The New Cold War Revisionism

...The public admission didn't come until last November, when a group of American and Russian scientists headed by Meselson published an article in Science, agreeing with the CIA's conclusion of more than a decade before—the epidemic had been caused by escaping toxins from Military Compound 19 at Sverdlovsk...

...This gold rush is from Canada— not to Canada...

...Meselson examined hospital records that showed there had been a steady stream of anthrax victims, not the sudden surge to be expected from an accident...

...But, with perhaps almost as much likelihood . . . it could have been caused by tainted meat, just as the Russians say...

...In the early Seventies I started to follow Canadian gold mining stocks, and today I spend much of my research time in Canada visiting my contacts and other mining industry professionals...

...financial media, but gold mining stocks make up over 10% of the Toronto Stock Exchange Index (Canada's S&P equivalent...

...Instead of picks and shovels their tools are laptop computers and dump trucks the size of small buildings, and instead of mules they use helicopters...

...30 The American Spectator June 1995 Meselson appealed to Soviet authorities for permission to conduct investigations on the spot...

...It was a sort of Platonic ideal of a Communist front publication, with headlines like "The Soviet Woman Is Not A Feminist—She Has No Reason To Struggle Since All Her Problems Are Solved" and "The CIA Trains Mosquitoes to Poison—The Secrets of the USA's Biological War...

...L ast fall, the New York Times ran a front-page story detailing the CIA's covert assistance to the Japanese Liberal Party during the 1950s...

...If you would like to learn more about our top recommendations or services please contact us at (800) 426-9993...

...Some were in predictably pro-Soviet magazines such as the British New Scientist, but the stories ran most everywhere...

...He took the documents at face value, and two years later organized an American tour for his Soviet comrades to Cambridge, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C...

...it would be a tragedy for the truly guilty in the former Soviet Union to recycle themselves politically without being challenged with the facts...

...Most investors are unaware of the magnitude of the great Canadian Gold Rush...

...But a problem arose: acting on instructions from the Soviets, Bobolas cut Yannikos out of the deal...

...T he first concerns Paul Anastasi, a writer for the New York Times and other Western publications who stumbled across one of the greatest of all the Cold War stories in Greece, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence for his efforts...

...Its brass sent strong supporting letters on behalf of Anastasi to the court...

...this was reduced to one year on appeal, and later commuted to a fine...

...When it turned out that he was wrong, the Times asked the same reporter who wrote puff pieces about Meselson's past errors to write the official cover-up...

...The Financial Times' s man in Moscow, David Satter, toured the Sverdlovsk region in the spring of 1980, and met various people whose anecdotal evidence supported the official Soviet line...

...Anyone looking dispassionately at the record of the past sixteen years would have to conclude that Meselson, for the most part, had bought the Soviet line...

...The Soviets claimed that infection continued for quite some time, suggesting that the infectious agent couldn't have been a cloud of spores—a cloud would have spread its poisons quickly...

...The nature of the Sverdlovsk incident is still unresolved because the Soviets are still sulking...

...CI 32 The American Spectator June 1995...

...Some of our most prestigious institutions, including the Hoover Institution and the Library of Congress, were tacitly party to this shameful arrangement...

...Meselson funded the tour with money from a grant he'd obtained from the MacArthur Foundation, and continued to stress the plausibility of the official Soviet explanation...

...Canadian miners, the best in the world, are off to Latin America, West Africa, Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union where the potential for gold discovery is enormous...

...the mid- to late eighties, the Times had given complete coverage to its readers, while cautiously defending Anastasi editorially...

...Yannikos took the money, and announced he was too sick to testify on Anastasi's behalf...

...Bukovsky sent the documents to Anastasi, who tried to interest Greek newspapers with them, but the intimidation campaign waged by Ethnos and its friends in Papandreou's government was successful...

...the Moscow publication quoted a local doctor who treated the victims of the incident: "What we had was waste from a bacteriological weapon...

...Yannikos was instructed to find an appropriate business partner...

...In 1978 Yannis Yannikos, a veteran Communist Party member who had often been in the Soviet Union for months at a time since the 1974 fall of the colonels, showed up in Athens...

...These risks should be carefully considered...

...What Soviet disinformation efforts show is that we will not get real disarmament without strict verification and an insistence that .. . before they sign a new global ban, the Soviets explain why they violated the one that exists...

