Eisenhower and Khrushchev Clash Over Cuba, July 9, 1960

Politico.com/

AP Photo

By ANDREW GLASS

On this day in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that the United States would not countenance the “establishment of a regime dominated by international communism in the Western Hemisphere.”
Eisenhower’s statement came in response to a threat issued by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In a Moscow speech, Khrushchev said the Soviet Union was prepared to use its missiles to protect Cuba from U.S. military intervention. “One should not forget,” Khrushchev declared, “that now the United States is no longer at an unreachable distance from the Soviet Union as it was before.” He charged that the United States was “plotting insidious and criminal steps” against Cuba.

The verbal volley between Moscow and Washington came amid a rapidly deteriorating climate in Cuban-American relations — some 18 months after Fidel Castro had overthrown Fulgencio Batista, that nation’s longtime dictator. Although the United States had recognized the new revolutionary government, many top U.S. officials believed that Castro was moving to establish a communist regime in Cuba.

Accordingly, on July 3, Washington suspended sugar purchases from Cuba, which accounted, at the time, for 80 percent of Cuban exports to the United States. Two days later, Castro nationalized all U.S. businesses and commercial property on the island. Eisenhower retaliated by canceling Cuba’s remaining 1960 sugar quota. On July 8, the Soviet Union announced it would buy all of the sugar that had been cut off by Washington.
As charges and countercharges flew between the Cold War rivals, Castro said in a July 9 Havana radio interview: “They have done all they can to remove the revolutionary government … [But] we are acting with reason and right on our side. They are acting against reason, right and history. We are certain we will emerge victorious in this struggle. We are absolutely certain we will win the economic battle.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0712/78209.html#ixzz208xEIoCJ

6,000 former KGB officers were holding positions in Russia’s central and regional governments

Indeed, as of June 2003, some 6,000 former KGB officers were holding positions in Russia’s central and regional governments. Among them:

Vladimir Putin, elected president of Russia; Vladimir Osipov, head of the Presidential Personnel Directorate; Sergey Ivanov, defense minister; Igor Sergeyevich Ivanov, minister of foreign affairs; Viktor Ivanov and Igor Sechin, deputy directors in the Presidential Administration; Vyacheslav Soltaganov, deputy secretary of the Security Council; Viktor Vasilyevich Cherkesov, chairman of the State Committee on Drug Trafficking; Vyacheslav Trubinkov, deputy foreign minister; Vladimir Kozlov, deputy media minister; Gennady Moshkov, first deputy transport minister; Nikolay Negodov, deputy transport minister; Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, deputy minister for economic development; Vladimir Makarov, Leonid Lobzenko and Igor Mezhakov, deputy chairmen of the State Customs Committee; Sergey Verevkin-Rokhalsky and Anatoly Sedov, deputy taxes and duties ministers; Anatoly Tsybulevsky and Vladimir Lazovsky, deputy directors of the of the Federal Tax Police Service; Alexander Grigoriev, general director of the Russian Agency for State Reserves; Alexander Spiridonov, deputy chairman of Russia’s Financial Monitoring Committee; Vladimir Kulakov, Voronezh governor; Viktor Maslov, Smolensk governor.

Can you imagine a democratic Germany run by Gestapo officers?

Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa - WorldNetDaily

Top Soviet-bloc defector: Marxism infecting U.S.

WorldNetDaily/

By Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa

Editor’s note: Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc official ever to defect to the West. In December 1989, Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu was executed at the end of a trial whose accusations came almost word-for-word out of Pacepa’s book, “Red Horizons,” subsequently republished in 27 countries.

After President Carter approved his request for political asylum, Pacepa became an American citizen and worked with U.S. intelligence agencies against the former Eastern Bloc. The CIA has praised Pacepa’s cooperation for providing “an important and unique contribution to the United States.”

A few weeks ago I read “America’s Marxist Picnic,” a touching story by WND’s David Kupelian, which illustrates how much the U.S. government hated Marxism a generation ago.

David’s father was one of America’s top rocket scientists, and he became deputy undersecretary of defense for strategic and theater nuclear forces under Ronald Reagan. During the 1970s, however, the U.S. government considered withdrawing his top secret security clearance because some informer had reported that, during his teen years, his mother had attended an Armenian church picnic where a pro-Soviet speaker gave a talk.

That story moved me. My father also worked for America – not as a top rocket scientist, but as service manager of the General Motors affiliate in Romania. Working for America became a crime when the communists took over Romania at the end of WWII and my father was soon killed by the Red Army.

Today the Communist Party is abolished in Romania, which re-became a trustworthy ally of the U.S.. Meanwhile, the formerly cursed Communist Party USA is throwing its full support to the current president of the United States.

I wrote to David. That’s how this interview was born.

Editor’s note: Ion Mihai Pacepa was interviewed by WND Managing Editor David Kupelian.

WND: Gen. Pacepa, it’s an honor to talk with you. Please tell me, did America win the Cold War? If so, why are we fighting Marxism in our own country today? And if not, what really happened?

Pacepa: Yes, we won the Cold War, but unlike other wars the Cold War did not end with an act of surrender and with the defeated enemy throwing down his weapons. But no, we are not fighting Marxism in our country, because the American people have not yet been warned that their country is being contaminated by Marxism. A few conservative luminaries like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly have warned that Marxism is infecting the United States, but neither the Republicans’ “Pledge to America” nor the Tea Party’s “Contract from America” has mentioned the word Marxism.

So far, to the best of my knowledge, only your “Marxism, American-Style” (June 2012 Whistleblower magazine) and PJ Media’s “Say No To Socialism” have called attention to the looming dangers of Marxism, a heresy that killed some 94 million people and transformed a third of the world into feudal societies in the middle of the 20th century.

There is still a widely popular belief in the U.S. and Western Europe that the nefarious Marxist legacy was uprooted in 1991 when the Soviet Union was abolished, just as the Nazi legacy was extirpated in 1945 when World War II ended. That is simply wishful thinking. There is a considerable difference between these two historical events.

In the 1950s, when I headed Romania’s foreign intelligence station in West Germany, I witnessed how Hitler’s Third Reich had been demolished, its war criminals put on trial, its military and police forces disbanded and the Nazis removed from public office. I also saw how West Germany’s economy was being rebuilt with the help of Marshall Plan money and how the country had become a multi-party democracy and a close friend of the United States. In 1959, when I returned to Romania, West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) made it the leading industrial power in Europe.

None of those things have happened in the former Soviet Union. No individual has been put on trial, although its Marxist regime killed many more millions than the Nazis did. Most Soviet institutions, under new names, have been left in place and are now run by many of the same people who guided the Marxist state. The KGB and the Red Army, which instrumented the Cold War, have also remained in place with new nameplates at their doors.

