U.S. President Barack Obama has “Reset” Washington’s relationship with Moscow, seeking to ease Kremlin concerns about Eastern Europe missile defense in exchange for continued U.S. access to Afghanistan over Russian territory. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, at her 2009 nomination hearing, paid lip service to working together with the Russian Federation “on vital security and economic issues,” including terrorism. But the State Department’s profile of Russia lists the “50th Anniversary of the American Exhibits to the U.S.S.R.,” “New START,” and “Human Rights” as top issues, not “Terrorism, Islamic.” That omission is not likely to change, whether Obama is reelected for a second term in 2012 or a Republican pursuing a more interventionist foreign policy wins the White House.
Ignoring or omitting inconvenient facts is nothing new in U.S.-Russian relations, a situation made possible by the collusion of the mainstream media and government officials to disguise propaganda as news.
A quarter-century ago, I interviewed Victor Marchetti, a retired CIA officer, for Full Disclosure, an alternative publication. Marchetti, a one-time Soviet analyst, coauthored with John D. Marks The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974). Marchetti, a Catholic troubled by some CIA practices, sought the agency’s reform. The Nixon administration was not amused. Marchetti became the first American served with a federal court’s censorship order. His New York publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, stood by him and printed blank sections in the book to illustrate censorship. Later editions appeared with once-redacted sections related to politicians such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. Milton Young of North Dakota, a CIA congressional oversight committee member, in boldface. To put food on the table, Marchetti wrote for various publications from the far-right Spotlight to the left-libertarian Inquiry after resigning the CIA. He discussed intelligence reforms with members of the U.S. Congress, and later testified before a congressional committee.
One story Marchetti told involved Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the son of peasants who rose to the peak of Soviet power: first secretary of the Communist Party (1953-64). My interest in Soviet studies was more than academic. My maternal grandmother, a peasant, witnessed World War I and the Russian Revolution’s onset, and buried three of her four children, victims of war, in a rural Orthodox cemetery before emigrating. Today, Khrushchev is known especially for his Kitchen Debate with Vice President Nixon (1959), and for pounding his shoe on the podium at the United Nations (1960). He should be remembered for denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality at the 20th Party Congress (1956), avoiding nuclear war with the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), and the two-volume Khrushchev Remembers, published (1971 and 1974) by Little, Brown.
Khrushchev was deposed in a 1964 coup led by Leonid Brezhnev, a protégé, and aided by Mikhail Suslov, a proto-Stalinist. In the 1960’s, the Politburo was divided between Brezhnev’s faction and Suslov’s. That’s when the KGB and CIA entered the picture, according to Marchetti, who characterized subsequent events as “very sensitive.” Marchetti, in our 1986 interview, outlined the Brezhnevites reasoning as follows:
They’re giving Brezhnev a bad time, and they’re trying to undercut all of the changes you [Khrushchev] made and all of the changes Brezhnev has made and wants to make. . . . Since you’re retired and living here in your dacha why don’t you . . . dictate your memoirs. . . . [T]he KGB will review them. We’ll see this information gets to the West, which will publish it, and then it will get back to the Soviet Union in a variety of forms—Voice of America, Radio Liberty, book copies, articles. . . . This will influence the intelligentsia and party leaders and undercut Suslov and the Stalinists . . .
Marchetti emphasized that disinformation designed to manipulate public opinion is an obstacle to the truth. He argued one should be highly skeptical of the idea that “two suitcases full” of Khrushchev’s tapes could “get out of the Soviet Union” without the KGB’s knowledge:
[A]nybody who knows the least bit about the Soviet Union knows the whole thing is impossible. A former Soviet premier cannot sit in his dacha and make these tapes and then give them to a U.S. newspaperman and let him walk out of the country with them. That cannot be done in a closed society, a police state, like the Soviet Union.
Others shared Marchetti’s skepticism. New York Times columnist Harrison Salisbury wrote in 1970 that “if, as some evidence suggests, the materials were passed to the West by Viktor Louis, a middleman of the Soviet security police, the motive might also be to settle scores between one police faction and another. Such speculation cannot be verified.” Louis provided the tapes to Time’s Moscow bureau. They were transcribed by Strobe Talbott, then-Oxford roommate of future President Bill Clinton. U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms focused on Louis and the KGB at Talbott’s 1993 confirmation hearings when President Clinton nominated him to be deputy secretary of state. Clinton, in his 2004 autobiography, My Life, recalled the episode in terms nearly identical to Marchetti’s explanation: Khrushchev
secretly recorded his memoirs on tape, and arranged, I think through friends in the KGB, to get them to Jerry Schecter, then Time magazine’s bureau chief in Moscow. Strobe was fluent in Russian and had worked for Time in Moscow the previous summer. He flew to Copenhagen to meet Schecter and get the tapes. When he got back to Oxford, he began the laborious process of typing Khrushchev’s words out in Russian, then translating and editing them. . . . I was especially fascinated to hear Strobe recount Khrushchev’s tales of Kremlin intrigue. Strobe’s seminal book . . . made a major contribution in the West to the understanding of the inner workings and tensions of the Soviet Union, and raised the hope that someday internal reform might bring more freedom and openness.
Talbott, in his own 2002 reminiscence (The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy), describes himself as a “morning person” in contrast to Clinton’s “night owl.” Clinton adjusted his schedule, rising early to help Talbott by frying eggs for breakfast. They were just two young American graduate students discussing “ol’ Nikita” with his audiotapes in their flat.