...this time there was no legal action from Ethnos and no thuggish backup from the government...

...But the other shoe never dropped: there were neither apologies for past error, nor warnings about the ramifications this new discovery had for American-Soviet arms control agreements...

...Anastasi was targeted because he wrote for two of the English-speaking world's most prestigious newspapers, the Times and the London Telegraph...

...and Yannikos had provided, for the first time, documentary and first-hand evidence of the inner workings of the operation...

...The announcement required some kind of reaction, so the New York Times called upon one of Meselson's earliest acolytes: Nicholas Wade—the Science writer who was by now on the staff of the Times...

...Last year, Bill Clinton signed a little-noticed piece of legislation that authorizes the creation of a monument to the victims of Communism, and there is some talk already about the need for a museum along the lines of the Holocaust Museum, to remind us about a past that many would like forgotten...

...His request was granted after four years, but at the last minute in the summer of 1983, not long after the Soviets shot down KAL flight 007, Meselson's trip was canceled by the Kremlin...

...They are none too eager to reopen this painfully embarrassing subject, and for them, Bukovsky's documents were not exactly welcome news...

...The issue became even more explosive when a Soviet émigré by the name of Mark Popovsky testified before a House Intelligence Committee subcommittee that June...

...And there the story died...

...Although I am an American broker I don't follow Wall Street that much, my entire focus is on Canadian natural resource stocks...

...Instead of insisting on open access, they made their own private deals with the Russians, trading principle for a handful of old documents...

...to sign a chemical weapons ban . . . such an agreement must be real, not imaginary...

...It describes the most exciting gold mining phenomenon I have ever seen...

...Satter went on to add that, while he had found evidence that refuted the official version, it had inadvertently been edited out of his story...

...There was no news report, no heroic portrait of Anastasi in the Sunday magazine, no editorial warning about the KGB running its own newspaper in a NATO country...

...It could constitute a violation—extraordinarily foolish and selfdefeating—of the 1975 convention...

...No matter that the same information had been announced by the Russian president—and no matter that the Cabot Professor had been pumping the Soviet line for more than a decade...

...He was promptly sued by Ethnos, which enjoyed the full support of the Greek government...

...Yet just six months later, Russia's Literaturnaya Gazeta published firsthand accounts from people stating, "I am today firmly convinced that in the spring of 1979, a deadly cloud arose over our military center and the wind carried it . . ." Horrible stories circulated about burying the dead in lead caskets and research into genetic engineering...

...Anastasi was convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment...

...My career as a stockbroker began 34 years ago on the floor of the old Spokane Mining Exchange...

...The paper's choice to ignore the story is typical of the very slight American interest in the misadventures of the Evil Empire...

...It's a worthy enterprise, magnified by the great need to preserve the truth in some place where it cannot be subverted...

...It is a short step from that falsification to an unwillingness to challenge the next enemy of freedom...

...Boris Yeltsin finally announced in 1992 that he had been misled at the time, but now knew that the incident had been caused by an accident at a chemical-weapons facility...

...Since the Socialist Party had just entered Japanese government for the first time since the war, Bukovsky thought his information might be newsworthy—especially given the Times's demonstrated interest in the covert funding of Japanese political parties...

...Yeltsin's announcement galvanized Meselson, who returned to Russia that summer...

...Ethnos wielded enormous political influence, both onrunaway best-seller in Greece...

...I am acquainted with several of the financial institutions that have financed this gold rush and I know that they are speculating- more on the fundamentals of the individual mining stocks- and less on an increase in the price of gold...

...Ethnos hadn't bothered to sue any of the roughly half-dozen published accounts that had made precisely the same claim—that the KGB had financed Ethnos and the Akademos operation...

...When Bobolas refused, Yannikos sued him, and told the whole story to the Times's Anastasi...

...Most of his activities on Sverdlovsk had consisted of attacking the United States and defending the Soviet Union...

...It was a classic of the genre, complete with embarrassed soundbites from the guilty politicians and apologetic remarks from the Agency...

...And though the Times itself and two of its reporters had been targeted by an arrogant KGB disinformation operation, the paper—and virtually every other "major" newspaper in America and Western Europe—deemed the saga insufficiently newsworthy...

...It is clear from this archival material that support for Bobolas came from the very top of the Soviet pyramid...

