Reagan Approved Plan to Sabotage Soviets

The New York Times ^ | February 27, 2004 | David E. Hoffman reviews "At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War"

[Fledermaus]

That's too simplistic of a view for me to agree.

While it was a response and consequence in fighting the Soviet Union, Afghanistan was just another decision based on the best available options. Like Iraq vs. Iran (we never sold Iraq chemicals, that's a lie and fabrication by the media). Or we used Noreiga or the Shah of Iran.

It's a messy world. Soviet communism was the biggest threat at the time. Do I wish our bureaucrats and elected officials of both parties had looked farther ahead? Sure.

I wish a lot of common sense things they are uncapable of accomplishing. Doesn't mean I'm ready for anarchy just yet. Maybe in a year or two.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Too bad liberals like Kerry have tried to suppress our ability to do these nasty things for decades.

They don't want the U.S. to be a superpower. It drains resources for necessary constituent buying and it interferes with international deal making diplomacy. They need a weak U.S. so they can try communism again - this time on a world-wide scale where the elites can rule the masses.

"Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left" Hillary Clinton and the Third Way***......For these self-appointed social redeemers, the goal-"social justice"-is not about rectifying particular injustices, which would be practical and modest, and therefore conservative. Their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. "Social Justice" for them is about a world reborn, a world in which prejudice and violence are absent, in which everyone is equal and equally advantaged and without fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a re-structuring of human nature and of society itself.

Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name this future anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes it possible. But it is a world that has never existed and never will. Moreover, as the gulags and graveyards of the last century attest, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic in the world we know.

But the fall of Communism taught the progressives who were its supporters very little. Above all, it failed to teach them the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flowed from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. The arrogance that drives them has hardly diminished. The left is like a millenarian sect that erroneously predicted the end of the world, and now must regroup to revitalize its faith.

No matter how opportunistically the left's agendas have been modified, however, no matter how circumspectly its goals have been set, no matter how generous its concessions to political reality, the faithful have not given up their self-justifying belief that they can bring about a social redemption. In other words, a world in which human consciousness is changed, human relations refashioned, social institutions transformed, and in which "social justice" prevails.

Because the transformation progressives seek is ultimately total, the power they seek must be total as well. In the end, the redemption they envision cannot be achieved as a political compromise, even though compromises may be struck along the way. Their brave new world can ultimately be secured only by the complete surrender of the resisting force. In short, the transformation of the world requires the permanent entrenchment of the saints in power. Therefore, everything is justified that serves to achieve the continuance of Them......***

[Fledermaus]

Oh my! I'm fanning myself now!

Better than a lap dance! I've got ones and fives ready!! lol

Excellent!

[WaterDragon]

Good for Reagan!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

LOL

[Cincinatus' Wife]

"The house we hope to build is not for my generation but for yours. It is your future that matters. And I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were a statement, not an apology." · Ronald Reagan

Reagan and the Soviets

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children - this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done." - 1964 A Time For Choosing Speech

[Wumpus Hunter]

I like how we "let" them STEAL the stuff to srcew themselves with! There was a thread about a month ago about how we even designed faulty IC chips specifically for them to steal.

Contrast this with the rat approach - selling them whatever they want and sticking the money in your pocket.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Contrast this with the rat approach - selling them whatever they want and sticking the money in your pocket.

The Clinton foreign policy.

[steverino62]

Regarding the last paragraph of this article: those who argue that internal Soviet factors caused the collapse of the Soviet Union often ignore the dynamic interplay between external and domestic variables. One cannot objectively read Gorbachev's central committee and party congress speeches, for instance, without concluding that Gorbachev intended for glasnost and perestroika to reverse Soviet economic decline precisely because that decline adversely impacted Soviet security and foreign policies. In reality, these so-called internal sources of causation were strongly, perhaps decisively, shaped by external considerations.

[IGOTMINE]

You reek or troll.

I've read your other posts. I classify you as a stealth Moby.

I'll be watching.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

But the Left is trying to make lemonade.

[Atlantic Friend]

As an added tidbit of information, Farewell was the codename of a Soviet official working for the French intelligence service, the DGSE. What Farewell told his controllers was that the Soviet Union was becoming expert at obtaining Western technology that could be used militarily by buying high-tech civilian goods that used the same electronic components.