“Communism is dead,” people shouted in 1989, when the Berlin Wall began to come down. Soviet Communism is indeed dead as a form of government. But Marxism is on the rise again, and people are not paying attention. Why not? Because most people do not seem to be familiar with the undercover forms of Marxism we are facing today.

Hiding the ugly face of Marxism behind a smiling mask has become a Marxist science, which I described in a large piece recently published in PJ Media. Here let me just say that until 1963, Marxism was mostly camouflaged as “socialism.” The 1963 missile crisis generated by the socialist República de Cuba gave the socialist mask of Marxism a dirty name in the West and few Marxists wanted to be openly associated with it anymore. They therefore began hiding their Marxism under a new cover called “economic determinism,” which became all the rage among leftists who no longer wanted to be labeled socialists.

Economic determinism is a theory of survival rooted in Marx’s “Manifesto” (another theory of survival), but it pretends that the economic organization of a society, not the class war, determines the nature of all other aspects of life. Over the years, economic determinism has assumed different names. Khrushchev’s dogonyat i peregonyat (catching up with and overtaking the West in 10 years) and Gorbachev’s perestroika are the best known.

I wrote the script of Nicolae Ceausescu’s determinism, which was hidden behind the nickname “New Economic Order.” Most Americans, who are not used to dealing with undercover Marxists, have problems recognizing one. In April 1978, President Carter publicly hailed Ceausescu as a “great national and international leader who [had] taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community.” At the time, I was standing next to Ceausescu at the White House – and I just smiled.

Three months later, I was granted political asylum in the United States, and I informed President Carter how Ceausescu had been feeding him a pack of lies. The admiration for Ceausescu’s undercover Marxism had, however, taken on such a life of its own that the U.S. Congress, dominated by President Carter’s Democratic Party, brought the United States a sui-generis version of Ceausescu’s economic determinism. That move generated double-digit inflation. The U.S. prime rate hit 21.5 percent, the highest in U.S. history, and people had to spend long hours in line waiting to buy gas for their cars.

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and later an economic adviser to President Obama, has kept that undercover Marxism alive in the U.S. She even wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the merits of the allegedly “mixed” socialist-capitalist economies in Ceausescu’s Romania and Tito’s Yugoslavia. Two American presidents went to Bucharest to pay tribute to Ceausescu’s Marxism disguised as economic determinism. None had ever gone there before.

A few months ago, when the devastating economic crisis in Greece exploded, economic determinism lost credibility and our Democratic Party replaced it with “progressivism,” which is the current cover name for American Marxism. The real Progressive Movement was born after the U.S. financial crisis of 1893, which the country tried to solve by redistributing America’s wealth. The progressives pushed through the first federal income tax and they created a string of labor standards that opened up the floodgates of corruption and financial excess that generated the Great Depression. A new Progressive Movement, dubbed the New Deal, led to steep top tax rates, strict financial regulations, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, eventually generating the current economic crisis.

Today’s Progressive Movement was born in New York’s Zuccotti Park. It was first known as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement and advocated the abolition of “capitalist America.” The Democratic Party strongly embraced it and made “Progressive” its new byword. “God bless them,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told the U.S. Congress. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” 

More >>

Ex general del Pino sobre la traicion de Fidel Castro

Cubanálisis El Think-Tank

Rafael del Pino/

Daniel Ortega, Maurice Bishop y Fidel

No, no pienso referirme en este artículo al día de los padres en este mes de junio. La efeméride me hizo recordar un acontecimiento histórico que tuvo lugar hace ya 23 años.

El viejo refrán de “agua pasada no mueve molinos” a veces conspira en nuestros cerebros y nos hace omitir importantísimas experiencias cuando concentramos demasiado la atención en hechos y fenómenos actuales.

Creo que errores pasados no solo son capaces de mover molinos sino también cerebros. Uno de los ejes fundamentales en la importancia de la historia es poder analizar el pasado para comprender el presente. Solo mirando el pasado, podemos comprender el por qué de nuestra actualidad. Por eso haremos un sintetizado recorrido por algunas de esas huellas dejadas en medio siglo de avatares.

Hoy existen en mi profesión generales que nacieron después del triunfo revolucionario. Oficiales provenientes de las escuelas Camilo Cienfuegos educados bajo la maquinaria propagandística de un régimen totalitario, engrasada en medio siglo de control y tergiversaciones. Maquinaria implacable que se encarga afanosamente de borrar las huellas del desastre porque saben, cómo sentenció Lenin, que para hacer una evaluación objetiva de cualquier fenómeno social hay que analizar cómo surge, como se desarrolla y en que se convierte.

Escojo esta fecha también porque probablemente muchos de los cadetes que hoy se gradúan como oficiales en las escuelas militares estaban siendo traídos al mundo por sus respectivas madres en los momentos cuando se consumía una de las más grandes infamias y traiciones cometidas por Fidel Castro, su hermano y el resto de los incondicionales que se prestaron a la farsa para asesinar al General de División, Héroe de la Republica de Cuba Arnaldo Ochoa Sánchez.

Pero como este crimen fue una de tantas traiciones cometidas por quienes han destruido la nación es preciso hacer un sintetizado recuento.

Desde el inicio mismo del derrocamiento de la dictadura de Batista, Fidel Castro ha traicionado a cuanto seguidor de buena fe se incorporó al proceso revolucionario para restablecer el cauce democrático. No le bastó con la traición a todo aquel que se pronunció alarmantemente contra el cambio de rumbo que tomaba una Revolución tan popular sino que los trituró sin compasión. Desde combatientes del Moncada como Gustavo Arcos que le condujo el automóvil que nunca llegó a entrar en el famoso cuartel pero que le costó un balazo en la cadera hasta otros combatientes de la misma gesta que lo siguieron mas tarde en el Granma como Mario Chanes de Armas que cumplió hasta el último día de sus 30 años de presidio.

Comandantes del calibre de Huber Matos que simplemente renunció a sus cargos por no acompañarlo en el camino del totalitarismo y que igualmente cumplió hasta el último día su condena a 20 años de prisión.

Pero la traición fundamental, no solo a los que sufrieron la represión e ignominia al oponerse al camino de una tiranía más sangrienta que la de Batista fue a aquellos que dieron sus vidas siguiendo el programa revolucionario totalmente democrático del Moncada. La traición total al  programa insurreccional del 26 de Julio que prometió un retorno de Cuba a la democracia representativa, a la Constitución de 1940 y a la celebración de elecciones libres en un año y medio después del triunfo de la insurrección.

Incontables son los ejemplos que necesitarían toda una biblioteca para registrar las traiciones de Fidel Castro. Y en todos, absolutamente en todos, estuvo presente el gastado argumento de la patria en peligro, de salvaguardar la soberanía de Cuba, de la falta de lealtad de los que disienten y la traición al máximo líder. Que como dijo Raúl en su discurso del 14 de junio de 1989 donde anunciaba el arresto del General Ochos – “Fidel es el papá  de todos los cubanos” y sus órdenes, “encarnan el mandato y la voluntad de la Patria”.

