Audio: The Kennedy KGB Connection

Kennedy assessed the situation and said “The problem here is the American president.”

Earlier this week I interviewed Paul Kengor, author of The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. The book is a fascinating and detailed study of President Reagan’s strategy to defeat the USSR and wreck international Communism.

Among its most sensational aspects is a section detailing the domestic opposition to Reagan’s campaign for re-election in 1984 and his decision to deploy intermediate-range nuclear forces (INFs), Pershing II missiles, into Western Europe to counter the Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons across the Warsaw Pact. Specifically, Kengor includes what is purported to be a translated memo from the KGB archives, dated May 14, 1983, that describes an offer made to the KGB on behalf of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) by former Senator John Tunney (D-CA), a fellow Democrat and close friend of Kennedy’s.

According to the document, Sen. Kennedy offered to help the Soviet leadership mount a media public relations campaign in the United States that would do two things. First, it would convince the American people that the Soviets intended peaceful co-existence with us. Second, it would undermine President Reagan’s efforts to deploy the Pershing IIs and build the Strategic Defense Initiative as well as undermining his national security stances and strategy on a broad basis, which in turn would dent Reagan’s campaign to be re-elected in 1984. In short, Sen. Kennedy was offering to work with USSR General Secretary Yuri Andropov against the President of the United States.

The interview is linked below both as Flash and downloadable mp3. It’s about 20 minutes long. I’ve edited it here and there for clarity, but not for content. In the interview, Dr. Kengor establishes several important things about the document. He establishes where and when it was found and by whom, and how it ended up in his possession and therefore in his book. This gives us a chain of custody going back to 1992, when then Russian President Boris Yeltsin had opened the Soviet archives in order to keep the resurgent Communists at bay, and when Tim Sebastian of the London Sunday Times discovered the document in the Soviet archive. Sebastian first reported on the document in the Times, in 1992, though his story only included a few sentences from the document. Kengor’s book includes the entire translated document. The scholars Kengor mentions as having passed the document to him both have serious pedigrees in researching the Soviet Union. Their names are Herb Romerstein, author of The Venona Secrets, and Marko Suprun. They are also named in the book’s footnotes.

Outside the Sebastian article and Kengor’s book, there is independent confirmation that Sen. Kennedy made yet another overture to the Soviets. In 2002, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, chaired by former Sen. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and which can hardly be regarded as a Republican shill, published Working Paper #40. That paper is online at this link, and contains about a dozen references to Sen. Kennedy. On page 167 it refers to Kennedy’s intent to work with the Soviets to free the hostages in Tehran–in order to bolster Kennedy’s prospects against President Jimmy Carter, against whom Kennedy was running for the Democrat nomination for president in 1980. Kennedy was also hoping to work with the Soviet leadership to keep detente on track, even as Carter was castigating the USSR for its invasion of Afghanistan. Working Paper #40 goes into some detail about Kennedy’s efforts against President Carter’s anti-Soviet policies in 1980. As in the 1983 overture, Kennedy enlisted Tunney to be his agent in Moscow against a sitting US president’s foreign policy. Taken together, it seems that Sen. Kennedy was equally ready to undermine a Democrat or Republican president.

Update: In the interview, Dr. Kengor mentions an article written by one of his sources, Herb Romerstein, regarding the Kennedy KGB document. Here is the article. It’s very much worth your time. (h/t A Blog For All)

Ted Kennedy was a 'collaborationist'
Human Events, Dec 8, 2003 by Romerstein, Herbert
Aided KGB for Political Purposes

Even long-time Bush watchers were surprised when former President Bush presented an award to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.) at a time when the far-left senator was involved in a full-scale series of attacks on our current President.

Teddy Kennedy's bizarre attack on President Bush shocked even some of his supporters. With rhetoric reminiscent of "conspiracy nuts," Kennedy accused the President of deliberately getting us into an unnecessary war in Iraq, a war that was planned in Texas. Remember that the senator's brother, Jack, was assassinated in Texas 40 years ago.

