The FReeper Foxhole Remembers The Cold War (A Synopsis) - Part VII - Sep 29th, 2004

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[SAMWolf]

Soldiers of God: 1975-1988

COUP

In the 1970s, Afghanistan became a focus of superpower rivalry. Geographically strategic -- near Persian Gulf oil and Indian Ocean ports, and bordering the Soviet Central Asian republics -- a friendly Afghanistan was vital to Moscow's interests.

The Soviet Union sent hundreds of advisers to Kabul following an April 1978 military coup that brought a left-wing regime to power. Led by Nur Mohammed Taraki, the new regime began reforming Afghanistan by decree -- taking land from the owners and giving it to the peasants who worked it. Women were encouraged to stop wearing veils, and were placed in literacy classes alongside men. In the countryside, these reforms were seen as threats to ancient customs and the authority of the mullahs -- the Islamic priests. Opponents of reform burned down schools. Thousands fled to neighboring Pakistan to avoid the turmoil.

Nur Mohammed Taraki

In Washington, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was convinced that the new Afghan regime -- coupled with the overthrow of the shah in neighboring Iran -- constituted a major threat to the West. He advised President Carter that Moscow might use the Afghan crisis to move south and seize the Persian Gulf's oil. The U.S. soon began sending covert aid to Islamic groups fighting the communists. The rebels called themselves the Mujahedeen, or Soldiers of God. They were mostly peasants, organized by village mullahs and landowners, with weapons captured from the communists. Moscow propaganda portrayed the Soviet-trained Afghan government army as a motivated, mechanized force. But in reality, thousands of Afghan government soldiers were deserting each month. Kabul pleaded with Moscow to send Soviet troops. Soviet leaders discussed the crisis, but took no action -- until mobs massacred Soviet advisers and their families in the Afghan city of Herat. Soon after, Kabul's request for Soviet troops moved to the top of the Kremlin's agenda.

INVASION

In Afghanistan, President Taraki's prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, launched a campaign of terror -- having opponents arrested and shot. Concerned, Taraki flew to Moscow to talk with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev about how to curb Amin's excesses. They decided to oust him, hoping the Kabul government could gain popular support by slowing the reforms and ending the terror. But Moscow's secret plans leaked out, and when Taraki returned to Kabul, Amin had him seized and executed.

These burned-out trucks and escorting armored vehicles of an ambushed Soviet convoy are mute testimony to the effectiveness of the rebel road interdiction campaign.

Amin, realizing the Soviets wanted him gone, began to seek better ties with the West. But this only fueled speculation in Moscow that Amin might be a CIA agent, and arguments mounted for an invasion to remove him. With the announced deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in Europe, Moscow felt it had little to lose internationally by intervening in Afghanistan with troops. In December 1979, the Politburo held an emergency meeting and made its fateful decision -- hoping the mission would end within weeks. By December 25, tens of thousands of men in tanks and trucks began to cross the Afghan border.



KGB special forces stormed the old royal palace on the edge of Kabul, which had become Amin's favorite residence. The prime minister tried to hide, but he was shot dead. Moscow replaced Amin with a more manageable leader, Babrak Karmal. Since the Cold War started, the Soviet Union had used military action to topple troublesome leaders in Hungary and Czechoslovakia -- but never had it invaded a country beyond the borders of the Warsaw Pact. Now Soviet forces had crossed the line.

RESPONSE

At the United Nations, the Soviet invasion was widely condemned. In Washington, President Carter blocked grain deliveries to the Soviet Union, launched a boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow and stepped up U.S. arms spending. He sent his national security adviser to Pakistan to rally resistance. Brzezinski wanted to arm the Mujahedeen without revealing America's role, and sought the help of Pakistan's military ruler, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq -- despite his poor record on human rights, nuclear weapons and drug trades.

With the election of Republican Ronald Reagan as U.S. president in 1980, American covert military aid to the Afghan rebels only increased. Money and arms were channeled through Pakistan -- which controlled the way aid was distributed among the many Mujahedeen factions. Pakistan hoped to install a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Afghanistan.


The Mujahideen were issued with US Stinger missiles

Meanwhile, as fighting escalated, the United Nations sought a diplomatic solution -- a deal for a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, if military aid to the Mujahedeen was stopped. Hope for the plan blossomed in Moscow when, following the death of Brezhnev, the new Soviet leadership indicated it might accept the U.N. proposal. But the United States and Pakistan were not ready to cut a deal with Moscow.

CIVIL WAR

Inside Afghanistan, the ferocity of the fighting increased. At first, the Soviet army guarded cities, road and airports, leaving the Afghan army free for combat. But by 1980, almost 100,000 Soviet troops were deployed around the country; soon, they were sucked into battle. The Soviets started with textbook "sweep offenses" devised to defeat NATO in Europe or Chinese troops on the plains of Manchuria. But against guerrilla fighters in mountainous terrain, their approach was a disaster.