Estoy seguro que estos nuevos Generales/Camilitos y Cadetes/Oficiales desconocen la realidad histórica que le ha tocado vivir al pueblo cubano. Han sido muchos años de hermetismo, de tergiversación de la verdad, del empleo irrestricto de toda una maquinaria diseñada para convertir la verdad en mentira y viceversa. Pero siempre hay quien no se conforma con los credos ni el oscurantismo y encuentran la forma de informarse con fidelidad.

El pretexto más utilizado para justificar la conculcación de las libertades y de los derechos de los cubanos ha sido el de “la soberanía en peligro” Comenzaremos por ese aspecto. No es necesario dar explicaciones detalladas de qué sucedió, prefiero limitarme a sus sanos juicios y que sean ustedes mismos los que investiguen y evalúen acontecimientos trascendentales ocurridos después de 1959 que por lo menos a mi me demostraron que el régimen implantado en Cuba por Fidel Castro ha sido el más entreguista de nuestra soberanía nacional en toda su historia.

- ¿Solicitó o no Fidel Castro que una Brigada Motomecanizada Soviética permaneciera en Cuba por más de 20 años en las proximidades de Santiago de las Vegas con toda su técnica militar y armamentos? ¿Teníamos nosotros más que suficientes Brigadas con el mismo potencial combativo para cumplir esas funciones?

- ¿Tuvimos o no una Brigada similar durante largos años en Etiopia para proteger al asesino de Mengistu?

- ¿Con que derecho FC cedió esa región de Santiago de las Vegas a una potencia extranjera para que la convirtiera en una base militar en el corazón de nuestra patria?

- ¿Entregó o no FC a las tropas soviéticas toda la región donde radicaba el antiguo reformatorio de menores de Torrens conocido en la guerra fría como Complejo de Lourdes para que montara una base militar de exploración y espionaje electrónico contra Estados Unidos?

- ¿Solicitó o no Fidel Castro al gobierno soviético que enviara pilotos de combate rusos para defender a Cuba y así poder enviar a los mejores pilotos cubanos para la guerra de Angola?

- ¿Con que derecho FC accedió a que pilotos rusos que ni hablaban español se ocuparan de la defensa de los cielos de Cuba? ¿Fue discutido en la Asamblea Nacional? ¿Fue aprobado por decisión de la Asamblea o por algún referéndum que le diera legitimidad?

- ¿Teníamos o no los suficientes pilotos para cumplir ese deber sagrado de defender la patria que solo corresponde a los cubanos?

- ¿Le cedió o no Fidel Castro un tercio de la base aérea de San Antonio de los Baños a la aviación estratégica de la Unión Soviética para que basificara sus mastodontes TU-95? ¿Es o no verdad que a los militares cubanos se les prohibió la entrada en esa área de nuestra propia base?

- ¿Qué relación puede tener digamos con la soberanía de Angola (la cual supuestamente “defendíamos” ) el aplastar al mejor estilo soviético, empleando nuestros tanques, el golpe de Estado que una propia fracción del MPLA dirigida por Nito Alves intentó darle a Agostino Neto? - intentona  apoyada además por la propia URSS - ¿No era ese un conflicto interno de la organización gobernante MPLA a más de un año de haberse retirado a Namibia las tropas sudafricanas que apoyaron a la UNITA en 1975?

¿Tienen todavía estos señores la desfachatez de hablar de soberanía?

Pasemos ahora a “La traición a la Patria”

¿Cuál sería una verdadera traición a la patria; la que le endilgaron al general Arnaldo Ochoa para asesinarlo con visos legales por poner en peligro la subsistencia de un grupo ilegitimo de poder o la de un gobernante protegido dentro de un Puesto de Mando, en un bunker a prueba de golpes nucleares como estábamos nosotros en la Crisis de los misiles nucleares pidiéndole a la metrópoli protectora que iniciara los golpes nucleares contra Estados Unidos que indudablemente acabarían con la existencia de todos los cubanos que no tuvieran dicha protección?

No especulo, he aquí el párrafo de la carta donde Nikita Krushov se opone a tamaña irresponsabilidad: “En su cable del 27 de octubre Vd. nos propuso que fuéramos primeros en asestar el golpe nuclear contra el territorio del enemigo. Vd., desde luego, comprende a qué llevaría esto. Esto no sería un simple golpe, sino que el inicio de la guerra mundial termonuclear”.

¿Nos dijo o no Raúl Castro en una reunión que fue grabada y después distribuida por todas las unidades que el coronel Pedro Tortoló Comas debió haberse pegado un tiro por no haber combatido hasta la muerte sacrificándose junto a los 784 cubanos que allí había?

Si es que encuentran el famoso video vale preguntarse ¿que hizo Fidel y Raúl Castro después del asalto al Moncada sin estar rodeado por ninguna fuerza incomparablemente superior sino rendirse a un sacerdote católico para que los protegiera? O ¿Qué hicieron otra vez en Alegría de Pio sino fue correr despavoridos quedando dispersos?

Destruir a Tortoló como lo hicieron por haberse negado a sacrificar centenares de vidas inútilmente para complacer el ego insaciable de un caudillo, es para mí una traición sin precedentes no solo al coronel sino a todos los oficiales que allí había, a los centenares de hombres que iban a morir y más aun a las esposas, hijos y familiares que perderían a sus seres más queridos. Saquen ustedes sus propias conclusiones si alcanzan a ver el video.

Por último definamos la lealtad.

Todos los que le digan que si han llegado a ser lo que son, se lo deben al Comandante en Jefe, a la Revolución, al Partido o a cuanto otro fetiche se les ocurra están tendiéndole la trampa para que crucen la fina línea que separa la lealtad de la sumisión.

Cuba es una isla sin fronteras ni conflictos fronterizos de ningún tipo, sus fuerzas armadas están concebidas para defender el país de una agresión militar extranjera y no tienen contemplado en su doctrina militar ser empleadas contra la propia población civil. El mantenimiento del orden es la responsabilidad que se le ha dado al Ministerio del Interior.

Existe una gran diferencia entre la lealtad y la sumisión. La lealtad es el cumplimiento de lo que exigen las leyes de la fidelidad y las del honor y hombría de bien. La sumisión es el sometimiento de alguien a otra u otras personas.

Cuando se actúa en interés de un grupo de gobernantes en contra de los intereses de la mayoría del pueblo cubano se ha traspasando el campo de la lealtad para caer en el de la sumisión.

Nunca será lo mismo someter una multitud que regir una sociedad.