...Although the New York Times itself—and two of its reporters—had been targeted by an arrogant KGB disinformation operation, the paper deemed the saga insufficiently newsworthy...

...The great Canadian Gold Rush was set off by changing mining regulations and tax laws in third world countries...

...But according to Cabot Professor . Meselson . the outbreak may have been caused instead by airborne spores...

...Yannikos later told the Wall Street Journal that he hadn't realized he was dealing with the KGB at the time—a bit hard to accept from a man who had spent so much time in the Soviet Union...

...Bobolas had fallen on tough times, and was delighted to accept the Soviet offer: 70 percent of the profits from the commercial ventures would go into the publishing venture, with the remainder to be divvied up between the two Greek partners...

...Gold mining stocks are not suitable for many investors...

...The information in the Soviet archives could avert this unfortunate outcome...

...Our minimum account size is $10,000...

...Meselson would later make a name for himself as the leading skeptic of the "Yellow Rain" theory, according to which the Soviets used poison gas against their enemies in Afghanistan, Laos, and Cambodia in the early 1980s...

...Yannikos had been involved in the marketing of Soviet books in Greece in the past, but he was told by his Soviet interlocutors that this new project could not be runbehalf of Papandreou within Greece, and on behalf of the Soviets internationally...

...claims were far more suspect...

...Without doubt, something strange and unprecedented happened...

...Sam Parks Group - National Securities Corporation 1001 4th Ave., Suite 2200, Seattle, WA 98154 MEMBER NASD and SIPC 31 American decision in 1991 to drop a demand for "spot on-site inspections" of Soviet chemical weapons facilities as a condition for a treaty agreement to ban the weapons...

...You would never know it from the U.S...

...Meselson offered several learned theories to explain the anthrax deaths...

...What was so surprising about yet another episode...

...He discovered George Bobolas, a well-established businessman who bragged to the Soviets that he could help them with technology transfer, an area of particular interest to the KGB...

...Chief among these is a Some of our most prestigious institutions, including the Hoover Institution and the Library of Congress, were tacitly party to this shameful arrangement...

...he believed himself entitled to a share of the paper's abundant profits...

...Thus was formed the Akademos publishing house...

...He returned this time with evidence that, indeed, the cause of the anthrax outbreak had been airborne...

...Michael Ledeen The New Cold War Revisionism As new information is resolving old controversies, the New York Times reverts to its habit of covering up Soviet disinformation—even if that means throwing its own journalists overboard, or rewriting history...

...Mining is a risky business...

...Bukovsky called Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, who called Abe Rosenthal, former editor of the Times, who—after verifying the substance of the story—called (in Rosenthal's words) "the apMichael Ledeen, our foreign editor, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...In effect, it has invited the Russians to sit down and discuss the issue with but one condition, that their explanation won't be on the agenda...

...But Satter later became one of the first to suspect a disinformation campaign on the part of the Soviets...

...The hysterical reaction of the paper clearly betrayed the fact that Anastasi had done them some damage...

...Meanwhile, Sitnikov begged Yannikos to drop the suit, stressing how important Ethnos was to the Soviets...

...The American woman was the Times's Marvine Howe...

...the case was ultimately thrown out by the Supreme Court on a technicality...

...In February 1990, Meselson was presented with the Freedom and Responsibility Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science...

...Some of these documents chronicle an extended period of Soviet covert support for the Japanese Socialist Party from the 1950s well into the 1970s...

...He wrote in 1991: "I now believe that the people I quoted [in his 1980 story] were KGB plants...

...Yannikos was not pleased...

...After a hymn to Meselson's work in challenging the government's "yellow rain" hypothesis, Wade notes of the Sverdlovsk anthrax episode that "the truth was not so clear cut and Meselson not so right...

...And the true history of the Cold War has yet to be told over there...

...The American Spectator June 1995 29 top-secret KGB report entitled "On Cooperation with Greek Publisher G. Bobolas...

...government official call for opening the files—ours or theirs—on the Soviet period...

...And if a military base near the site of the epidemic was the source, then the Soviets may be guilty of violating the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972...

...In recent months, two major stories have broken regarding the KGB's use of Western journalists in Soviet disinformation campaigns, and both reflect poorly on the American media...

...Wade concocted an extraordinary puff piece in the Times Magazine last December 18...