After heavy casualties, the Soviets changed tactics -- abandoning their massive armored sweeps and taking to the air. Commandos were dropped in by helicopter to cut the Mujahedeen's escape routes. Soviet aircraft began bombing indiscriminately across Afghanistan, pummeling village after village into oblivion. Thousands of civilians were killed in Soviet atrocities throughout the country. The Mujahedeen committed their own war crimes, often executing Soviet and Afghan prisoners in cold blood.

WITHDRAWAL

The war in Afghanistan was taking its toll on the Soviets. With increasing ruthlessness and daring, the Mujahedeen attacked Soviet convoys bringing oil and weapons to their army. As many as 2,000 Soviets were killed each year. For Moscow's troops, many of whom were raw recruits, the war seemed pointless. Sickness, drunkenness and drug abuse sapped the army's strength. The wounded got minimal care. Back home, Soviet propaganda portrayed the troops as brave defenders, bringing order to a war-torn country. But returning veterans began to reveal their true role. And in cemeteries across the Soviet Union, the cost of the invasion became impossible to hide. For the Soviets, Afghanistan had become their Vietnam.

The last Russians columns disappear north up the Salang Highway

In March 1985, an energetic new leader took power in the Kremlin. As Mikhail Gorbachev met crowds around the country, opposition to the war could finally be expressed. Gorbachev told the United Nations that the Soviets would consider withdrawing from Afghanistan under a U.N. agreement. But Washington -- prodded by hard-liners seeking revenge for Vietnam -- still wasn't ready for peace. Reagan urged the Mujahedeen to go for victory and sent them America's latest missile -- the state-of-the-art, shoulder-launched Stinger. The missiles made plain that America was directly involved in the Afghan war.

Meanwhile, U.N. officials pressed on with peace talks. By April 1988, an agreement was signed in Geneva allowing Moscow to withdraw its troops. The pact also barred further military aid to either side -- but both superpowers ignored the ban. The supply of weapons went on; the Geneva accords did not bring peace. Instead, Afghanistan was to endure more years of bloodshed. Although the Soviet troop withdrawal was completed by February 1989, fighting among rival groups of Islamic fundamentalists -- using U.S. and Soviet weapons -- has continued to destroy the country. Since 1979, five million Afghans have been wounded or forced to flee their homes. Almost 15,000 Soviet soldiers have been killed. And a million Afghans have died -- a cruel legacy of the Cold War.

[SAMWolf]

Spies: 1949-1990
ATOMIC SPIES

The great game began even before the Grand Alliance formally split along ideological lines. The KGB had several sources inside Los Alamos, where scientists worked in secrecy to develop America's first atomic bomb. Unknown to one another, scientists Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall both passed on details of how to detonate nuclear weapons by "implosion" -- a principle so new to Soviet science that there was no equivalent word in Russian.


Klaus Fuchs

In 1949, the Soviets exploded their first atom bomb. Triggered by implosion, it copied key elements of the American bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. The atom spies had saved the Soviet Union perhaps two years of research.

IN THE COLD

The intelligence war was lopsided. The KGB operated in the West, but the CIA confronted a closed world. Trains crossing the Finnish border into Russia were sealed by steel shutters.

The Soviets, on the other hand, had infiltrated the very heart of Western intelligence by the 1940s. Acting out of political conviction, Britain's Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean delivered a flow of information to Moscow. Philby's treason had deadly consequences: Agents he betrayed in the Balkans were apprehended and shot. Burgess and Maclean defected to Russia in 1951; Philby, under suspicion for another decade, defected in 1963.


Kim Philby

Even attempts to infiltrate the Soviet Union were compromised. In 1953, Soviet émigré Mikhail Kudriavtsev parachuted into Russia to spy for the CIA. He was immediately detained by Soviet authorities. Kudriavtsev saved his life by telling the KGB everything and agreeing to parrot a prepared statement at a heavily stage-managed press conference.

BERLIN

In Berlin, the West thought it had scored an espionage coup: The CIA dug a long tunnel under the Soviet sector to tap telephone cables.

But from the start, the operation was betrayed to the KGB by a source inside British intelligence -- George Blake. Blake had served as a British intelligence officer in Seoul, South Korea. Captured by the North Koreans, he volunteered to help the KGB after witnessing the West's bombing of civilians.


George Blake

Even with Blake's warning about the CIA tunnel, the KGB did not move against the operation, concerned that Blake might be compromised. For months, the Berlin tunnel operated without interference, allowing the CIA to intercept signals from Moscow. Heavy rain one April night in 1956 caused a cable failure, giving the KGB the excuse it needed to expose the tunnel and turn the West's intelligence feat into a Soviet propaganda victory.