Raúl tenía razón en la desarticulada diatriba improvisada en su nefasto discurso del 14 de junio de 1989. Solo que el efecto del vodka le hizo decir que “Fidel es el Papá de todos los cubanos” en lugar de “Fidel es el padre de todos los traidores”

The Origins of “Glomar” Declassified

A USGS Satellite photo of the Glomar Explorer in Suisun Bay, CA

UNREDACTED/ By William Burr

On 19 March 1975, the New York Times’ front page included Seymour Hersh’s headline story, “C.I.A. Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles.” This was the story of the ship Glomar Explorer, constructed by one of Howard Hughes’ companies under CIA contract, and built to salvage a Soviet submarine three miles in Pacific waters. The National Archives has recently declassified in full, in response to a mandatory declassification review appeal, the record of a White House discussion that same day about Hersh’s story. President Gerald Ford met with White House advisers, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and CIA director William Colby and discussed a response to the disclosure of “Operation Matador,” the code name for the salvaging project. Schlesinger wanted to confirm the story because it was “a major American accomplishment”, a “marvel,” and going public would help it avoid looking like “part of a covert operation.” Unpersuaded, Colby wanted to keep the lid on it. Recalling the May 1960 U-2 affair, when President Eisenhower acknowledged his responsibility which led to the collapse of the Paris summit meeting in May 1960, Colby wanted to take a different tack: “We should not put the Soviet Union under such pressure to respond.” With U.S.-Soviet détente under pressure in the United States, Colby thought it better to avoid new tensions in relations with Moscow.  More >>

Anatoly S. Chernayev Diary, 1972- An insider's view of the Brezhnev era

http://www.nsarchive.org

First trip with Gorbachev. Chernyaev in Belgium, October 1972.

Soviet government official Anatoly Chernyaev records an insider's view of the Brezhnev era

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 379 Posted - May 25, 2012
For more information contact:
Svetlana Savranskaya - 202/994-7000

Translated and edited by Anna Melyakova and Svetlana Savranskaya

"Anatoly Chernyaev's diary is one of the great internal records of the Gorbachev years, a trove of irreplaceable observations about a turning point in history. There is nothing else quite like it, allowing the reader to sit at Gorbachev's elbow at the time of perestroika and glasnost, experiencing the breakthroughs and setbacks. It is a major contribution to our understanding of this momentous period."
— David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Dead Hand

"Remarkable diary ..."
— Historian Amy Knight, New York Review of Books, April 6, 2012

click for full size Chernyaev, Anatoly Kovalev and Alexander Bovin in Zavidovo.

click for full size Chernyaev and Georgy Arbatov in Zavidovo.

Washington, D.C., May 25, 2012 – Today the National Security Archive publishes excerpts from Anatoly S. Chernyaev's diary of 1972 for the first time in English translation with edits and postscript by the author. While the diary for the Gorbachev years, 1985-1991, published before and widely used in scholarly work on the end of the Cold War provided a major source on the Gorbachev reforms, the earlier years of the diary give the reader a very rare window into the workings of the Brezhnev inner circle in the 1970s.

The portrait of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whom most Americans remember from his later years as frail and incomprehensible, emerges very differently from the earliest in the series of diaries donated by Anatoly Sergeyevich Chernyaev to the National Security Archive. In 1972, Chernyaev, deputy head of the International Department of the Central Committee, started keeping a systematic diary, recording his attendance at Politburo meetings, his participation in meetings at the state dacha in Zavidovo (where the experts and speechwriters met to draft speeches and reports for the General Secretary), visits abroad, and the daily life of a high-level Soviet apparatchik.

In 1972, Brezhnev is a skillful negotiator, who prepares seriously for Richard Nixon's first visit to Moscow, who discusses texts of his speeches with leading Moscow intellectuals whom he brought into his inner circle as speechwriters and consultants, who is essentially non-ideological in his dealings with foreign leaders-negotiating arms control and economic agreements with Nixon while the U.S. forces are bombing the Soviet communist ally Vietnam, preferring Georges Pompidou to the leader of French communists Georges Marchais, and"brainwashing" Pakistani leader Bhutto. The two most striking differences between the aging Brezhnev of the late 1970s-early 1980s and the Brezhnev of this diary are that the General Secretary is clearly in charge of the Politburo sessions and that he actively consults with leading experts and intellectuals, such as Georgy Arbatov, Nikolai Inozemtsev, Alexander Bovin and Chernyaev himself.

Chernyaev's daily duties are centered around the international communist movement, interactions with representatives from European communist parties. The reader sees Chernyaev's emerging disillusionment with his work, which in comparison to real foreign policy, like preparation for Nixon's visit, feels meaningless. Chernyaev comes to believe that "the Communist Movement right now is nothing more than an ideological addendum to our foreign policy," and that the Soviet authority in the progressive movements in the world is shrinking: "nobody believes us anymore, no matter how we portray the Chinese and try to explain our Marxist-Leninist purity."

He sees the future in a different direction. After Nixon's visit, Chernyaev is asked to draft Brezhnev's speech on Soviet-American relations and thus is allowed to see all the materials from the meeting, including all transcripts of conversation. Impressed with the quality of interaction and the non-ideological spirit of it, Chernyaev anticipates a new era: "Be that as it may, but we've crossed the Rubicon. The great Rubicon of world history. These weeks of May 1972 will go down in history as the beginning of an era of convergence."

But the new era will only come thirteen years later. In 1972, he sees the first almost imperceptible sign from the future. In October 1972, he is asked to accompany first secretary of the Stavropol region on a trip to Belgium. This is where Chernyaev meets and spends time with Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time. Astonishingly, as Chernyaev later admits, he did not record this meeting in the diary at the time. Only photographs documented this auspicious meeting where Chernyaev sits on the left hand of the future Soviet leader, whose right hand he was destined to become in the late 1980s.

"Mig Alley" - Documentary

The Family Gagarin Left Behind

Photo: Allen Abel

Air & Space magazine/ By Allen Abel

They are his daughters and his widow, his nieces and cousins, his space-going peers, his former rivals, millions of us who knew him only from black-and-white newsreels as the first man in space, and a dwindling few who remember first-hand how far he had to rise to reach the stars.

It was April 12, 1961, when a dreamy boy born to poverty and flames on the Eastern Front of the Second World War flew weightless for nearly two hours in a capsule called Vostok—“the East.” Barely seven years later, when he was 34 years old, the spacefaring hero with the famous, easy smile was killed in a crash of his own MiG-15UTI jet, his hand still on the joystick when he and his instructor copilot hit the trees. He is one of history’s bravest and most tragic adventurers.

I am searching for the father and husband and friend behind the chiseled face on a statue or gleaming idol on a coin. But his elder daughter seems more comfortable discussing his public persona, calling his flight “one of the main achievements that took place over the last 100 years, not only for this country but for mankind.”

1968

She is telling me this in an office above one of the world’s great treasuries, the exhibition halls of the Moscow Kremlin, where czarist—and later, Communist—power presided over centuries of serfdom, socialism, and sacrifice. Elena Yurievna Gagarina was two years and two days old when her father lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and not quite 10 when he died. Today, she is the director of the Kremlin State Museum, where she is the guardian of imperial robes, royal carriages, and Fabergé eggs.