French President François Mitterrand told President Reagan during a G-7 meeting in 1981 IIRC, and then Farewell was a shared sourced of information for both French and US intelligence services. I seem to remember that Farewell went out of business in the late 80s.

[Coop]

Look at the bright side, IGM. At least our friend here writes complete sentences and paragraphs. Even posts "replies" instead of just hit-'n-run garbage articles.

We're attracting a higher class of folk here to FR.

[Cincinatus]

"And here you thought that the collapse of that dang ol' Soviet Union was just a coincidence, huh?"

[EQAndyBuzz]

I am sure Clinton is still getting his cut from the Kosovo heroin profits.

[Jeff Gordon]

The sabotage of the gas pipeline has not been previously disclosed,

The story of the sabotaged pipe line was told many years ago in a book about Reagan's war with the Soviet Union. The book did not give the details this article gives. It did say that the sabotage was implemented by tricking the Soviet Spies to buy sabotaged technology.

[atomicpossum]

Do a web search for the 'Farewell Dossier' for more info, there's even someon the CIA website...

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The Farewell Dossier
By WILLIAM SAFIRE, NY Times 2/2/04
Feb 2, 2004, 08:28


Here is the unremarked story of "the Farewell dossier": how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia — all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss — helped us win the cold war.

Weiss worked down the hall from me in the Nixon administration. In early 1974, he wrote a report on Soviet advances in technology through purchasing and copying that led the beleaguered president — détente notwithstanding — to place restrictions on the export of computers and software to the U.S.S.R.

Seven years later, we learned how the K.G.B. responded. I was writing a series of hard-line columns denouncing the financial backing being given Moscow by Germany and Britain for a major natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. That project would give control of European energy supplies to the Communists, as well as generate $8 billion a year to support Soviet computer and satellite research.

President François Mitterrand of France also opposed the gas pipeline. He took President Reagan aside at a conference in Ottawa on July 19, 1981, to reveal that France had recruited a key K.G.B. officer in Moscow Center.

Col. Vladimir Vetrov provided what French intelligence called the Farewell dossier. It contained documents from the K.G.B. Technology Directorate showing how the Soviets were systematically stealing — or secretly buying through third parties — the radar, machine tools and semiconductors to keep the Russians nearly competitive with U.S. military-industrial strength through the 70's. In effect, the U.S. was in an arms race with itself.

Reagan passed this on to William J. Casey, his director of central intelligence, now remembered only for the Iran-contra fiasco. Casey called in Weiss, then working with Thomas C. Reed on the staff of the National Security Council. After studying the list of hundreds of Soviet agents and purchasers (including one cosmonaut) assigned to this penetration in the U.S. and Japan, Weiss counseled against deportation.

Instead, according to Reed — a former Air Force secretary whose fascinating cold war book, "At the Abyss," will be published by Random House next month — Weiss said: "Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it." The catch: computer chips would be designed to pass Soviet quality tests and then to fail in operation.

In our complex disinformation scheme, deliberately flawed designs for stealth technology and space defense sent Russian scientists down paths that wasted time and money.

The technology topping the Soviets' wish list was for computer control systems to automate the operation of the new trans-Siberian gas pipeline. When we turned down their overt purchase order, the K.G.B. sent a covert agent into a Canadian company to steal the software; tipped off by Farewell, we added what geeks call a "Trojan Horse" to the pirated product.

"The pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines and valves was programmed to go haywire," writes Reed, "to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space."

Our Norad monitors feared a nuclear detonation, but satellites that would have picked up its electromagnetic pulse were silent. That mystified many in the White House, but "Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another twenty years to tell me why."

Farewell stayed secret because the blast in June 1982, estimated at three kilotons, took place in the Siberian wilderness, with no casualties known. Nor was the red-faced K.G.B. about to complain publicly about being tricked by bogus technology. But all the software it had stolen for years was suddenly suspect, which stopped or delayed the work of thousands of worried Russian technicians and scientists.

Vetrov was caught and executed in 1983. A year later, Bill Casey ordered the K.G.B. collection network rolled up, closing the Farewell dossier. Gus Weiss died from a fall a few months ago. Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way.

Source:2004 Ocnus.net Top of Page

http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=40&num=10082

[atomicpossum]

CIA website:

Duping the Soviets
The Farewell Dossier
Gus W. Weiss

Article here

[Colonel_Flagg]

<< But others liberals say that internal Soviet factors were more important, >>

There.