Page 3 of 5 THE GATES
INHERITANCE, Part 1 The
tortured world of US intelligence By Roger Morris
emigre
exodus. Knowing Russia so little to begin with,
Washington's representatives proved incapable of
seeing just how distorted were the perspectives of
their mentors, whose reflexive animus, after all,
America's top officials shared without the
encumbrance of knowledge. Lost from the start were
intellectual integrity and independent judgment,
those most basic necessities for any diplomatic or
intelligence service and, of course, for
formulating national policy.
From that corrupted tutelage, freshly
minted US specialists were commonly assigned to
Latvia or Estonia, small Baltic states conquered
by Russia in the 18th century but now (briefly)
independent. These became Meccas for the
anti-Soviet diaspora, in many respects small
replicas of the caste system and reactionary
politics of Imperial Russia itself. So it was that
America's diplomats, expected to understand and
interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were
shaped not only by an insular and fearful American
culture, but also by the pervasive lost-world bias
of their trainers. Not surprisingly, a Baltic
syndrome ripened and settled into career
orthodoxy. Without having set foot there,
America's early "experts" on the USSR, men who
would shape policy in the Cold War, formed
indelible attitudes "while studying Russia from
afar".
Kennan's epiphany on the train
proved short-lived. The Soviets soon plunged into
the nightmare world of dictator Joseph Stalin's
great purges. Facing the accompanying craze of
xenophobia and suspicion, US diplomats reacted
predictably. The outwardly charming, patrician
ambassador from Philadelphia, William Bullitt Jr,
regretted in dispatches the influence in the
Kremlin of a "wretched little kike [person of
Jewish origin]" – whom he discreetly did not
identify by name - as opposed to what he called
"straight" Russians (whom he tolerated only
slightly more).
Fluent in Russian, but in
the disappeared Russia of their emigre tutors,
Kennan and his colleagues understood little of the
rulers and ruled in a society so separated from
them by class and perspective. "Weird
developments" was the way one of them
characterized the murderous midnight arrests and
show trials that ravaged the USSR in the 1930s,
seemingly inscrutable events rooted in defining
struggles between crushing backwardness and
revolutionary fervor, democracy and dictatorship,
confident openness and fearful isolation.
The embassy found even more baffling an
undeniable popular support for the tyranny that
had so savagely extinguished the great
enlightenment and Western social democratic ideals
of the revolution. Behind the Communist Party
despotism lay a chilling authenticity in the
"dictatorship of the proletariat", which had
carried upward a new stratum of privilege and
power. Kennan would not bother with the "hackneyed
question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia"
- so he began a 1938 State Department lecture.
Missing much of the point of the past 20
years and the 50 to come, he stressed what he
considered the historical essence of a people:
Russia's congenital "Asiatic" aggressiveness and
penchant for "Byzantine" intrigue. "After all," he
explained with no audible irony or hint of
self-awareness, "nations, like individuals, are
largely the products of their environment ..."
For its part, Washington had no official
doubts about the evil paradox of the Soviets, a
system seen as mad and inept, yet diabolical and
relentless, its policies cruelly capricious yet
cunningly planned. "We were all agreed," as one of
Kennan's superiors put it archly, "what was the
situation in the USSR."
Cartoon worlds,
Russian and American Through the inter-war
years, and especially after World War II, the
specialists, invariably in agreement, advised a
coterie of senior officials whose own consensus
was historic. Their names made up a roll call of
men who shaped postwar US policy and much of the
world in the second, American half of the 20th
century - secretary of state Dean Acheson,
secretary of defense and under secretary of state
Robert Lovett, ambassador Averill Harriman,
assistant secretary of defense and World Bank
president John McCloy, secretary of defense James
Forrestal, State Department aide Paul Nitze, and a
handful of others.
With much inbreeding of
schools, firms and society, theirs was a universe
of Groton, polo and tennis, of Wall Street
combines, rich wives, shaded estates, "wealth,
cleverness and social grace", as Evan Thomas and
Walter Isaacson described it - and of congenial
precepts about world affairs, including ready
agreement about Russia. It was, above all, a
circle of fateful insularity.
Assumed to
be of broad experience, they were men who had
never experienced the Depression torment of their
era, as so many of their countrymen had, to say
nothing of the upheavals of war and revolution
that convulsed so much of the early 20th-century
world. Apparently cultured, they had cultivated no
sensibility for societies beyond those of Western
Europe. Typically, the lean, magnetic young
financier Bob Lovett played the mimic for his Long
Island weekend circle, with rubber-faced,
reportedly hilariously accented parodies of the
world's laughable people - Russians, Arabs and
Chinese among others.