It is difficult to imagine a more elegant workplace, or a more elegant woman. When Barack and Michelle Obama visited Moscow in 2009, it was Elena who escorted the First Lady through the galleries. Fluent in English, she is the custodian not only of Russia’s royal jewels but also of every Yuri Gagarin statue, every postal tribute, and every published encomium. All must pass her personal inspection.

“There are good sculptures and bad sculptures, good stamps and bad stamps,” she says. “This is the role which is given to me by law: that all images of my father and stories of his life I should see.” Fine art, she says, is all that ever attracted her, even as her father was reaching for—and falling from—the heights of space exploration and fame. “Each of us in our family followed a different path,” she says. “My mother was a doctor, my sister an economist. Our parents wanted us to follow our own interests.”

Elena worked her way up to become the curator of 18th century English drawings and engravings at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum. (Her only child, a daughter, works at the Kremlin with her.) It is natural to wonder whether someone named, say, Kuznetsova—the Russian “Smith”—would have risen as high as Yuri Gagarin’s daughter. But Elena waves off this petty conjecture. “I never used my name for my career,” she says. “My field of interest is very different from anything connected with space travel. I always wanted to be an art historian from the earliest age. But still, of course, people know my name. Everyone has a story about my father. Everyone has a story to tell about the 12th of April.”

Elena herself doesn’t remember much of that day. “When my father went into space, I don’t think that at that period I understood it quite well,” she says. “I was too young. All the people I encountered every day—our friends, our neighbors—were connected with the space project.”

No one at the time knew much about the engineering challenges of spaceflight. “The cosmonauts understood that it was 50-50 if the flight would be successful or not. The general consensus was that it was safe. But Father had complete trust in the chief designer [Sergei Korolev]. Korolev loved him very much.”

The second daughter, Galina Yurievna Gagarina, was 36 days old when her father flew. “When I was a child, I lived as every child does,” she says. “We hadn’t any special teacher or special school or special conditions of life. Our city—Star City—was a very special place. From the very beginning, I knew that. But for us, it was normal. At school, I studied with many different children. Not all were the children of cosmonauts.”

By the time Galina reached fourth grade, American astronauts were on the moon. If the Gagarina girls had been unique as infants, their celebrity no longer was so singular. A lot of the dads at Star City had gone into space.

We are in Galina’s office at Plekhanov University in Moscow, where she has been a professor of economics for 25 years. Galina, who is married to a pediatrician from the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia’s far east, has one child: a boy, now 17, named Yuri. Like her sister, she is fluent in English.  More >>

Gagarin’s Flight Record Falsified

discoverynews.com/ By Amy Shira Teitel

On April 12, 1961, the world met Yuri Gagarin, a former Soviet Air Force pilot who shot from obscurity to international fame after making one full orbit around the Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

But the mission records the Soviet Union submitted to international authorities to secure Gagarin's place as the first man in space present a very different mission. Specifically, his landing was deliberately falsified. During the year, lies about the Vostok landing system called into question whether or not Vostok 1 deserved its place as history's first spaceflight at all.

In 1905, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI, known as the International Air Sports Federation in English) was established to manage and maintain all records of accomplishments in aviation. By the 1950s, the FAI had grown to include aeronautic and astronautic categories under its umbrella. With spaceflight on the horizon, the organization established a set of guidelines for what constitutes a spaceflight -- if two nations were going to vie for the record of first in space, the FAI should have clear rules to determine a winner.

The terms of spaceflight reflected the organization's roots in aviation. For a flight to count, the pilot-astronaut or pilot-cosmonaut would have to land with his spacecraft. After all, if a pilot fails to land  with his aircraft, it's usually because something has gone wrong and the flight has been a failure. Why should spaceflight be any different?

The Soviet Union statement presented to the FAI stated  that the cosmonaut had landed inside Vostok 1 as per the organization's guidelines on spaceflight. Signed by the sports commissar of the USSR, the document asserts that "at 10:55 a.m. Moscow time on the 12th of April 1961 ... the pilot-cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyvich Gagarin landed with the 'Vostok' spaceship."

He hadn't. He couldn't have even if he'd wanted to.

The Vostok spacecraft was basic and unsophisticated and lacked a braking system. Gagarin did as he was trained to do: He ejected during the final phase of his descent. He and Vostok 1 touched down separately by parachutes.

ANALYSIS: Vladimir Komarov: The Unsung Space Hero

Gagarin's landing was much scarier than the innocuous one described in the FAI's formal record. Vostok 1 fired its retrorockets and began its fall through the atmosphere, but the cables connecting the crew module with the instrument unit failed to separate. The latter heavier unit fell first, exposing Vostok's fragile hatch to the fiery phase of reentry. Only after the cables burned away did Vostok reorient itself with its heat shield down. Its parachute deployed late, and when Gagarin ejected 23,000 feet above the ground, his own 'chute deployed late as well. He landed 10 minutes after and miles away from his spacecraft in the Saratova region near the border of Kazakhstan.

Farmers who saw the cosmonaut fall from the sky didn't know what to make of the man in the orange suit and helmet. A woman and her daughter reportedly reached Gagarin first; when she asked if he came from space, he confidently said that he had before asking to use a phone to call the Soviet Space Agency.

But the FAI accepted the Soviet-issued statement on the flight. At least, it did until Gherman Titov followed Gagarin into orbit four months later.

Titov, who had been Gagarin's backup for Vostok 1, spent a little over 25 hours in orbit before returning to Earth on Aug. 7, 1961. His landing was similarly veiled when the flight record was presented to the FAI, this time seeking to secure a duration record for the Soviet Union. It states that "pilot-cosmonaut Gherman Stepanovich TITOV and the spaceship 'Vostok 2 ... landed in the vicinity of the village of Krasny Koot." While the official record is ambiguous, the cosmonaut made no secret of his landing. He publicly admitted to ejecting before touching down by a personal parachute.

NEWS: Gagarin's Final Words: Is Sausage Packed?

Titov's admission called Gagarin's landing, and consequently his record as the first man in space, into question. If Gagarin and Titov both ejected before landing, the Soviet Union would lose its spot in history as the first nation to launch a man into space.

Controversy began to brew and the FAI held a special meeting of delegates to reexamine Titov's records and reconsider Gagarin's. The result of the meeting was a change to the parameters that defined spaceflight rather than a change to the records. The parameters switched to focus on the payload launched; this technical achievement mattered more than how the astronaut or cosmonaut landed. That Gagarin had orbited the Earth was the real achievement, and both his and Titov's records remain in the FAI's books.

Gagarin's true landing and the technical problems that very nearly killed him during his descent weren't publicized until 1971, three years after he died in a plane crash in 1968. The FAI posthumously honored Gagarin that year by established the Yuri A. Gagarin Gold Medal to recognize the achievements of space pilots in man's ongoing conquest in this new realm.