...Three more years passed, and in the summer of '86, Meselson finally met with the Soviet doctors who had examined the evidence back in '79...

...He was alarmed that articles like his own had contributed to the The American Spectator June 1995 The great Canadian Gold Rush...

...To call Ethnos pro-Soviet would be a considerable understatement...

...A recently published book, The Secret World of American Communism, reviewed by Philip Terzian on p. 62, is going to make such self-deception harder to entertain...

...Great Canadian Gold Rush" isn't just a catchy Sam Parks advertising slogan...

...Using Soviet literature on the subject, Meselson showed that there had been many previous outbursts of anthrax in the country—thirty-five of them in Sverdlovsk alone between 1956 and 1968...

...Popovsky, the author of Soviet biology and medical texts, claimed to have information about an explosion at Compound 19—a secret military facility in Sverdlovsk for the production of biological agents—at the time of the mysterious anthrax outbreak Most government scientists and intelligence analysts were convinced that Popovsky's information was good, but there was one notable dissenter: Matthew Meselson, a Harvard professor of microbiology and consultant to the CIA...

...Yet Boris Yeltsin, after repeated promises to open the Communist archives, last year summarily issued a 30-year secrecy edict that sealed virtually everything after 1965...

...These documents antedate the creation of Ethnos by more than a year...

...At the time of the trials inple died from anthrax...

...A few days later, the article came to the attention of Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet dissident now living in England...

...Returns were good enough for his Soviet friends to encourage Bobolas to embark on a new project—a daily newspaper to be called Ethnos...

...Thus deprived of his key witness—the main source of the information in the book—Anastasi faced an impossible task in court...

...There is commodity price risk, there is operational risk and there is political risk (even in the United States and Canada...

...Under the circumstances," Satter wrote, "it would be foolish for the U.S...

...Bukovsky had recently returned from Moscow, where he had obtained KGB documents for a forthcoming book...

...Satter also reported mounting evidence that the Soviets had falsified the "data" given to the West, removed records from the local hospitals, and even had local topsoil removed and asphalted by workers wearing protective clothing...

...W hen the dissident Bukovsky began looking through his cache of KGB documents last year, he discovered several remarkable ones pertaining to the Bobolas affair...

...for if the liberals, as exemplified by the Times, succeed in falsifying the historical record, the American public may well conclude that there was no point in fighting the Cold War...

...T here are some great reporters at the Times, but it's hard to escape the conclusion that some of their editors don't want them to report all the news...

...However, if gold does go to $450 or $500 per ounce, as I believe it will, the individual stocks should perform even better...

...This theme was developed the following spring by two Soviet scientists, who wrote in a Soviet scientific journal that there had been 159 outbreaks of anthrax among livestock in the area between 1936 and 1979...

...Nobody was willing to touch the story until the secret documents were translated into English...

...A pother Soviet story that should have gotten a lot of space but was relegated to the archives after a very brief appearance, concerns the mysterious accident in Sverdlovsk in April 1979, in which several hundred peoMeselson refused to accept that the Soviets had facilities for biological weapons, and suggested that, even if they did, that fact wouldn't necessarily violate the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention...

...The Klondike and the California gold rushes were smaller by comparison...

...Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion—that here's a Harvard scientist who's proved that he can be fooled by the Big Lie—the Times takes the opposite tack to tell Russians that this time they'd better watch it...

...I have yet to hear a U.S...

...For that, the Administration is in part to blame...

...Although the story did not make clear exactly what readers were supposed to condemn in the affair, the tone of the article left no doubt that this had been another one of those scandalous CIA performances we have come to know and deplore...

...The primary undergraduate newspaper at Harvard, the Crimson, filed this remarkable report the following year: Until today, officials in the former Soviet Union could claim that a 1979 anthrax epidemic . . . was caused by tainted meat...

...When Yannikos refused, Bobolas offered him $650,000 in exchange for his silence...

...Moscow officials might as well yield those secrets now, for from the lies of governments Matthew Meselson is determined to extract what he knows as a scientist to be true—that the pursuit of biological weapons is an extreme folly...

...Akademos turned out a book by Brezhnev, and several volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia...

...propriate people" at the Times...