On April 22, 1956, an espionage tunnel was discovered which had been dug from West Berlin into the territory of the GDR Capital. With its help US services had tapped telephone cables belonging to the Soviet troops temporarily stationed in the GDR and to the Government of the GDR. The photo shows part of the tunnel and some of the tapping and amplifying equipment.

Five years later Blake himself was betrayed by a defector from the Polish Intelligence Service. He was sentenced to 42 years in a British prison but escaped in 1966 and fled to Moscow.

PUZZLE PIECES

As the Cold War intensified through the 1950s, pressure on the CIA increased. The West was desperate for detail about the size and strength of Soviet forces. It was the Soviet missile force that worried the CIA most -- and about which it knew the least.



From 1956, American technical superiority started providing answers. The CIA's own reconnaissance plane, the U-2, flew high over Russia to photograph Soviet bases, but in four years of searching found no operational intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites. Then in 1960, the Americans successfully launched a satellite fitted with a camera. After 17 orbits, the film capsule was ejected, caught in midair and brought back to Earth for analysis. A subsequent flight confirmed the existence of just one Soviet ICBM launch site.


Colonel Oleg Penkovsky at the moment a Soviet court sentenced him to die by firing squad for supplying the West with details about Soviet missiles.

The rest of the puzzle's pieces were provided by perhaps the greatest spy of the Cold War: Col. Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet military intelligence officer who passed secrets to the United States and Britain between April 1961 and August 1962. Penkovsky revealed the Soviets' lack of atomic warheads and their problems with guidance systems. He provided information that proved critical to the United States during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But his cover was blown. In October 1962, he was arrested. In 1963, the Kremlin announced Penkovsky had been executed.

SURVEILLANCE

Western governments grew weary of the huge KGB presence in their midst. In 1971, the British expelled 105 Soviet intelligence officers identified by a defector. Technology increasingly assumed the burden of spying.



Satellites could now intercept radio communications and data from test launches of the opposition's missiles. Film taken in space no longer had to be returned to Earth. Through photography and electronic eavesdropping, each side received huge flows of information -- often too much for the analysts to handle.

Still, ground-based surveillance remained a critical tool of the trade. In East Germany, the secret police, or Stasi, kept tabs on ordinary citizens. Interrogations were routinely filmed. Internal security efforts fueled distrust throughout society.

MOLE

By the 1980s, the CIA had penetrated the Kremlin by carefully establishing agents within Soviet intelligence and defense circles. The CIA was alarmed when in the mid-1980s some of those agents disappeared, including Gen. Dmitri Polyakov, a Soviet military intelligence officer who had provided information to the West since 1962.


Aldrich Ames

By 1991, CIA investigators suspected a mole in their ranks. The hunt for the traitor took three years, homing in on CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames. The FBI filmed him secretly in Bogota in 1993. Agents staked out his house and tapped his phones. The breakthrough came from CIA analysis of his bank statements.

On February 21, 1994, nearly five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ames was arrested for spying, along with his wife, Rosario, after years of high living. During his nearly nine years on the KGB payroll, Ames was paid $2.7 million. He identified 25 CIA agents in the Soviet Union, 10 of whom were executed. Ames is now serving a life sentence without parole. One of the last Cold War-era spies arrested, Ames may have done more damage than any other turncoat in CIA history. And he did it for money.

Additional Sources:

www.cnn.com
www.presidentschildren.com
www.ramaz.org
www.wien-vienna.at
home.millsaps.edu
reagan.webteamone.com
college.hmco.com
www1.gazeta.pl
www.afghanland.com
fmso.leavenworth.army.mil
www.informationwar.org
www.iasa.com.au
www.msu.edu
www.vw.cc.va.us
www.sparrowsp.addr.com
www.smh.com.au
www.pinetreeline.org
www.pbs.org
www.skyrocket.de
www.nacic.gov

[SAMWolf]

In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev promised to reduce East-West tensions. But within four years those promises turned to anger and mistrust. The Cold War was far from over.

For centuries, nations had tried to conquer Afghanistan. None succeeded. But the Cold War -- and an Afghan civil war -- would bring a terrible toll of death and destruction to the people of this traditionally Islamic land.

The Cold War was fought on two fronts. In public, it was a series of confrontations and crises. But the East and West also battled in the shadows, as intelligence agents risked their lives to steal secrets.

[SAMWolf]

Veterans for Constitution Restoration is a non-profit, non-partisan educational and grassroots activist organization. The primary area of concern to all VetsCoR members is that our national and local educational systems fall short in teaching students and all American citizens the history and underlying principles on which our Constitutional republic-based system of self-government was founded. VetsCoR members are also very concerned that the Federal government long ago over-stepped its limited authority as clearly specified in the United States Constitution, as well as the Founding Fathers' supporting letters, essays, and other public documents.