After the decision to keep Gagarin's record intact, the early Vostok landing system went from a controversial issue to a historical oddity of the transition from flight in aircraft to spaceflight in capsules.

Nuclear Treason: Who Was Leo Szilard? — Emerging Corruption

Emerging Corruption/  By Trevor Loudon 

Sane nations do not willingly surrender a position superior military strength to potential enemies,  for no reason.

Why then did  the U.S. Senate recently sign   START 2 with Russia, despite a long record of blatant and persistent cheating by Moscow?

Obama and Medvedev, START 2

The United States has  signed several nuclear disarmament treaties with the Soviet Union/Russia, always from an ever decreasing position of superiority. Always Moscow has gained and Washington lost ground.

Leo Szilard

Why has Washington always conceded advantages to Moscow, when there was absolutely no necessity to do so?  The blunt answer? Because U.S. policy makers have been  persuaded to do so, by American citizens who’s loyalty to their home country is questionable.

One of the most influential leaders of the U.S. disarmament lobby was former nuclear physicist and Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard. In 1962, two years before his death, Leo Szilard founded a little known organization that would come to have a huge impact on U.S. defense capabilities , the Council for Abolishing War, now known as the Council for a Livable World.

In the early 1960s, Szilard sought a way to influence U.S. defense/disarmament policies at the highest levels.; In 1962, he founded the Council for Abolishing War to raise money for U.S. Senators who favored arms-control treaties. By Szilard’s calculus, all states had two Senators, so votes came cheapest by supporting campaigns in the least populous states. The Council’s first successful candidate was Sen. George McGovern from South Dakota.
Today the Council supports candidates from all states and the House of Representatives as well.
It was America’s first and most successful Political Action Committee for arms control and disarmament.

Bela Kun

But who was this man, who sought to buy his way into the heart of U.S. defense policy making?
Leo Szilard was born in  Hungary in 1898.
In Budapest during the 1919 Bela Kun Hungarian Soviet Republic, Szilard founded a socialist students association to “help clarify political and economic issues.” The Hungarian Association of Socialist Students distributed a pamphlet on tax and monetary reform purportedly written by Szilard.

Leo Szilard was an enthusiastic supporter of Bela Kun’s communist regime. When Kun’s government fell, the backlash against communists and Jews persuaded Szilard to leave Hungary for Berlin. there he was involved in a study group dedicated to analyzing Soviet affairs.

In London in the 1930s, Szilard helped organize the Academic Assistance Council to aid refugee scholars. He also proposed enlisting Nobel laureates to protest Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, the first time the  group was politicized in this way. Both causes were legitimate, but both were also heavily infiltrated by communists and sympathizers.

Szilard’s best known political efforts involved his mentor,  friend, and fellow communist sympathizer  Albert Einstein. In New York in 1939, Szilard proposed and drafted a letter from Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that warned about German nuclear weapons research and urged a U.S. counter-effort.

Their letter prompted Roosevelt to convene a federal Advisory Committee on Uranium (with Hungarian physicists Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller, and Szilard as members) that promised money for Enrico Fermi and Szilard to conduct chain-reaction experiments at Columbia University.

But when this funding from Washington hadn’t materialized by the spring of 1940, Szilard enlisted Einstein in an  effort at political blackmail. He drafted for Einstein a letter warning the White House that if those funds were not forthcoming, Szilard would publish a paper detailing just how a chain reaction in uranium could work. Soon, Fermi and Szilard received their money.

By 1942 Szilard was working on the Allied effort to develop the Atomic Bomb – the  Manhattan Project,

Einstein and Szilard

However Szilard  was already under suspicion.

General Groves, head of the Project  declared Szilard to be detrimental to the project and that he should be arrested and interned for the duration of the Second World War.

Were Groves’ suspicions founded?

According to Pavel Sudoplatov, former wartime director of the Administration for Special Tasks, an elite unit of the Soviet intelligence service, Leo Szilard, Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, knowingly supplied information to Soviet contacts during their work on the Manhattan Project.

Sudoplatov

Sudoplatov wrote in his 1994 book “Special Tasks, Memoirs of an unwanted witness-A soviet Spymaster”;

The most vital information for developing the first Soviet atomic bomb came from scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project to build the American atomic bomb – Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard.”
Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Szilard’s secretary were often quoted in the NKVD files from 1942 to 1945 as sources for information on the development of the first American atomic bomb. It is in the record that on several occasions they agreed to share information on nuclear weapons with Soviet scientists. At first they were motivated by fear of Hitler; they believed that the Germans might produce the first atomic bomb. Then the Danish physicist Niels Bohr helped strengthen their own inclinations to share nuclear secrets with the world academic community. By sharing their knowledge with the Soviet Union, the chance of beating the Germans to the bomb would be increased.”
As early as 1940, a commission of Soviet scientists, upon hearing rumors of a superweapon being built in the West, investigated the possibility of creating an atomic bomb from uranium, but concluded that such a weapon was a theoretical, not a practical, possibility. The same scientific commission recommended that the government instruct intelligence services to monitor Western scientific publications …
We were able to take advantage of the network of colleagues that Gamow had established. Using implied threats against Gamow’s relatives in Russia, Elizabeth Zarubina pressured him into cooperating with us. In exchange for safety and material support for his relatives, Gamow provided the names of left-wing scientists who might be recruited to supply secret information. …”

Another route was from the mole who worked with Fermi and Pontecorvo. The mole in Tennessee was connected with the illegal station at the Santa Fe drugstore, from which material was sent by courier to Mexico. The unidentified young moles, along with the Los Alamos mole, were junior scientists or administrators who copied vital documents to which they were allowed access by Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Szilard, who were knowingly part of the scheme.

We received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on. In all, there were five classified reports made available by Oppenheimer describing the progress of work on the atomic bomb.”
Not only were we informed of technical developments in the atomic program, but we heard in detail the human conflicts and rivalries among the members of the team at Los Alamos. A constant theme was tension with General Groves, director of the project. We were told of Groves’s conflicts with Szilard. Groves was outraged by Szilard’s iconoclastic style and his refusal to accept the strictures of military discipline. The “baiting of brass hats” was Szilard’s self-professed hobby.Groves believed that Szilard was a security risk and tried to prevent him from working on the Manhattan Project despite Szilard’s seminal contribution to the development of the first atomic chain reaction with Fermi. ...

Sudoplatov claims that Soviet spy chief Lavrenti Beria  had post war plans for their Manhattan Project friends.

Beria

After our reactor was put into operation in 1946, Beria issued orders to stop all contacts with our American sources in the Manhattan Project; the FBI was getting close to uncovering some of our agents.Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament. Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage. We began a worldwide political campaign against nuclear superiority, which kept up until we exploded our own nuclear bomb, in 1949. Our goal was to preempt American power politically before the Soviet Union had its own bomb. Beria warned us not to compromise Western scientists, but to use their political influence.

