Spectator's Journal/Casey's Final Mission
Ledeen, Michael
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL CASEY'S FINAL MISSION rr hat congressional investigators I should be digging into the October Surprise Hoax rather than studying Bill Casey's greatest operation is a tribute to...
...Pugo, despite his alcoholic daze, recognized he had been made a fool of, and blew his brains out...
...The only remaining question is when Bill Casey will emerge to fill in the last missing details...
...This task was unwittingly but brilliantly fulfilled by Admiral Crowe and General Powell, two successive chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff...
...For, instead of using Gorbachev to provoke an insurrection by the Democrats, he was confident enough of the incompetence of the "Gorbachev team" to approve...
...Since he was personally indispensable to the operation, he decided to go underground...
...When she realized that Gorbachev was the only major world leader to embrace her tyrannical and corrupt opponent, she had no hesitation in working closely with the United States...
...Once this had been accomplished, it was only necessary to surround them with incompetent aides, and inept economists (of which there was an overabundance in Moscow), and keep them all well supplied with vodka, women, and hard currency for their overseas accounts, something that Casey was able to have Gates manage through some of the...
...Andrews...
...SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL CASEY'S FINAL MISSION rr hat congressional investigators I should be digging into the October Surprise Hoax rather than studying Bill Casey's greatest operation is a tribute to the extent of Casey's cunning...
...We can all look forward to his book, which I am told has the working title of Unveiled...
...Later in the Reagan years, Casey activated Gorbachev for such sensitive missions as authorizing a Sandinista invasion of Honduras on the eve of a crucial congressional vote on contra aid and urging the Libyans to bomb a West German nightclub, thereby justifying an armed American response...
...This subtle tactic ensured maximum support for all the nationalist and ethnic movements in the empire, for it branded Gorbachev an ineffective enemy...
...But the most brilliant part of GEORGE was the selection of Gorbachev's own team in Moscow...
...Gates masterfully protected Yeltsin from being suspected of beingthe "American candidate" by staging a series of diplomatic rebuffs at the White House...
...For it was obvious that the experienced members of the Old Guard were not only suspicious of Gorbachev, but skilled enough to uncover the plot...
...This was, of course, authorized by Gorbachev himself, who secretly passed word to the most inept of all the coup leaders, Interior Minister Boris Pugo...
...Late in the Reagan presidency, Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, a man with great experience in Washington, beMichael Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...But happily no one pursued it, and GEORGE meandered towards its triumphant conclusion...
...The plan went even better than anticipated, for the GEORGE documents—from which this account is largely drawn—called for Gorbachev to escape to Vilnius, denounce the coup, endorse Yeltsin, and then defect to California...
...Andrews, Scotland, where he was able to maintain secure communications THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 27 with Gorbachev's control in Moscow and with the loyal Gates back in Washington...
...The August coup was carefully managed by Casey through Gorbachev...
...Whenever Gorbachev balked, Casey would threaten to cut off Raisa's American Express card, and "Iron Mike" relented...
...Gates easily convinced General Scowcroft that Yeltsin was a hard-drinking boor, thereby shielding Yeltsin from undue suspicion and enhancing his popularity among the Russian people, who had long admired boorishness and hard drinking...
...Gates was also able to recruit two important allies to the disinformation campaign against Gorbachev: Vice President Quayle and Defense Secretary Cheney...
...Gorbachev warned darkly about the use of military power to preserve the Union, and he even supported occasional forays into Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, and Lithuania, just enough to placate the hard-liners but not nearly enough to quell the rising tide of democratic and nationalistic opposition...
...0 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991...
...The risk grew considerably when Mrs...
...Casey's major problem was to keep the operation secret, particularly from a KGB that grew increasingly suspicious by Michael Ledeen of Gorbachev as he ruthlessly and systematically dismantled the empire...
...These actions were also necessary on an international level, for the repression reinforced the anti-Soviet lobbies in Washington, London, and Paris, delaying efforts at a bailout for the Kremlin...
...Even before the funeral, he had removed his operational base from Langley to a small cottage near the 15th green of the historic golf course at St...
...The mission was to destroy the Soviet empire, discredit Communism, and launch a democratic movement that would shatter the Soviet Union...
...Any clear-eyed analysis of Gorbachev would have led ineluctably to the conclusion that he was an American agent, for how else could one explain his constant statements of amazement at the "intensity of national and ethnic sentiment" in a nation whose major domestic problem had long since been proclaimed to be precisely ethnic and national separatism...
...The brilliant management of the Yeltsin account and the Shevardnadze gambit were handled, once again, by Casey himself...
...This enabled Gates to play a rather more public role than he could have at CIA, and Gates carried out Casey's orders to speak out against working too closely with Gorbachev...
...the Chaplinesque "coup" of August 19...
...For while it was perhaps understandable that Americans, and even most Europeans, would not notice that Gorbachev never had an effective policy for any of the problems that beset the beleaguered empire (and that all of his actions worked to the detriment of the existing system), it certainly was perceived by the other Kremlin leaders...
