In December of 1949, Stalin’s Chinese agent, Mao Tse Tung, overthrew the Nationalist Chinese government.
The following year, Communist North Korea (placed under Stalin’s control after World War II), attacked South Korea (protected by America). The Korean War would last 3 years and cost about 50,000 American lives.
Joseph Stalin died in 1953. Some Russian historians believe that he was poisoned by some of his underlings; who no doubt breathed a huge sigh of relief when the paranoid old tyrant finally ‘kicked the bucket’.
Nikita Khrushchev was then named as First Secretary of the Communist Party, and later Premier. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet Union; a series of relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev was still a thug who had faithfully served the Stalin-Kaganovich death cult, but when compared to his brutal predecessor, Nikita was a pussy-cat. As a historical figure, Stalin slowly but surely began to fall out of favor in Khrushchev’s Russia. Even by Soviet standards, “Uncle Joe” was simply too much of a beast.
Digressing from the Cold War for a moment, in 1954, Khrushchev made the purely symbolic public relations gesture of internally transferring the Crimean peninsula from the Soviet Russian Republic to the Soviet Ukrainian Republic. The transfer was meant as a show of respect and friendship for Russia’s Ukrainian brothers. But the Crimea, historic home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, was and still is predominantly Russian. As you can guess, this event will also be revisited later on in the narrative.
During the 1950’s, Senator Joe McCarthy launched his crusade to expose the Communist infiltration of the American government. McCarthy gained a huge national following of both Republicans and Democrats. At first, when his investigations were limited to just lower and mid level Soviet agents, McCarthy was tolerated by America’s Globalist ruling class. But when the Junior Senator from Wisconsin began peeling back the onion, and suggesting that higher powers had actually allowed the infiltration to take place for their own domestic purposes; the press turned on McCarthy with a vengeance. Ultimately, it wasn’t Soviet backed secret Communists who destroyed McCarthy. It was the Globalists; with President Dwight D. Eisenhower foremost among them; albeit from “behind the scenes”.
Near the end of the Cold War Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower (“Ike”), one of the CIA’s U2 spy planes was shot down over Soviet airspace in 1960. Pilot Francis Gary Powers was then arrested by the Soviets, to be released in a spy swap 2 years later. As Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, Ike’s manifest affinity for Soviet Generals surprised some of Ike’s own staff (especially General George Patton). The Allied Commander had even gone to Moscow, where he was an honored guest at a victory parade and after-party hosted by Stalin himself;{24} this as Soviet NKVD and Red Army units were gang-raping as many as 2 million helpless women in eastern Germany.{25}
The seeming contradiction between Eisenhower’s unusual camaraderie with the Soviets (and also his latter day destruction of Joe McCarthy), as opposed to his subsequent anti-Soviet Cold War chess moves, is no longer a mystery when we understand what the Cold War was really all about. Again, it was never about “Capitalism” vs “Communism”! The Cold War was all about the post-World War II breakup of a once close relationship between the Globalists and their Soviet partners. The “lovers’ spat” then degenerated into a long range turf war. Both groups were Global imperialists; and both groups hated McCarthy.
The darkest days of the Cold War came during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, after the discovery that the Soviets had deployed nuclear missiles on Fidel Castro’s Communist Island. In response, President Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island; a blockade which the Soviets threatened to run. With the world on edge, back-channel negotiations eventually resolved the crisis. The Soviets agreed to remove their missiles from Cuba in exchange for the U.S. removing its nuclear missiles from Turkey; missiles which were aimed at Moscow. It is important to note that the Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba were in response to the American missiles which were first deployed in Turkey.
The Cold War progressed throughout the 60’s with the U.S. fighting the unnecessary war in Vietnam; a tragic farce so divisive that it served to undermine the domestic peace of America. Believing that they were rebelling against “The Powers That Be” many idealist college kids and war protesters turned “radical left” — exactly where “The Powers That Be” wanted them to go!
The 1970’s witnessed a CIA-KGB chess match of proxy wars, disinformation campaigns, murders, and puppet states going at each other. The battle for global influence was played out across Africa, South America, and Asia. Even as The Cold War raged, the new Soviet boss, Leonid Brezhnev, continued to talk and do business with US Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter.
Years before Ronald Reagan was to arrive on the “world stage”, it appeared as though the Cold War would be a permanent fixture of life that the world had learned to live with. After all, the new Soviets weren’t nearly as bad as Lenin and Stalin were. Furthermore, they certainly weren’t foolish enough to ever pick a fight with the mighty US of A; let alone launch a suicidal nuclear strike against it. And so, everyone slept a whole lot better than they did during the 50’s and early 60’s.
The two super powers had learned to co-exist. But few in the West, or in the USSR, could ever have imagined that George Kennan’s long term “containment policy” had actually, beneath everyone’s radar, quietly helped to set the stage for the coming catastrophic collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union; exactly as the CFR luminary had forecasted in 1947.
CHAPTER 6
Jimmy Carter’s Dirty War
Popular mythology holds that the anti-Communist President Ronald Reagan “won the Cold War” after the “soft-on-Communism” President Jimmy Carter had nearly lost it. In reality, the foreign policy which ultimately undermined the USSR operated independently of whatever front man sat in the White House. Presidents come and go every four or eight years. But operative such as Kennan, Kissinger, Rumsfeld, Brzezinski, Schultz, Baker et al linger around in “public service” for decades.