Comrade Beria’s advice turned out to be sound. Szilard’s usefulness to the Soviet cause only incresaed after the War.

One of Szilard’s first projects was the strongly pro-disarmament  Federation of American Scientists, started with former communist and alleged spy  Philip Morrison, and communist sympathizer  Harold Urey . F.A.S. was founded in 1945 with a membership of more than 2,000 scientists and an advisory panel that included several more communists or sympathizers, including  Robert Oppenheimer,  Harlow Shapley, andEdward U. Condon  , a known associate of several Polish embassy officials.

Leo Szilard was, co-organizer of the first Pugwash conference in 1957, a major series of gatherings involving Western and East Bloc scientists, diplomats and politicians.

Khruschev

In 1960, Szilard gained a private audience with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in New York City. During their two-hour conversation, Szilard gained the Soviet leader’s assent for a Moscow-Washington “hot line” to help prevent accidental nuclear war. As a gift, Szilard brought Khrushchev a new razor and promised to send him blades as long as there is no war. “If there is war,” said Khrushchev, “I will stop shaving. Most other people will stop shaving, too.”

Szilard was also an early affiliate of the far left and pro-disarmament Washington DC based think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies – once described by British security expert Brian Crozier as the “perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the K.G.B.”

Leo Szilard died before his attempts to influence U.S. disarmament policies came to fruit, but bear fruit they did.

Remembering a Dissident: Yuri Glazov

FrontPage Magazine

Editor’s note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died fourteen years ago on March 15, 1998. The editors felt it would be appropriate to mark this occasion by reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2010 issue. We also hope readers will consider contributing to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive.  [See info at bottom of article for U.S. and international donations.]

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.  More >>

The 3 A.M. Phone Call: Zbigniew Brzezinski Received Warning of Incoming Nuclear Attack

http://www.nsarchive.org/

Zbigniew Brzezinski with Deng Xiaoping

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2012 – During the 2008 campaign, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debated the question: who was best suited to be suddenly awakened at 3 a.m. in the White House to make a tough call in a crisis. The candidates probably meant news of trouble in the Middle East or a terrorist attack in the United States or in a major ally, not an 'end of the world' phone call about a major nuclear strike on the United States. In fact at least one such phone call occurred during the Cold War, but it did not go to the President. It went to a national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was awakened on 9 November 1979, to be told that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the combined U.S.–Canada military command–was reporting a Soviet missile attack. Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm. It was one of those moments in Cold War history when top officials believed they were facing the ultimate threat. The apparent cause? The routine testing of an overworked computer system.

Recently declassified documents about this incident and other false warnings of Soviet missile attacks delivered to the Pentagon and military commands by computers at NORAD in 1979 and 1980 are published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. The erroneous warnings, variously produced by computer tests and worn out computer chips, led to a number of alert actions by U.S. bomber and missile forces and the emergency airborne command post. Alarmed by reports of the incident on 9 November 1979, the Soviet leadership lodged a complaint with Washington about the "extreme danger" of false warnings. While Pentagon officials were trying to prevent future incidents, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown assured President Jimmy Carter that false warnings were virtually inevitable, although he tried to reassure the President that "human safeguards" would prevent them from getting out of control.

Among the disclosures in today's posting:

• Reports that the mistaken use of a nuclear exercise tape on a NORAD computer had produced a U.S. false warning and alert actions prompted Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to write secretly to President Carter that the erroneous alert was "fraught with a tremendous danger." Further, "I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters."
• Commenting on the November 1979 NORAD incident, senior State Department adviser Marshal Shulman wrote that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence" and that there is a "complacency about handling them that disturbs me."
• With U.S.-Soviet relations already difficult, the Brezhnev message sparked discussion inside the Carter administration on how best to reply. Hard-liners prevailed and the draft that was approved included language ("inaccurate and unacceptable") that Marshal Shulman saw as "snotty" and "gratuitously insulting."
• Months later, in May and June 1980, 3 more false alerts occurred. The dates of two of them, 3 and 6 June 1980, have been in the public record for years, but the existence of a third event, cited in a memorandum from Secretary of Defense Brown to President Carter on 7 June 1980, has hitherto been unknown, although the details are classified.
• False alerts by NORAD computers on 3 and 6 June 1980 triggered routine actions by SAC and the NMCC to ensure survivability of strategic forces and command and control systems. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) at Andrews Air Force Base taxied in position for emergency launch, although it remained in place. Because missile attack warning systems showed nothing unusual, the alert actions were suspended.
• Supposedly causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."
• In reports to Carter, Secretary cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." Nevertheless, Brown argued that "human safeguards"—people reading data produced by warning systems--ensured that there would be "no chance that any irretrievable actions would be taken."

Background

For decades, the possibility of a Soviet missile attack preoccupied U.S. presidents and their security advisers. Because nuclear hostilities were more likely to emerge during a political-military confrontation (such as Cuba 1962, the likelihood of a bolt from the blue was remote but Washington nevertheless planned for the worst case. Under any circumstances, U.S. presidents and top military commanders wanted warning systems that could provide them with the earliest possible notice of missile launches by the Soviet Union or other adversaries. By the early 1960s, the Pentagon had the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWs) that could provide about 15 minutes of warning time. By the mid-to-late1960s, forward-scatter systems (so-called "Over the Horizon Radar") could detect missile launches within five to seven minutes from while, while the 474N system could give three-to-seven minutes of warning of launches from submarines off the North American coast. [1]

By the end of the 1960s, the United States was getting ready to deploy the Defense Support Program satellites which use infrared technology to detect plumes produced by missile launches. DSP could be used to tell whether missile launches were only tests or whether they signified a real attack by detecting number of missile launches and trajectory. This provided25 to 30 minutes of warning along with information on the trajectory and ultimate targets of the missiles. As long as decision-makers were not confronting the danger of a SLBM launch, the DSP would give them some time to decide how to retaliate.

In 1972, the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) began to network warning systems into at "interlinked system" operated at its headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.[2] A complex computer-based system always bore the risk of failure, break-downs, or errors. Even before networking emerged, false warnings emerged as early as 1960 when a BMEWs radar in Greenland caught "echoes from the moon," which generated a report of a missile attack which was quickly understood to be false (see document 1). During the Cuban Missile Crisis false warning episodes occurred, some of them involving NORAD, that were virtually unknown for many years.[3] If there were significant incidents during the years that followed, it remains to be learned. But once the networked systems were in place, the possibility that they would typically produce false warnings became evident. 

The Events of 1979-1980

"As he recounted it to me, Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President's decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes …. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that … 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to call the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system." -- Robert M. Gates. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How they Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996),114.

