Victory
Schweizer, Peter
F or nearly three decades after World War II, one of the great breakthroughs in defeating the Nazis was kept secret. This was the cracking of the German coding machine Enigma. The system for...
...After all, the strategy—to put military, technological, political, and economic pressure on the Soviets—wasn't secret...
...Second, and more important in Casey's mind, it would ruin the Soviet economy...
...Schweizer didn't interview Casey, who died in 1987, but he makes the anti-Soviet policy sound more Casey's than Reagan's...
...No doubt later, fuller accounts of the triumph over Soviet Communism will nail that down...
...But the whole story won't be known until reams of classified documents, particularly a string of National Security Decision Directives drafted under President Reagan, are made public years from now...
...Strobe Talbott says Mikhail Gorbachev responded "primarily to internal pressures, not external ones...
...Sorry,but I wince at the use of the word "secret...
...Apparently...
...M ost notable was the effort to undermine the Soviet Union economically...
...When two sides fight and one loses, chances are the winner had something to do with it...
...The Saudis had been allowed to buy AWACS radar planes...
...The system for breaking the code, known as Ultra, was at the core of the most dazzling and significant deception in military history, Operation Fortitude...
...This was a widespread program, including altered or fabricated technological information in both civilian and military areas," Schweizer writes...
...Reagan repeatedly promised American defense of Saudi Arabia...
...Had Casey, along with Reagan, prompted this Saudi move...
...Still, Schweizer isn't certain even whether oil pricing was a fundamental part of the comprehensive strategy to "exacerbate" the Soviet economic crisis...
...It is coming out in dribs and drabs: tales of daring spy flights over the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, accounts of successful economic warfare, Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...VICTORY: THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION'S SECRET STRATEGY THAT HASTENED THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION Peter Schweizer Atlantic Monthly Press / 284 pages / $22 reviewed by FRED BARNES 70 The American Spectator August 1994 Another eye-popping part of the Reagan strategy was the use of economic disinformation...
...These efforts are well known...
...breathtaking revelations of geostrategic bonanzas...
...Two reasons...
...We'll know for sure when the presidential directives are released...
...At one point Reagan looked the Saudi king straight in the eye and gave him his absolute assurance that he would do whatever was necessary to ensure the integrity of Saudi Arabia," says Schweizer...
...Something similar is happening with the story of victory over Soviet Communism in the Cold War...
...One, it would help the U.S...
...How do we know Talbott is wrong...
...And now there's Peter Schweizer's compelling, if underreported, book...
...Why was Casey so eager for this...
...Schweizer tells the story of economic warfare chronologically, mixing it in with the evolution of SDI, recruitment of Sweden in the fight to save Solidarity, and so on...
...I had not known, for instance, of CIA Director Bill Casey's relentless campaign to get Saudi Arabia to increase oil production, flood the market, and drive down oil prices...
...Common sense, for one thing...
...Schweizer, former fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, doesn't have a documentary record to rely on...
...It caused serious delays in construction of the Soviet natural gas pipeline, thereby delaying the accrual of hard currency from gas sales...
...So thoroughly fooled were Hitler and his lieutenants that even when American, British, and Canadian troops hit the Normandy beaches, the Germans thought the landing was a feint and the real invasion would take place elsewhere...
...Then there's the testimony of Soviet generals, economists, and defectors to buttress this impression...
...My favorite was the sale of blueprints for gas turbine components with a built-in engineering flaw...
...These actions persuaded the Germans that Allied forces were more than double their real size and that the D-Day landing would occur in Norway or Pas de Calais in France, not in Normandy...
...It was pushed...
...economy in the same manner as an across-the-board tax cut...
...Thus, when the Saudis increased production from 2 million to 6 million, then to 9 million barrels a day, in 1985, it "drove a stake through the heart of the Soviet economy," writes Schweizer...
...But he's interviewed the top national security officials of the Reagan administration—Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Robert McFarlane, Donald Regan, John Poindexter, Ed Meese, Richard Allen, Bill Clark, et al.—and they've revealed more to Schweizer than they did in their own books...
...It was something Reagan excelled at—a personal diplomatic gesture pregnant with meaning...
...Only parts of it were, and Schweizer deserves credit for spelling them out in compelling fashion...
...One more problem: Bill Casey...
...Schweizer also runs through the administration's exploitation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, its funneling of CIA funds to Solidarity in Poland, its emphasis on high-tech weapons like the Strategic Defense Initiative, its bid to keep the Soviets from buying new technologies they couldn't produce on their own—all aimed at bringing the Soviet economy and ruling class to the breaking point...
...However, we've already learned enough to know that the Soviet empire didn't fall over on its own...
...What factor lay most heavily on the minds of the Saudis when they made the decision is anybody's guess," admits Schweizer...
...But Schweizer places them as part of an overall strategy, and that's the beauty of his valuable book...
...There was a better way: he should have isolated the economic strategy and followed it through to the end, then turned to a different element...
...This was news to me, and I was thrilled to learn of it...
...The information was part true, part false, with "enough truth to get Soviet engineers to take the bait and begin digesting the information and using it in their own designs, mixed with enough fiction to make their efforts ultimately fail...
...After reading Victory, I wasn't sure if Reagan's role was marginal or major...
...For every dollar drop in the price of a barrel of oil, the Soviets lost a dollar in hard currency...
...My point, though, is how long it was before the full story of Ultra and the massive deception became known...
...Reagan issued a special executive order that permitted a private sale to them of Stinger missiles without notifying Congress...
...The Soviets relied on oil exports almost entirely for their hard currency...
...Schweizer explains convincingly how these internal pressures were intensified by deliberate American acts...
...A joint venture of Brits and Yanks, Fortitude "made full use" of Ultra, double agents, dummy armies, phony radio traffic, and other clever measures, writes historian Stephen Ambrose in D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II...
...This is a short book, but I sometimes lost the trail...
...Schweizer says they've disclosed the "secret strategy" pursued by the Reagan administration in the Cold War, the strategy to roll back Communism, not merely contain it...
...Maybe it was, but if so, we should be told explicitly...
...Oil pricing, he says, was "apparently codified into policy...
...But the administration had certainly done enough favors for the Saudi ruling family that reciprocation was in order...
...Without the deception, D-Day might have failed entirely, and the war been prolonged, or worse...
...We know that Strobe Talbott, President Clinton's deputy secretary of state and a former Time correspondent, was wrong when he wrote in 1990: "The Soviet system has gone into meltdown because of inadequacies and defects at its core, not because of anything the outside world has done or not done or threatened to do...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
