Presswatch

...Marshall Shutman, Secretary Vance's expert on Soviet matters, who, according to Graham Hovey of the New York Times, writing on January 15, announced that "the Soviet leadership had badly miscalculated both the difficulties of the military operation in Afghanistan and the reaction it would provoke in the United States and much of the world...

...But the government held firm, and in the end won a parliamentary vote in December...

...We're supposed to rendezvous with our group in Manhattan,' said the Captain, 'but I guess we'll be late.' He withdrew a large map from his pocket and unfolded it...

...In these cases, it is sometimes hard to identify cau*e and effect, but it seems that Shulman was himself briefed by the editorial board of the New York Times, a group of people responsible for the remarkable claim that the Soviet invasion put the Russians into a "quagmire...

...What sort of shifts...

...Afghan soldiers were leisurely standing around by their tanks when the Russians landed, and the hapless Afghans were gunned down without warning...

...Did we know it was going to happen...

...Instead of hearing this, however, we were treated to a bizarre briefing from Mr...

...This after noting that American journalists knew virtually nothing about the condition or location of the American hostages, had had virtually no interviews with leading Iranians, and had failed to follow up on an invitation from then-Foreign Minister Abot Hassan BaniSadr to "hold a one-day seminar with American journalists to tell them how to Michael Ledeen fir Executive Editor of the Washington Quarterly...

...The serviceman had gotten the tank restarted, and the fuel-efficient diesel --the Captain said that all tanks were powered by diesel--purred like a kitten...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 25...

...On January 7, Anderson wrote in the IVashmgton Post that, "in contrast with Soviet boldness in Afghanistan, Ayatollah Khomeini has said tauntingly that Carter lacks 'the guts' to take military action against lran...

...Tass and Pravda thundered warnings of nuclear holocaust and domestic political unrest...

...The Captain explained that we were referring to a counterrevolutionary propagandist...

...Indeed, it seems that the makers and shakers of our foreign policy were amazed by the dimensions of the Soviet assault, even from one day to the next after the initial blitzkrieg...

...There was no need for anyone to intercept conversations between Soviet leaders in order to realize that Carter's policies were inviting disaster...

...The German conditions met, NATO voted to enact the TNF modernization program...

...Just remember to keep the kettle going...

...The response from the Soviet Union was about what you might expect...

...Let me see,' he said, 'we can follow the interstate down to Westchester, turn off onto the Parkway, and come right down into Manhattan via the Triborough bridge from the Bronx...

...So, here again, one might have expected somebody to notice that while the President was warned, his experts apparendy did not believe the warnings...

...And his article ought to be required reading in the White House and the Pentagon (I exempt the State Department for two reasons: First, they don't read...

...Still nothing appeared...

...My driver here speaks passable French, so when we got separated from our column somewhere in Quebec, we had no problem being pointed in the right direction.' "Emma reminded me that the Russians we had met in Vermont, and there were a small number of them in fact, seemed like friendly people...

...I suggest there are only two serious possibilities...

...I guess we'll take 96th Street over to the West Side and then we'll be down to West 43rd...

...And so we learn, according to a "Western diplomat" in Kabul, that the coup could have been deterred by Afghan forces if the Soviet ruse had not succeeded, because "the Afghan armor in the town easily outgunned what the Soviets brought in . . . . the crucial factor was surprise...

...Nobody in Kabul was expecting this...

...This was probably what Shulman meant by "historic miscalculation...

...Is there anyone in our government who knows Leonid Brezhnev so well as to consider him a member of the family...

...She told the Captain that there was a terribly sweet Russian fellow who had come to Vermont not so long ago, a writer by profession...

...There must be fascists around here if the likes of Solzhenitsyn are allowed to live in this vicinity,' the Captain said...

...Emma said that if people wanted to get excited over a harmless crank, there was nothing much sensible folks could do about it...

...If you had read the European press, you would have found all sorts of useful information, from the width of the road hastily constructed by the Soviets for resupply of their troops to the comportment of Soviet soldiers, and finally to the impressive way the Russians not only established military control over Afghanistan but also installed their marionettes in all offices of the ministries...

...But the correct answer, at least in the Iranian-Afghanistan phase of the Carter debacle, is Jack Anderson...