The series of alarming incidents and telephone phone calls recounted by former NSC staffer (and later CIA director and future Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates took place in the middle of the night on 9 November 1979. Because of the potentially grave implications of the event, the episode quickly leaked to the media, with the Washington Post and The New York Times printing stories on what happened. According to press reports, based on Pentagon briefings, a NORAD staffer caused the mistake by mistakenly loading a training/exercise tape into a computer, which simulated an "attack into the live warning system." This was a distortion because it was not a matter of a "wrong tape," but software simulating a Soviet missile attack then testing NORAD's 427M computers "was inexplicably transferred into the regular warning display" at the Command's headquarters. Indeed, NORAD's Commander-in-chief later acknowledged that the "precise mode of failure … could not be replicated."[4]

The information on the display simultaneously appeared on screens at SAC headquarters and the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which quickly led to defensive actions: NORAD alerted interceptor forces and 10 fighters were immediately launched. Moreover, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), used so the president could control U.S. forces during a nuclear war, was launched from Andrews Air Force Base, although without the president or secretary of defense.

Some of this information did not reach the public for months, but at least one reporter received misleading information about how high the alert went. According to the New York Times' sources, the warning was "deemed insufficiently urgent to warrant notifying top Government or military officials." Apparently no one wanted to tell reporters (and further scare the public) that the phone call went to President's Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The behind-the-scenes story became more complicated because the Soviet leadership was worried enough to lodge a complaint with Washington. The Cold War tensions had already been exacerbated during the previous year and this could not help (nor could an impending Kremlin decision to invade Afghanistan). On 14 November, party leader Leonid Brezhnev sent a message via Ambassador Anatoly Dobyrnin expressing his concern about the incident which was "fraught with a tremendous danger." What especially concerned Brezhnev were press reports that top U.S. leaders had not been informed at the time about the warning. The Defense Department and Brzezinski took hold of the reply to Brezhnev's message which senior State Department adviser Marshall Shulman saw as "gratuitously snotty" (for example, language about the "inaccurate and unacceptable" Soviet message). The Soviets were indeed miffed because they later replied that the U.S. message was not "satisfactory" because it had taken a polemical approach to Moscow's "profound and natural concern."

About seven months later, U.S. warning systems generated three more false alerts. One occurred on 28 May 1980; it was a minor harbinger of false alerts on 3 and 6 June 1980. According to the Pentagon, what caused the malfunctions in June 1980 was a failed 46¢ micro-electronic integrated circuit ("chip") and "faulty message design." A computer at NORAD made what amounted to "typographical errors" in the routine messages it sent to SAC and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) about missile launches. While the message usually said "OOO" ICBMs or SLBMs had been launched, some of the zeroes were erroneously filled in with a 2, e.g. 002 or 200, so the message indicated that 2, then 200 SLBMs were on their way. Once the message arrived at SAC, the command took survivability measures by ordering bomber pilots and crews to their stations at alert bombers and tankers and to start the engines.

No NORAD interceptors were launched so something had been learned from the November episode, but SAC took same precautionary measures. The Pacific Command's airborne command post ("Blue Eagle") was launched for reasons that remain mysterious.[5] NEACP taxied in position at Andrews Air Force Base, but it was not launched as in November. That missile warning sensors (DSP, BMEWs, etc) showed nothing amiss made it possible for military commanders to call off further action. According to a Senate report, NORAD ran its computers the next 3 days in order to isolate the cause of the error; the "mistake was reproduced" in the mid-afternoon of 6 June with the similar results and SAC took defensive measures.[6]

When Harold Brown explained to President Carter what had happened and what was being done to fix the system, he cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." This meant that "we must continue to place our confidence in the human element of our missile attack warning system." Brown, however, did not address a problem raised by journalists who asked Pentagon officials, if another false alert occurred, whether a "chain reaction" could be triggered when "duty officers in the Soviet Union read data on the American alert coming into their warning systems." A nameless U.S. defense official would give no assurances that a "chain reaction" would not occur, noting that "I hope they have as secure a system as we do, that they have the safeguards we do."

How good the safeguards actually were remains an open question. While Secretary of Defense Brown acknowledged the "possibility" of future false alerts, he insisted on the importance of human safeguards in preventing catastrophes. Stanford University professor Scott Sagan's argument about "organizational failure" is critical of that optimism on several counts. For example, under some circumstances false alerts could have had more perilous outcomes, e.g. if Soviet missile tests had occurred at the same time or if there were serious political tensions with Moscow, defense officials might have been jumpier and launched bomber aircraft or worse. Further, false warnings were symptomatic of "more serious problems with the way portions of the command system had been designed." Yet, defense officials have been reluctant to acknowledge organizational failings, instead blaming mistakes on 46¢ chips or individuals inserting the wrong tape. Treating the events of 1979 and 1980 as "normal accidents" in complex systems, Sagan observes that defense officials are reluctant to learn from mistakes and have persuaded themselves that the system is "foolproof."[7]

Bruce Blair also sees systemic problems. Once a "launch-under--attack" strategic nuclear option became embedded in war planning policy during the late 1970s, he sees the weakening of the safeguards that had been in place, e.g., confirmation that a Soviet nuclear attack was in progress or had already occurred. One of the arguments for taking Minuteman ICBMs off their current high alert status (making virtually instantaneous launch possible) has been that a false warning, combined with an advanced state of readiness, raises the risk of accidental nuclear war. The risk of false alerts/accidental war is one of the considerations that is prompting other anti-nuclear activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, to protest at Vandenberg Air Force Base against the Minuteman ICBM program and the continued testing of Minutemen.[8]

The Soviet nuclear command and control system that developed during the 1980s provides an interesting contrast with the U.S.'s. While the United States emphasized "human safeguards" as a firewall, the "Perimeter" nuclear warning-nuclear strike system may have minimized them. In large part, it was a response to Soviet concern that a U.S. decapitating strike, aimed at the political leadership and central control systems, could cripple retaliatory capabilities. Reminiscent of the "doomsday machine" in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Perimeter could launch a semi-automatic nuclear strike under specified conditions, for example, no contact with political or military leaders, atomic bombs detonating, etc. If such conditions were fulfilled, a few military personnel deep in an underground bunker could launch emergency command and control rockets which in turn would transmit launch orders to ICBMs in their silos. According to David Hoffman's Pulitzer-prize winning The Dead Hand, when Bruce Blair learned about Perimeter, he was "uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of a few, with so much automation." While the system may have been operational as late as the early 1990s, only declassification decisions by Russian authorities can shed light on Perimeter's evolution.[9]

According to Bruce Blair, writing in the early 1990s, warning system failures continued after 1980, although they did not trigger alert measures.[10] The U.S. nuclear incidents that have received the most attention have not been false warnings, but events such as the Air Force's accidental movement of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB in 2007 and the mistaken transfer of Minuteman nose-cone assemblies to Taiwan in 2006. In any event, more needs to be learned about the problem of false warnings during and after the Cold War and pending declassification requests and appeals may shed further light on this issue. 
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