...28 The American Spectator June 1995 Despite the American media's tendency to favor our scandals over theirs, the quantity of KGB documents (not to mention the millions of Stasi files in Germany and other files from the former members of the bloc) is growing daily...

...Development of vaccines and antidotes was permitted, and so, perforce, was the production of small quantities of the agents themselves (in order to develop the antidotes...

...They told him that the weather had been very bad around Sverdlovsk in the summer before the outbreak, which reduced the supply of fodder for farm animals...

...Instead of insisting on open access, they made their own private deals with the Russians, trading principle for a handful of old documents...

...For their good deeds, the lawyers for Ethnos demanded that the government investigate those foreigners who dared to write fairly—described by Bobolas's lawyer (previously Papandreou's Minister of Justice) as "a rabble of witnesses, British, German, Dutch, one Jew from racist South Africa, one American woman and former Greeks, who appeared in Greece as provocative, aggressive, impertinent advocates of the insulter and slanderer...

...Yannikos fingered the three key movers behind the creation of Akademos and Ethnos: Boris Pankin (then-director of the Soviet copyright office, later deputy foreign minister under Gorbachev), Vassili Sitnikov (deputy director of the copyright office and simultaneously deputy director of the KGB's Disinformation Department, specializing in disinformation operations against NATO) and Yevgeny Chistiakov (press attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Athens, a KGB operative later expelled from Greece after being caught trying to steal Greek naval documents...

...He was in search of a partner for a joint publishing venture with the Soviets...

...Meselson's considerable scientific and political prestige had gone to support the notion that one could trust the Soviets' statements on their biological weapons programs...

...American intelligence experts were convinced from the beginning that the deaths were the result of an accident at a Soviet biological-weapons facility...

...It stresses the considerable value of Bobolas's activities, and describes Akademos as "the publishing base of ideological influence in Greece and among other Greek communities in other countries...

...But the paper passed on the story...

...They were subsequently described in great detail in two long articles in Swiss Press Review and News Report, a highly regarded Geneva newsletter that provides an independent source of information and commentary on international affairs...

...The lack of interest in our erstwhile enemies stems in part from the terribly misleading picture of the Communist empire that so many American intellectuals and intellectual institutions—universities, magazines, newspapers and television networks—presented over the Cold War years...

...This is not an academic debate...

...Anastasi wrote a book about the affair, Take the Nation in Your Hands, which became a entirely by a known Communist...

...local farmers were forced to use feed supplements that, in the past, had caused outbreaks of anthrax...

...M eanwhile, additional Soviet sources surfaced in the international press...

...The Soviets might have been working on a human vaccine against anthrax, something not prohibited by the treaty...

...The plan was to found a publishing house for Soviet books and magazines, with financing to come from commercial joint ventures with Soviet corporations...

...Once out in Switzerland, the information was quickly picked up by the conservative press in Greece...

...Bobolas launched Ethnos in the autumn of 1981, just weeks before the Socialist Party of Andreas Papandreou came to power, and it quickly became the most popular newspaper in Greece...

...Next to weigh in was Nicholas Wade, a writer for Science magazine: What is so inherently implausible about [the Soviet] explanation...

...Anastasi's lawyer, also legal adviser to the Minister of Youth, withdrew from the journalist's defense ten hours before the trial began...

...No mention was made of the Meselson-sponsored tour by the Soviet disinformation team, and Wade's article ends on a high note: Meselson's new study, Wade argued, "puts a heavy burden on the Russians to make clear what was really happening in Sverdlovsk and elsewhere...

...The Soviets vigorously denied this, insisting the outbreak had been caused by contaminated pork...

...Ethnos called the Soviet Union "the first peace bloc in history," and wrote that the Berlin Wall was built to stop a planned NATO attack against East Germany and, eventually, the Soviet Union itself...

...The Times ought to have been delighted to announce its vindication, and to have informed its readers that, in this case at least, it had indeed been the newspaper of record...

...In the March 19, 1993 issue of the Harvard Gazette (a university newsletter), Meselson even claimed that he'd never had the story wrong, and that he still couldn't accept that the Russians were cheating on the treaty: "We can't assume violations, [Meselson] points out...

...Should you buy stock in it...

...Players in this gold rush are not old prospectors with grubstakes— they are publicly traded gold mining and exploration companies, financed by sophisticated Canadian and European financial institutions and managed by technically trained mining entrepreneurs...