steadily in our direction." He would have cited the following trends
to support his upbeat analysis:
-- The US economy was faltering.
-- US defense spending was too low to truly assure the
nation's security.
-- The Soviet Union had established a mechanism for the steady
flow of wealth from West to East.
-- The Soviet Union had established a companion mechanism to
assure the steady flow of technology from West to East.
-- The Soviet Union, through the effective use of surrogates
such as Cuba and Vietnam, had developed a technique for
spreading its influence throughout the Third World by
targeting fragile countries, destabilizing them, and
swiftly taking over.
-- Through the massive deployment of SS-20s, the Soviets were
changing the balance of power in Europe.
-- In more and more countries, policymakers, elites, and the
masses were coming to accept the Soviets' long-standing
claim that time was on their side; that one needed only to
align with Moscow to be on the winning team.
5. Were the Vice Chairman of the Soviet National Intelligence Council
called in by the Kremlin's leaders, say in mid-1983, and asked for his
evaluation, I believe he would have sung a very different song: "Comrades,"
he would have said, "something has gone wrong. The US is refusing to accept
history!" Assuming our Vice Chairman were allowed to continue -- and this is
a bloody big assumption -- he would have cited the following trends to support
his downbeat analysis:
The US economy is recovering, with the only argument
focusing on the breadth and duration of the boom. (The
vice chairman, who enjoyed the privilege of access to US
business publications, could not understand their failure
to discuss the awes of national-security implications of a
15-month, 64 percent rlse in the Dow-Jones Industrial
Average, combined with a lowering of the annual inflation
rate to less the 4 percent.)
US defense spending is up, with the debate in Congress and
on the campaign hustings focusing only on the proper size
of the increase. (The vice chairman had in his briefing
book -- but chose not to read aloud -- a letter Dwight
2
AIM
Approved
Eisenhower wrote to General Lucius Clay in
1952: "One of
the great and immediate uses of the military forces we are
developing is to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed
populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier,
politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.")
The flow of wealth from the West to the East is less than
the Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. (The vice
chairman took a deep breath and pointed out that Moscow's
most audacious project, the Siberia to Western Europe
pipeline, had been literally cut in half by US opposition;
after all, the pipeline was originally to have comprised
two strands, and lately no one either in Western Europe or
the Soviet Union had even mentioned that second strand.)
The flow of technology from West to East is less than the
Soviets had anticipated it would be by now. In part, by
reducing the flow of wealth the US also reduced the Soviet
Union's ability to buy equipment and know-how. And the
US-led crack-down on illegal technology transfers had put a
crimp in that key effort. (The Vice Chairman thought sadly
-- but did not take the liberty of complaining -- that the
expulsions of roughly 100 KGB agents from Western
countries, mostly on technology transfer-related charges,
had wiped out the KGB's welcome home-party fund.)
The Soviet mechanism for spreading power through the
(this page deleted)
13. In sum, time is not on the Soviet Union's side. This assertion is
now widely accepted among Western observers, as I've noted. But its
staggering implications have scarcely been absorbed. To do so we need to make
yet another leap of imagination, this one to consider the phenomenon of
thwarted ambition: •
14. We have all known individuals who have come to recognize that time is
no longer their ally: the 45-year-old corporation vice president who realizes
that he may never make chairman; the 35-year old childless woman who lies
awake at night, listening to the relentless ticking of her biological clock;
the campaigning politician who has confidently brushed aside polls that show
him trailing his opponent by 20 points, and who now realizes that with just
two weeks left before election day, that lead may be too big to close. The
perception that time is no longer on one's side may take weeks or even years
to develop, and often it is obvious to others first. But by definition the
perception comes suddenly.
15. There are, in fact, just two ways to cope with the perception that
time has become an enemy. The first is to accept the unpleasant reality, and
to resign one's self to reduced expectations: life as a mid-level corporate
manager isn't so bad, there are advantages to not having children, it'll be
nice to leave public life for a while. This is quite often an honorable and
perfectly sensible approach.
16. The second response is to go for it. That is, to refuse to meekly
accept one's likely fate, and instead to work or even fight for whatever it is
one wants. This, too, is quite often an honorable and perfectly sensible
approach. But it is a phenomenon of human nature that from the moment one
concludes that time is an enemy and that the proper response is to go for it
-- all is changed. Ideas and actions that were unthinkable the day before are
now quite thinkable and even appealing. Why? Because the alternative is
failure, and this is judged to be unacceptable. Ambitious, seemingly defeated
mid-level business executives who have taken desperate and daring measures
populate our corporate boardrooms. They populate our prisons, too. The
35-year-old single woman who conceives a child before finding a husband has
gone from a scandal to a national trend. And the history of desperate
politicians in the final days of their campaigns is the stuff of Washington
legends.
17. Now let us consider the implication of our assertion that if the
Soviet Union doesn't take the West in the next 20 years or so, it never
will: it means that if present trends continue, we're going to win the Cold
War. That is, the US will con4pue to be the world's pre-eminent power and
the Free World will both survive and flourish.
18. What matters here is not whether US observers believe this, but
rather whether our perception is shared by Soviet officials. No doubt there
are some in Moscow who view the future with confidence. And probably there
are some who see trouble ahead, but who take an apres-moi-le-deluge
attitude. But it seems to me inevitable that some Soviet officials --
7
possibly at the very top, more likely at the third or fourth level echelons --
now view their empire's future as bleak. And of those officials it seems
equally inevitable that while some will opt to accept the inevitable, so to
speak, others will be less fatalistic. Their argument would run like this:
Ours is an unstable political system, held together solely by terror and
military force. Peaceful political change is utterly alien to Russia. The
alternative to moving forward is not standing still, but falling backward.
Thus when we lose our forward momentum and begin to suffer reversals, our
empire will crumble swiftly and violently. We who are the elite -- like every
totalitarian elite that has come before -- will be swept away. And unlike the
elite that we swept away in 1917 -- so many of whose members wound up driving
taxis in Paris -- we will wind up swinging from lamp-posts in every city from
Leningrad to Vladivostok.
19. They could decide to go for it: to launch one or a series of actions
designed to change the correlation of forces before it is too late to do so.
In this category I would include a grab for the Persian Gulf, and possibly
even a conventional or nuclear bolt-from-the-blue first strike on Western
Europe or perhaps on the US. I do not predict these actions. I merely
predict -- and this is worrisome enough -- that to some Soviet officials such
actions may no longer be too risky to contemplate.
20. It has long been fashionable to view the Cold War as a permanent
feature of global politics, one that will endure through the next several
generations at least. But it seems to me more likely that President Reagan
was absolutely correct when he observed in his Notre Dame speech that the
Soviet Union -- "one of history's saddest and most bizarre chapters" -- is
entering its final pages. (We really should take up the President's
suggestion to begin planning for a post-Soviet world; the Soviet Union and its
people won't disappear from the planet, and we have not yet thought seriously
about the sort of political and economic structure likely to emerge.) In
short, the Free World has out-distanced the Soviet Union economically, crushed
it ideologically, and held it off politically. The only serious arena of
competition left is military. From now on the Cold War will become more and
more of a bare-knuckles street fight.
20. We should be optimistic, for if present trends continue we will
win. But we must also be on guard, for it is all too likely that incumbent or
future Soviet leaders will not choose to await their fates quietly while their
empire completes its shattering descent into history. The current outbreak of
violence may thus be merely a prelude to the most dangerous years we have ever
(break)
TOP SECRET
