Why Ronald Reagan Did Not Reform the CIA (Kissinger)

NewsMax.com ^ | 12/10/02 | Lev Navrozov

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Why Ronald Reagan Did Not Reform the CIA

Lev Navrozov
Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2002

The CIA's published and generally available annual testimonies before Congress in the 1970s were unique. A unique departure from ritualistic (and self-serving) secrecy. No other Western intelligence agency has ever done it. The CIA deserves praise: At least the public, including myself, learned how good or bad the CIA is. The English public has been unable to learn how good or bad the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) is even if it is worse than the CIA.

I duly read the CIA's testimonies before Congress and wrote an article on the subject, which was published by Commentary magazine in November 1978 and reprinted or outlined in about 500 periodicals in the U.S. and all over the world, down to Australia.

The gist of my article: The CIA simply retold Soviet (and Chinese) propaganda. For example, the CIA asserted (and this was repeated by the New York Times on July 22, 1974, p. 2) that "Soviet defense spending" accounted for 6 percent of the "Soviet gross national product," that is, the same percentage as did U.S. defense spending.

Since the Soviet GNP was much smaller than the U.S. GNP, the CIA suggested that the Soviet defense spending was much smaller than the U.S. defense spending. So it was Soviet Russia that was peaceful, while the United States was war-oriented.

As for the Soviet development of biological and other post-nuclear weapons able to destroy or neutralize the Western means of retaliation, I understood after I had read the CIA's testimonies why the CIA had taken me for a madman in 1972 when I described the Soviet strategy to a senior analyst of the CIA who had become my lifelong friend, reader and admirer (see my column of Nov. 15, "Espionage in Today's Geostrategy").

Ronald Reagan, in 1979 a presidential candidate for his first term, had read my Commentary article (in the proofs!), and on Feb. 5, Richard V. Allen, later his national security adviser, sent me a letter praising my article (which had been reprinted in Ronald Reagan's election campaign newsletter) and expressing his satisfaction that I was "still interested in providing inputs to Governor Reagan."

As I met with "Governor Reagan," I "provided" to him whatever "input" I could in addition to my Commentary article. He decided to reform the CIA, and between 1972, when the Soviet giant bioweapons project was well under way, and 1992, when Yeltsin opened it to international inspection, Ronald Reagan was the only U.S. president who publicly denounced the development of bioweapons in the "evil empire."

But what about reforming the CIA? Could President Reagan do it? Any Soviet fool was able to conduct espionage in the United States or in the West in general. To conduct espionage in Soviet Russia, with all of its "places of residence" registered by the police, took a man of genius. Fools are many and readily available, men of genius are rare and have to be sought and recognized as such. Besides, did President Reagan have the real power to announce to all or most CIA employees that they were all dismissed because they were fools, not men of genius?

Douglas J. MacEachin, in charge of the CIA's Soviet analysis office from 1984 to 1989, rejected as absurd all conjectures about the Soviet development of bioweapons. He was a former Marine Corps officer, and as such he may have been excellent. But as the head of the Soviet analysis office he was a fool who rejected even the information others obtained (from émigrés for example, as did the Wall Street Journal in 1984).

According to the former Marine Corps officer, President Reagan and all who mentioned or hypothesized the Soviet development of bioweapons were the "evil empirists" – from President Reagan's phrase "evil empire." That is, he was ridiculing President Reagan!

MacEachin was powerfully buttressed in his attitude by the advent of Gorbachev to power in 1985. Who could dare to assert that Gorbachev, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and even in 2002 still a darling of the West, was investing annually billions of dollars to produce, for example, 4,500 metric tons of anthrax in the peak year as against 0.9 tons produced by the U.S. in its peak year –before 1969? That is, 5,000 times as much!

Suppose President Reagan had demanded that MacEachin be dismissed as a fool from the CIA and sent back to the Marine Corps. On whom would President Reagan have relied in this decision?

I was not a Kissinger, with his numberless top posts. I have never held any post, either in Russia or in the West – I have been a freelancer, translating in Russia, and writing in the West, and, after 1992, for Russia as well. I am an Einstein Prize laureate, but an Einstein Prize is nothing compared with a Nobel Prize or a Nobel Peace Prize, because it is infinitely smaller in terms of money, for Einstein was a very poor man compared with Nobel.

If President Reagan could have relied on Kissinger in reforming the CIA, he would have been in a better position. But Kissinger had never guessed before 1992 that the owners of Soviet Russia were developing bioweapons or that the CIA's testimonies before Congress in the 1970s were retellings of Soviet propaganda. Everything Kissinger has said publicly in his heavily accented baritone is Philistine twaddle.

Could President Reagan reform the CIA, relying only on unknowns like myself?

When I met Ronald Reagan, the memory of how the media had made short shrift of President Nixon was still fresh. This is possibly one reason why President Reagan sent his national security adviser, Richard Allen, into retirement as soon as the media had begun attacking him.

What struck me during my meeting with presidential candidate Reagan was his instantaneous effusive agreement with everything I said. Was he apprehensive of me as a representative of the dangerous media? I am told that one factor might have been the beginning of his Alzheimer's disease. At any rate, he did not strike me as a man ready to rush all alone into the battle against the CIA to reform it.

So, in 2002 the CIA is exactly as it was from 1972 to 1989, except that now it does not notice the Chinese strategy of destroying or neutralizing the Western means of retaliation and the development of bioweapons in China, while from 1972 to 1989 the CIA did not notice the Soviet version of that same quest for world domination.

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