...I think we'll bivouac in a place called the Algonquin.' ""I suppose they're on their way and I realized that they will be staying not so far from your offices, so I just wanted to alert you...

...Thus, the serious question--why didn't we believe the intelligence reports--is cancelled by the great circle route: Times to Shulman to Times, the modern double play...

...change American thinking...

...Evidently the Afghans did not, and one might readily conclude that our government was no better off, for the press briefings from the State Department constantly played down the dimensions of the invasion...

...On January 10, in a performance right out of the fifties (when types ranging from Joe McCarthy to Drew Pearson-Anderson's mentor--and Walter Winchell breathlessly announced they had come into some secret documents that finally exposed "the real story"), Anderson purported to relate the essential themes of a "secret analysis" of how Carter's refusal to respond to previous Soviet initiatives was responsible for "precipitating the Soviet intervention" itself...

...So far as I know, the only thing to appear in print on the subject of "Italy and TNF" has been an editorial in the New York Times in November about SALT, in which it was argued that weak governments like Italy's could hardly be expected to accept TNF modernization until the Senate ratified SALT...

...Week after week, Anderson has attacked the President for inviting Soviet aggression against Afghanistan, ignoring intelligence reports warning about the Russian buildup, and sending signals of such ostentatious weakness that the Kremlin could hardly resist the temptation to invade...

...It all happened like this: Last fall, the United States had proposed a program of modernizing NATO's theater nuclear forces (TNF) by manufacturing and deploying hundreds of cruise missiles and Pershing-2 missiles in Western Europe...

...Tyrrell may be in some danger from some of his friends in the media...

...Emma's the kind of woman who'll make a special effort to make newcomers feel welcome...

...There was a breakfast at Blair House with the Prime Minister for the top reporters, but the subject there was whether Italy would support the boycott of the Olympic Games...

...The East Coast winner is Douglas Watson of the Sun, who concluded an article on American press coverage of Teheran prior to the expulsion order early in January by saying " I f Iran had been covered half as well by the American press during the decades of the shah's modernizing but arrogant, friendly but cruel and corrupt rule, Americans might have understood better how to avoid the disaster that has occurred there...

...But to judge from our journalists' reports, it was a simple matter for the Russians to march in, take over, kill their enemies, and get on with the business of moving the iron Curtain to the borders of lran, Pakistan, and China...

...They have access to elaborate intelligence detailing what goes on inside the Kremlin...

...Who were the authors of this modern philosophers' stone...

...The game was won by a single point, 17-16, "in a game," according to the Herald Examiner, "closer than the score indicated...

...France did not count, as that country pretends not to be part of the NATO alliance, and countries like Belgium 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 and the Netherlands were not willing to be "out front" on such a potentially explosive domestic political issue...

...Even so, Anderson's old, bad habits die hard...

...F i n a l l y , there is the question of American intelligence and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...Except the man on third base--the Red Army in this case--scored the winning run in the meantime...

...The journalists themselves were then able to get on with what they took to be the " r e a l " story: "What did it mean...

...You might think Bill Satire, George Will, or Joe Kraft...

...Of course, Mr...

...If someone had elected to attend the "seminar," we might today be spared headlines proclaiming Mr...

...Bani-Sadr a "moderate...

...To look at him you would never imagine that anyone could get all worked up over him,' Emma said...

...The conversations of Kremlin THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980 23 leaders have been intercepted, and their personalities have been closely analyzed...

...Just suppose, for example, that one of his sources for this story turned out to be a member of the notorious Agency...

...At this point the Russians began to engage in animated conversation among themselves...

...Jack Anderson: Do you really think that Khomeini's first name is "Ayatollah...

...One might have expected our pressmen to have shown at least some interest in the military details of the enormously complex operation that brought nearly 100,000 Soviet troops into Afghanistan...

...The grandfather clock I had inherited from my great-uncle Nathan chimed three o'clock, reminding the Captain that it was time to go...

...T h i s month's award for runaway prose is divided between the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Baltimore Sun...

...For only the KGB can reasonably be expected to have tapped the lines of Kremlin leaders, and to have understood the motives for Soviet foreign policy with almost perfect accuracy...

...Which major columnist has been toughest on Jimmy Carter's weak foreign policy...

...second, they wouldn't listen...

...There was considerable danger that the German conditions would not be met, thus plunging NATO into a serious crisis...