Marchetti resigned from the CIA in pursuit of the truth. His book discussed whether “the CIA may or may not have been involved—to some degree” with Khrushchev’s memoirs. He elaborated in our interview: “I think you’re one of the very few people I’ve explained this story to in depth,” Marchetti said. The CIA’s motivation, he said, was
that a former Soviet premier [was] talking about his career and revealing some pretty interesting things about his thinking and the thinking of others. . . . There is a strong tendency to stick with Stalinism . . . but some of the cooler heads, the more moderate types, are trying to make changes. It’s good stuff from the CIA’s point of view . . .
The Church Committee, a U.S. Senate panel (1975-76), examined similar operations, hearing testimony from witnesses, including Marchetti. In one section, “Covert Relationships With The United States Media,” the panel reported, “In pursuing its foreign intelligence mission the Central Intelligence Agency has used the U.S. media for both the collection of intelligence and for cover.” The committee noted, “The CIA has been particularly sensitive to the charge that CIA covert relationships with the American media jeopardize the credibility of the American press and risk the possibility of propagandizing the U.S. public.” The CIA insisted its media operations were “focused abroad and not at the United States in order to influence the opinion of the American people about things from a CIA point of view.” Book-publishing activities occupy a “special place” in “the world of covert propaganda.” According to the CIA’s covert-action staff chief, the agency’s clandestine handling of book publishing and distribution could include getting “books published which should not be ‘contaminated’ by any overt tie-in with the U.S. government, especially if the position of the author is ‘delicate.’” Marchetti claimed The Penkovsky Papers, a 1965 book about Soviet Col. Oleg Penkovsky, a Western spy executed by the Soviets, was created by the CIA. The Church Committee agreed: “The book was prepared and written by witting Agency assets who drew on actual case materials. Publication rights to the manuscript were sold to a publisher through a trust fund which was established for the purpose. The publisher was unaware of any U.S. Government interest.”
It’s easy for the popular press to argue that the proverbial “other side” is involved. Only the alternative press would question why the truth should also apply to “our side.” The situation was reversed in the Soviet Union. Izvestia denounced Talbott as a “young sprout of the CIA,” while the KGB-Louis relationship was ignored. Some U.S. officials insisted the KGB duped Time until they learned that a deal had been cut. Then, Marchetti explained, “they quieted down and ceased their objections and complaints.” The situation was more complex in Moscow, where one KGB faction helped deliver Khrushchev’s memoirs to Time while another interrogated “the usual suspects” and tried to obstruct the process.
Yuri Andropov, the KGB’s longest-serving chairman (1967-82), helped Khrushchev’s memoirs reach the West. Andropov was general secretary until his 1984 death. His biographer, Zhores A. Medvedev, explains, “There were many signs in 1965 that a process of re-Stalinization was a possibility.” Articles eulogizing Stalin appeared in Soviet media, and his name was mentioned in the official press more frequently. The KGB, under Andropov, “skillfully used foreign journalists, leaking essential items to them through KGB agents like the well-known Viktor Louis.” Louis, in other accounts, diverted the second KGB faction to other Soviets to operate undetected. Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, in Khrushchev on Khrushchev (1990) noted that Lyova Petrov suggested the memoirs and provided the tape recorder. Petrov, a Soviet military intelligence officer, according to William Taubman (Khrushchev: The Man & His Era, 2003) introduced Sergei to Viktor Louis, who “had a friend in a very high place”—KGB head Andropov.
Khrushchev was subtle in discussing Soviet leadership under Brezhnev, avoiding direct criticism of Politburo members. He did criticize the Soviets’ 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, perhaps a veiled reference to Brezhnev. But Alexei Kosygin, Brezhnev’s ally, fares better when Khrushchev relates that Stalin “blew up and shouted at” him for reporting widespread malnutrition in Moldavia. Suslov, by contrast, appears reactionary for insisting Yugoslavia was no longer socialist even as the Soviet Union moved to reconcile with Tito.
Khrushchev’s harshest words were not reserved for the Soviet comrades who deposed him, but for Red China’s Chairman Mao, whom he repeatedly compared with Stalin:
I often see films about China on television and it seems that Mao Tse-tung is copying Stalin’s personality cult. . . .
Like Stalin, Mao never recognized his comrades as his equals. He treated people around him like pieces of furniture, useful for the time being but expendable. . . .
The more I listened to Mao, the more I had to compare him to Stalin. . . .
“Let’s try to imagine a future war,” Mao began. He sounded just like Stalin, who also loved to raise hypothetical questions of that sort. . . .
Both Stalin and Mao strengthened their personal dictatorship. . . .
Mao Tse-tung was following in Stalin’s footsteps.
For good measure, Khrushchev also criticized Red China’s intelligence chief: “Just as Stalin had Beria, so Mao had his own butcher—K’ang Sheng.”
The CIA would have been incompetent not to show interest in Khrushchev’s memoirs for its behind-the-scenes description of leading communist personalities and its colorful retelling of the Sino-Soviet split. The mission was a success. The proto-Stalinists were stopped, and détente (razryadka)—a far cry from Mutual Assured Destruction—was achieved under Brezhnev in the 1970’s. Still, Marchetti argued that Khrushchev’s memoirs were problematic:
The truth would have been much more effective. . . . Khrushchev was approached by the KGB and Soviet Politburo to dictate his memoirs, which he did under their supervision, which means we don’t know if he is telling the whole story or the complete truth, because they had an opportunity to edit it. The Russians were so anxious to get this information out so that it could come back to the Soviet Union for two reasons. The first was to build international pressure. The second was to build up internal pressure against the Stalinists.
Serious historians will ask tougher questions in the future. Why is Khrushchev silent about his youthful flirtation with Trotskyism? One can anticipate the answer: It didn’t serve the mission’s purpose.
To modern secular regimes, truth is whatever they can engineer. These regimes and their popular press have no use for inconvenient facts. The truth is incomprehensible to men whose adult lives are spent in states of nonreality, virtual or otherwise.
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