After the withdrawal of the Soviet advisers of the Czechoslovak state security services from the country, Moscow was forced to switch to a new ball game. Nikolai Semyonov, a counterespionage cadre officer, was recalled from Estonia to Moscow for a half-year briefing in the First Chief Directorate to equip him for his mission in Prague. The KGB continued to be the hub for gathering the most diverse kinds of information on the ČSSR. An analysis in May 1967, which was based primarily on information from the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, concluded that widespread discontent was due above all to mistakes in the economic reforms. This first set off alarm bells in the KGB.73
In the following months, the debate centering on freedom of expression in the media became more and more prominent in the KGB’s analyses, focusing on one of the root causes of all ills. Since 1964, Jiří Pelikan, the head of Czechoslovak National Television, had been producing in cooperation with ORF, the Austrian National Television corporation, a program called Stadtgespräche Wien-Prag. These lively “city communications” between Vienna and Prague were a historic first, featuring uncensored, live TV conversations across the Iron Curtain on a wide variety of topics.
In a timely show of its decisiveness, the KGB diagnosed a rapidly spreading crisis in Czechoslovakia. Andropov immediately stepped up the pressure on the Czechoslovak reformers. Leaving aside the differences of opinion on the “solution of the Czechoslovak problems” within the Soviet leadership, they had one thing in common: unanimity that the reforms must be stopped, ideally by the KSČ leaders themselves. This soon appeared to be wishful thinking in Moscow. So Andropov started to devise a worst-case scenario that outlined what might happen if the reformers were not stopped. Since Andropov had witnessed the victory of the “counterrevolution” in Budapest in 1956, parallels with and historical lessons from the Hungarian Revolution were becoming more prominent by the day. By mid-March, the KGB had definitive proof that its worst fears were justified. The Action Program of the KSČ had been passed on to them by friendly party members. On 13 March, the Action Program and the reforms planned by the KSČ were on the agenda of the Politburo’s meeting in Moscow. The Soviet leadership’s patience and forbearance were being exhausted. Two days later, the Politburo dispatched a letter to the KSČ bristling with the tough rhetoric of class struggle. Dubček was still able to dissuade the Soviets from taking action right away. The meeting in Dresden marked a compromise of a kind between Dubček, the Kremlin, and the leaders of the fraternal parties. Among them, Ulbricht had also done his homework, in a manner comparable to Andropov and Suslov. Dresden was the first of several meetings of the scheming fraternal parties from which the KSČ was subsequently excluded. The hardliners in these fraternal parties exerted their influence on the Kremlin’s course of planning for an intervention by underwriting, boosting, and endorsing it. The tail was wagging the dog, and the leverage of the weak was felt once again in the Cold War alliance structures.
LBJ’S ALOOFNESS: THE “NO ACTION” AMERICAN RESPONSE
The response of the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson not to intervene after the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia was quite predictable given previous U.S. behavior vis-à-vis crises in the Soviet Bloc. During the Soviet intervention in the German Democratic Republic in 1953 and in Hungary in 1956, the U.S. response had been minimal, too. Even when it was in an overall much more favorable strategic position during the Cold War than the Johnson administration was in the late 1960s, the Eisenhower administration had engaged in some tough “liberation of captive peoples” rhetoric, but refrained from considering any direct military response, nor did it unleash Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) covert operations.
The international environment and the U.S. position in the Cold War had changed considerably since the mid-1950s. The global U.S. position and the country’s relationship with its allies were under stress. The deepening quagmire of the Vietnam War, demands for NATO reforms and sharing of defense burdens, and hopes for launching arms control with the Soviets as well as a vigorous détente regime, kept the Johnson administration off balance. Moreover, the Johnson administration faced a deepening domestic crisis in 1968 during a highly contentious and divisive national election. The American youth were rebellious over the deepening and interminable Vietnam War. Johnson also faced a growing resistance in his own party to his policies in the Vietnam War after the Tet Offensive by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. During this deepening vortex of domestic unrest in late March 1968, Johnson made the momentous and surprising decision not to run again for reelection.74 The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. in April and Robert Kennedy in June added to the national trauma. In this deepening domestic crisis, President Johnson was incapable of responding to—let alone resisting—the burgeoning Soviet pressure on Dubček.
Johnson’s nonresponse to the Warsaw Pact invasion was clearly foreshadowed in an early May exchange between Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostow and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Rostow wanted Rusk to send a strong deterrent signal to Moscow not to intervene in Czechoslovakia. Rostow reasoned: “In retrospect, our failure to deter the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 was one of the most serious mistakes of our foreign policy since the war.” He reminded Rusk: “Similarly, stating in public that the U.S. would not intervene during the Hungarian crisis in 1956… gave the Soviets full license.” Rostow sternly admonished the Secretary of State that the Russians were hesitating and that “the moment to give them a deterrent signal is therefore now.” Rusk wrote two words on top of the one-page memorandum and initialed them with “DR”: “No action.”75 While State Department diplomats had been expecting some form of Soviet intervention ever since the more radical reforms of the Prague Spring were unfolding, the CIA was circumspect and full of wishful thinking that somehow the Czechoslovaks might get away with their reform agenda.
On 22 July, Rusk issued a cautious warning to Soviet ambassador to the United States Anatolii Dobrynin for the first time. Rusk noted that “the USA has been against interference in the affairs of Czechoslovakia from the very start.” In the message summarizing this conversation Dobrynin sent to the Politburo, Rusk apparently added: “This is a matter for the Czechs first and foremost. Apart from that, it is matter for Czechs and other nations of the Warsaw Pact” (emphasis added).76 As noted above, Russian historian Prozumenshchikov has interpreted this message as a “green light” from Washington to Moscow that they would not intervene if the Kremlin cleaned up the Czechoslovak mess. This may well have been Moscow’s perception, but it was hardly the precise meaning of Washington’s message. These vital signals from Washington undoubtedly provided grist to the mills of the Kremlin hawks who had been demanding a military intervention for weeks. Given that Dubček’s promises had all been empty ones, those Kremlin decision makers who had warned about the international consequences of an intervention were muted.
When the Warsaw Pact invasion came on 20 August, the Johnson administration was surprised and reacted with the same passivity with which Eisenhower had reacted to the 1953 and 1956 crises. The president himself was deeply disappointed that the invasion shattered his dreams for détente to salvage at least one signal foreign policy success as a legacy of his troubled presidency. Clearly he was not prepared to test Soviet resolve with a military response as the late night discussions of the National Security Council on the day of the invasion on 20 August suggest. Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford noted that Johnson felt doubled-crossed by the Kremlin leaders and only reluctantly agreed to cancel the summit meeting that was already scheduled for early October in Leningrad. Secretary of State Dean Rusk averred that the United States could do little to help Prague; the Czechs had to help themselves. General Earle G. Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made it abundantly clear that a military U.S. response was out of the question: “We do not have the forces to do it” (emphasis added). The United States found it impossible to respond to two major international crises at the same time. All that could be done was “giving the Russians hell” by castigating their intervention in the United Nations and registering a formal protest via the Soviet ambassador with the Kremlin.77 During the 1968 Czechoslovakia events, CIA director Richard Helms did not play the role of primus inter pares that Allen Dulles had enjoyed as key adviser to Eisenhower during crises in the Soviet Bloc.78