...At the State Department, Secretary Vance sang the praises of the Cossiga government (just as Henry Kissinger had last autumn, after visiting the Prime Minister--and the Pope...

...First, that the source is Jimmy Carter himself, who embraced the Soviet tyrant with filial affection in Vienna (this hypothesis is supported by Teddy Kennedy's apparently witless remark that foreign policy should not be based on "unrequited love"), or, alternatively, that Jack Anderson has gotten his hands on some KGB files...

...Are there still awards for real journalism...

...But the working press didn't notice...

...Roland Tyrrell of the Los Angeles Times demonstrated on January 10...

...The Americans (and most Western military analysts) believed this was necessary to offset the massive Soviet buildup in this and other areas...

...was a historic miscalculation likely to bring additional shifts in Kremlin policy in the months to come...

...No one knew that Italy had already accepted TNF modernization, SALT or no SALT...

...Yet, according to nearly a dozen intelligence experts and other top officials I spoke to, the President had received clear warnings of Soviet intentions to move massively into Afghanistan as early as last July...

...She couldn't think of his name but I assumed that she must have been referring to AI Solzhenitsyn, the bearded novelist who had created all the fuss back in 1975...

...I know Leonid Brezhnev better than I know my own father,' one analyst told me...

...According to Anderson, "these conc|usions are not the wild guesses of eggheads who suck them out of their thumbs...

...We returned to the highway to find the service truck from Hammerville Exxon...

...According to Watson, not a single journalist accepted the offer...

...For once, our advance warning was excellent, and the military experts who had followed the intelligence all along were not at all surprised by the events of late December and early January...

...Certainly it deserved some notice, even ifa sardonic editor had chosen to treat it as a "man bites dog" story (militarily inept haly bails out hobnailed Germans and Americans, etc...

...And while the nature of the information is classified, the fact that it existed is certainly not...

...The press was fully briefed...

...Other "progressives" lamented the move and threatened to bring down the coalition...

...Thus, the British OK was not sufficient...

...If so, one ought to go to Mr...

...He wrote that the invasion of Afghanistan was accomplished with such consummate ease because the Russians conducted " a carefully planned combination of deception, surprise and brute force...

...It was at this point that the Italian Council of Ministers, under the stewardship of Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga, quietly voted to accept the missiles on Italian soil...

...Then, the victim of a frenzy of moralism, Tyrrell might find himself disgraced for accepting a story from a " s p y . " There is another big story that nobody, noticed in the United States, even though it was on the front pages of virtually every major newspaper in the Western world for several weeks, in one form or another...

...I n the matter of Afghanistan, the American press has performed with its usual superficiality and love of "lesson" at the expense of information...

...The journalists who follow such matters had a second chance in January, when Cossiga made a routine visit to Washington for a couple of days...

...The headline could have read: "haly saves NATO...

...Don Oberdorfer of the Washington Post also sat at the fount of Shulman's wisdom, quoting him as believing t h a t " the Soviet Union's decision...

...And the analysis is confirmed by usefu, details: Afghan soldiers did not resist when the Soviet airlift took place, for the simple reason that they thought the Russians were coming to reinforce them...

...Where you bound?' asked the serviceman laconically...

...Roland Tyrrell for this contribution to our understanding of Soviet methods...

...Indeed, the only really interesting element in the Anderson column is the source of the comments...

...An old-style agitprop peace offensive...

...I hope they'll take my suggestion and drop by...

...It will be Soviet bombs versus tribal muskets," we were told, "in a terrain that favors guerrillas...

...The West Germans were willing to accept these missile's on 1heir tr provided that at least one other continental European country do the same...

...The Herald Examiner gets its 50 percent of the glory for its coverage of the Rose Bowl game between Ohio State and Southern California...

...Yet one really would like to know something about "what happened," and the story was lying there, available for plucking, as Mr...

...Words of high praise were heard at the White House...

...The local Communist Party denounced the decision...

...That relatively obvious insight had been all over the world press for years...

...The most dramatic ingredient of this campaign came a few days before the December 27 coup: "Soviet advisers effectively disarmed two key armored Afghan divisions days b e f o r e . . . b y persuading officers to turn over their ammunition for inventory and their tank batteries for winterizing, Western diplomatic sources said Wednesday...