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Actively seeking volunteers to provide this valuable service to Veterans and their families.

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UPDATED THROUGH APRIL 2004



The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul

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[snippy_about_it]

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[SAMWolf]

Good Night, Snippy.

[snippy_about_it]

Good night Sam.

[Coleus]

before you go to bed, are you going to link all the cold war threads when you finish? Good Night.

[Iris7]

As a student of Leftism and the Soviets I could see at that time that the Gdansk shipyard strike and the later Solidarity would be the death of the Soviet Union unless the Soviets acted promptly. This was obvious. Soviets had to believe(especially deep inside the Party) that they were the "Worker's Vanguard", the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", you see. And not a gang of thugs.

This may sound absurd, but it is the honest truth.

Jarulzelski, whom Matthew despises, had much to do with keeping the Soviets from doing the dirty work. More important, the Russians hated to do the job needed. My own guess at the time is that they would have had to kill well over a million Poles. Maybe five million. That is still my guess. A return to late '30s policies.

[Aeronaut]

Good morning Snippy.

[radu]

Good morning everyone!

To all our military men and women, past and present, and to our allies who stand with us,
THANK YOU!

I hope everyone's doing fabulously! I've had my hands a bit more than full lately and haven't had much computer time. :-( I've certainly missed y'all.
((Hugz)) all 'round!

[E.G.C.]

Good morning, snippy and everyone at the Freeper Foxhole.

[Grzegorz 246]

[alfa6]

Good Morning to All at the Foxhole

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[GailA]

Good morning

[The Mayor]

September 29, 2004

A Web Of Relationships

Read: John 15:1-14

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. —Mark 12:30

Bible In One Year: Isaiah 7-8; Ephesians 2

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A Harvard Business School professor wrote an open letter to the nation's graduates. He told them that in one sense they needed to forget what they had learned in school. He said that schools tend to put too much emphasis on the idea that success comes as a result of passing tests. The professor pointed out that in the workplace doing well depends largely on learning to succeed in what he called a "web of relationships"—the ability to cooperate with others and function as an effective team.

This truth also applies to living the Christian life. We often think that spiritual maturity and success result from how much we know about biblical facts and principles.

Jesus showed us, however, that real success comes from something else—from loving one another in the same way He loved us. He made it clear that we can do this only if we "abide" in Him (John 15:7). This means that we must stay close to Him through prayer and willingly obey His commands (v.10). Our web of relationships must extend first to God and then to others.

The secret of spiritual success is not just in acquiring individual knowledge—it's in combining that knowledge with love in all our relationships. —Mart De Haan

Lord, help us learn from what You did
When You lived on this earth;
You spread Your love to all You met—
You gave each one true worth. —Branon

As Christians draw close to Christ, they draw closer to one another.

[manna]

Present!

[alfa6]

Good Morning manna

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[Mudboy Slim]

Good Morning, snippy...good morning, Sam...

"Shed Powers!!"
(To be sung to the Rolling Stones' "Dead Flowers")

Folks, when you're sitting there, thinkin' 'bout supportin' Kerry...
Votin' fer some rich bloke you don't know...
Well, Hanoi John LOATHES the FRee...prefers Sosh'list Tyranny!!
He's a Massachusetts Lib'ral to the bone!!

Devolve Power, Prez'dent Dubyuh!! Devolve Power!!
Our Righteous dreams can be real if Bush leads US now!!
That's Right...we can devolve Power to individuals...
Must devolve Power to the States...
States, devolve Power to the Counties...
Folks, it's time we Liberate the U.S. of A.!!

Now hear me, DemonRATS...Right did Liberate Iraq!!
Folks're FRee 'cuz George Dubyuh led the way!!
Ol' MUD'll be in his basement room, laughin' while FReepin' Leftist tunes...)8^D!!
In a Righteous Quest fer Independence Day!!

Devolve Power, RightWing Congress!! Devolve Power!!
Our Righteous dreams can be real if Bush leads US now!!
That's Right...we can devolve Power to individuals!!
Must devolve Power to the States!!
States, devolve Power to the Counties!!
Bush, it's time we Liberate the U.S. of A. - yeah!!

(guitar-pickin' and strummin' interlude)

Devolve Power, Prez'dent Dubyuh!! Devolve Power!!
Our Righteous dreams can be real if Bush leads US now!!
That's Right...we can devolve Power to individuals!!
Must devolve Power to the States!!
States, devolve Power to the Counties!!
Folks, it's time we Liberate the U.S. of A.!!
Bush, it's time we Liberate the U.S. of A.!!

Mudboy Slim (07/29/2004)

[Professional Engineer]

Good morning ladies. Flag-o-gram.

Today! Spaceship One will make it's first official attempt at the X-prize.