...They had to be replaced with men whose intellect and personal habits would render them incapable of infiltrating GEORGE, or of posing any effective opposition to Gorbachev's policies to dismantle the Soviet empire...
...Could Gorbachev be the only person in the Soviet Union to believe that Stalin had solved the nationalities problem...
...Then, once they voted for independence, he sent in the army, which used just enough force to enrage the Lithuanians, but not nearly enough to put an end to the anti-Kremlin demonstrations...
...Thatcher unaccountably took Gorbachev seriously, and proclaimed him "a man with whom we can do business," thereby placing him at great risk...
...Moreover, he had already given considerable thought to the future of GEORGE after Reagan had left office...
...In the event, Gorbachev was able to remain in place and stay in Moscow long enough to carry out the final stages of dismantling the Soviet Union...
...When the Lithuanians came to him—before voting for independence—and asked what he wished them to do, he encouraged them to vote...
...In a characteristic departure from tradition, the director of Central Intelligence took personal control of an operation...
...T he details of Gorbachev's recruit- ' ment are not known, but there can be no doubt that he was the perfect agent for the mission, showing what Casey later referred to as "a genius for destruction" that gave him an almost instinctive feel for the right moves in delicate situations...
...Casey resolved the problem by ensuring that several Reagan Administration officials expressed profound distrust of Gorbachev...
...The first clear evidence that Gorbachev was our man in the Kremlin was his enthusiastic endorsement of the Marcos "victory" over Corazon Aquino in the Philippines...
...So he had Gorbachev carry out an about-face, and support a new "crackdown" on the separatists...
...In every case, he actedso as to inflame anti-Communist passions to the utmost, while never effectively repressing them...
...Slowly, but carefully, the likes of Kryuchkov, Pugo, Moiseyev, and Yazov were appointed to the key positions in the regime...
...old CIA accounts in their favorite bank, BCCI...
...So Casey, in the most melodramatic moment Of OPERATION GEORGE prior to the events of the last summer, staged his own death...
...Weinberger led this effort...
...By the summer, Casey decided it was safe to move, and the final stages of OPERATION GEORGE were typical of Casey's whimsical approach to espionage...
...Sole credit for this triumph must go to the amazing foresight, careful planning, and skilled management of William Casey, the squire of St...
...Andrews greens have frozen over and the old Irishman yearns for warmer weather and good conversation...
...There was a brief crisis when Jim Baker, who never understood what was going on, insisted on visiting Shevardnadze, but Gorbachev put a stop to it...
...For it is now over five years since I wrote in these pages: I don't know how much we're paying Mikhail Gorbachev to act as an American agent in the Kremlin, but he's worth every ruble he gets from the CIA .. . Since then, various Soviet leaders have reiterated this inescapable conclusion...
...He instructed Gorbachev to purge Yeltsin—easily the most popular Communist in Moscow—and the clever foreign minister from all positions in the government and the Communist party, and then permit Yeltsin and Shevardnadze to "return" in a new mantle, now viscerally opposed to the Old Order...
...GEORGE undoubtedly ranks as the greatest success story in the history of the CIA, and perhaps in all of espionage...
...The Iran-contra scandal menaced the operation, because Casey's movements came under increased scrutiny, and the congressional investigations left him little time to devote to GEORGE...
...Their public infatuation with Marshal Akhromeyev greatly embarrassed the Soviet military chief, who could hardly attack Gorbachev's growing friendship with Reagan and Thatcher once Akhromeyev was so clearly the darling of the American military establishment...
...gan to suspect that there was something suspicious about Gorbachev's relations with the United States, and Casey quickly arranged for Dobrynin's purge from power, a pattern that was later repeated with foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze...
...And that will probably be early in the winter, when the St...
...But the details have remained far from public view...
...The communications to Gorbachev came directly from Casey himself, and Gorbachev understood that he was thoroughly protected by the very limited distribution of the GEORGE communications, for the details of OPERATION GEORGE were known to only four people: Reagan, Casey, Casey's deputy Robert Gates, and Gorbachev's control agent in Moscow, whose identity cannot yet be revealed...
...In retrospect it seems astonishing that Gorbachev's preposterous statements were not more widely recognized as such at the time...
...By early 1991, it had finally become clear to Gorbachev's government "allies" that the empire was doomed unless drastic action was taken, but Casey was not ready to move that early...
...At the same time, it was necessary to have Communist hardliners embraced by American officers, so that Gorbachev could criticize his own colleagues for cozying up to the enemy...
...The few talented people in Soviet politics were driven out, so they would have no option other than the democratic movements...
...I can now reveal that the Gorbachev operation was known to the handful of people involved in running the Soviet president as OPERATION GEORGE, after the saint who stayed the dragon...
...There was a bad moment when Bob Woodward concocted the story of his deathbed interview with Casey, which, although false, raised the danger that others might conclude that the story of the stroke and brain tumor was a hoax...
...P laying golf early in the morning, I— studying the progress of GEORGE in the afternoon, and reading voraciously in the evenings, Casey led a happy life, and he got another lucky break when Gates was moved from CIA to the National Security Council by Bush...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