In its lurid
propaganda of the period, the Soviet tyranny
barraged its own predominantly peasant, still
largely pre-modern populace with cartoons of
vulture-like figures labeled Wall Street bankers
and corporate lawyers, all visibly anti-Slavic
bigots of reactionary venom. Like the matching
portraits of bomb-throwing Bolsheviks in American
cartoons, the images exploited the primal. Yet, in
ways long unrecognized in the US, the men who
governed Washington's relations with the world
lent much flesh-and-blood credence to the crude
caricatures on the walls of Soviet factories and
collective farms.
What America's analysts
and policymakers lost in their stunted worldview
was the sheer complexity, contradiction and
paradox of the Soviet Union, all relevant to
informed policy. Missing between myopia and phobia
was the authentic alternative to the Baltic
syndrome's policy by caricature: an intellectual
openness and seriousness, honesty and sensibility,
that might have led to genuine insight, to actual
"intelligence" that could have saved lives and
fortunes, even moderated the Kremlin tyranny and
hastened its end.
As a post-Soviet flood
of archives has revealed (though it was no secret
even during the years of Soviet rule), Moscow's
foreign policy was waged more often in caution
than aggressiveness, more out of weakness than
strength, and with an abiding parochial fear and
ignorance of the US, a hostility that Washington's
acts in kind only reinforced, justified and
prolonged. So much of the great "superpower"
rivalry was what John Le Carre would aptly call a
grotesque "looking-glass war".
The Soviet
leaders had been seared by revolution,
intervention, purges, the West's cynical efforts
to push Adolf Hitler east in the 1930s, and the
near-defeat and utter destruction of World War II,
followed by US postwar dominance and encirclement
in which they found themselves an eternal
half-hour from nuclear annihilation ("I'll climb
the Eiffel Tower and spit on all of Europe," the
provincial Leonid Brezhnev, a future Kremlin
leader, had said defiantly but pitifully in 1945.)
The postwar Soviet leaders were creatures
of their preconceptions and preoccupations, and of
their odious politics, as much as any ruling class
in history. Yet to relegate them to caricature, to
ignore the touchstones of their lives, was
ultimate folly. What American specialists saw were
not fearful, compromised "human beings like
ourselves", but monstrous, implacable, mythically
evil enemies in ill-fitting suits, to be opposed
at all costs, with the end - the "defeat" of
Russia one way or another - justifying the means.
The stakes were incalculable. The Cold War
would fatally mortgage domestic and foreign
affairs in the world's two most powerful
countries, enthroning corrupt oligarchs in each
who mocked the ideals - political democracy in the
case of the US, economic in the case of Russia -
for which so many had died. Their "superpower"
clash would dominate world politics for more than
four decades. It would draft tens of millions,
devour fortunes, cordon Europe and Asia off into
armed camps, entangle neutrals, wantonly destroy
any potential political-economic alternatives to
either corrupt system, rouse bitter political
struggles on every continent, unleash proxy wars
with untold millions of casualties, periodically
threaten nuclear holocaust, and fix the fate of
nations from Chile to Cambodia, the Congo to
Afghanistan.
When it ended in 1991 with
the seeming victory of the United States, the
outcome recast the planet. It had been the rivalry
of the century, and it threw a still unrecognized
curse over the next. No wonder that new period,
rather than being given a name of its own, would
be known, like some sad afterword, as "the
post-Cold War era".
From 1933 to 1945,
there was one notable exception to the astigmatism
of the specialists and their superiors - the
president of the United States. Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, that Hudson River squire, harbored no
illusions about the Bolsheviks. At the outset of
his presidency, he made clear his disgust with
what he called "the hunger, death and bitterness"
of Soviet rule. Yet he believed that the Kremlin's
foreign policy would be shaped by the acts of
other powers and he took a broader view of
Russia's painful experiment as well as its
profound weakness.
"He had some curiosity
about the Soviet Union, a measured respect for its
accomplishments," judged his biographer James
MacGregor Burns, "and a certain sympathy for its
goals of social justice, although he doubted that
'one could obtain Utopia in a day'."
For a
dozen years, FDR held at bay the cultivated
repugnance of his diplomats and the incestuous
bigotry of his plutocratic senior officials.
"Frankly, if I were a Russian, I would feel that I
had been given the run-around in the United
States," he said of a bottleneck in World War II
aid to Russia. "If I were a Russian..." - it was
not a premise common in government cables,
intelligence briefings, or policy papers, then or
later; nor did such essential human empathy
necessarily mean some policy simplistically
favorable to the Soviets.
In 1944, for
instance, Roosevelt was seized with a typical
enthusiasm for a postwar plan to reform the
ancient feudal land of
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