While the tone was hysterical, it was not unusual for Sen. Kennedy to attack an American President and give aid and comfort to our country's enemies. There are some important reports found in Soviet archives, after the collapse of the Communist dictatorship, that provide an interesting insight into the character of the senior senator from Massachusetts.

One of the documents, a KGB report to bosses in the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee, revealed that "In 1978, American Sen. Edward Kennedy requested the assistance of the KGB to establish a relationship" between the Soviet apparatus and a firm owned by former Sen. John Tunney (D.-Calif.). KGB recommended that they be permitted to do this because Tunney's firm was already connected with a KGB agent in France named David Karr. This document was found by the knowledgeable Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats and published in Moscow's Izvestia in June 1992.

Another KGB report to their bosses revealed that on March 5, 1980, John Tunney met with the KGB in Moscow on behalf of Sen. Kennedy. Tunney expressed Kennedy's opinion that "nonsense about 'the Soviet military threat' and Soviet ambitions for military expansion in the Persian Gulf . . . was being fueled by [President Jimmy] Carter, [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex."

Kennedy offered to speak out against President Carter on Afghanistan. Shortly thereafter he made public speeches opposing President Carter on this issue. This document was found in KGB archives by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, a courageous KGB officer, who copied documents from the files and then defected to the West. He wrote about this document in a February 2002 paper on Afghanistan that he released through the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center.

In May 1983, the KGB again reported to their bosses on a discussion in Moscow with former Sen. John Tunney. Kennedy had instructed Tunney, according to the KGB, to carry a message to Yuri Andropov, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, expressing Kennedy's concern about the anti-Soviet activities of President Ronald Reagan. The KGB reported "in Kennedy's opinion the opposition to Reagan remains weak. Speeches of the President's opponents are not well-coordinated and not effective enough, and Reagan has the chance to use successful counterpropaganda." Kennedy offered to "undertake some additional steps to counter the militaristic, policy of Reagan and his campaign of psychological pressure on the American population." Kennedy asked for a meeting with Andropov for the purpose of "arming himself with the Soviet leader's explanations of arms control policy so he can use them later for more convincing speeches in the U.S." He also offered to help get Soviet views on the major U.S. networks and suggested inviting "Elton Rule, ABC chairman of the board, or observers Walter Cronkite or Barbara Walters to Moscow."

Tunney also told the KGB that Kennedy was planning to run for President in the 1988 elections. "At that time, he will be 56 years old, and personal problems that have weakened his position will have been resolved [Kennedy quietly settled a divorce suit and soon plans to remarry]." Of course the Russians understood his problem with Chappaquiddick. While Kennedy did not intend to run in 1984, he did not exclude the possibility that the Democratic Party would draft him because "not a single one of the current Democratic hopefuls has a real chance of beating Reagan."

This document was first discovered in the Soviet archives by London Times reporter Tim Sebastian and a report on it was published in that newspaper in February 1992.

Sen. Kennedy played a major role during the 1970s in Grafting the restrictions that made it so difficult for the FBI and CIA to do the job of protecting the American people. One of the most pernicious restrictions was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) passed in 1978. President Franklin Roosevelt, in 1940, had ordered the FBI to wiretap Nazis and Communists because they were operating in the United States on behalf of hostile foreign powers. Every President after him used the inherent power of the President to order wiretapping for national security purposes.

Kennedy told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976 that "For the last five years, I and others in the Senate have labored unsuccessfully to place some meaningful statutory restrictions on the so-called inherent power of the Executive to engage in surveillance." When Congress discussed legislation to require a court warrant to wiretap enemy agents and terrorists, Kennedy and the ACLU began a campaign to raise the barriers as high as possible. Kennedy introduced the concept in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Bill that required evidence that someone was providing classified information to a foreign intelligence service. Someone who "only" had a clandestine relationship with a foreign intelligence officer and carried out covert influence operations for a foreign power could not be wiretapped. When we see the KGB reports we can understand why Kennedy would want this provision in the law. Kennedy was not a KGB agent. He also was not "a useful idiot" who was used by the KGB without understanding what he was doing. Kennedy was a collaborationist. He aided the KGB for his own political purposes

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

just go here to HotAir and listen to the interview.