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Ex-US officials unveil Cold War
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THE United States during the Cold War ran covert operations against the Soviet Union to exploit nationalist tensions and divert its resources to biological weapons programmes Washington believed were not useful, former U.S. officials said on Saturday.
The comments were made at a gathering of U.S. intelligence analysts, operatives and experts at Princeton University for a conference on the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, said a military aide in the late 1970s wrote a paper that concluded the Soviet Union was suffering "enormous centrifugal political forces" and its dissolution was not unthinkable at the end of the century, a view that others in the White House also shared.
At that time, Brzezinski said he believed nationalistic tension in the Soviet Union was its "Achilles heel" and proposed creating an interagency group on that issue, which the State Department opposed because it disagreed with that assessment.
"Well, the interagency group was created, and then it led to a covert programme which the Agency (CIA) undertook, euphemistically and elegantly called a programme for the delegitimization of the Soviet system," Brzezinski said. "It was a program designed to exploit national tensions within the Soviet Union."
Another U.S. covert operation sought to persuade the Soviets that the United States had continued its biological and chemical weapons programme despite signing a treaty to the contrary.
The goal apparently was to trick the Soviet Union into diverting resources to try and combat programmes that the United States believed were not militarily useful, Raymond Garthoff, a historian and former U.S. diplomat and CIA officer, said.
The FBI and U.S. Army ran that disinformation campaign from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s mainly through double agents.
That operation apparently was "to get the Soviets to devote a lot of resources in areas we had concluded militarily were not productive or useful," Garthoff said.
"What hasn't been known until very, very recently is that the United States did a great deal to stimulate that (Soviet) program," he said on a panel at the conference.
"We carried out a successful deception operation on both CW (chemical weapons) and then on BW (biological weapons) in persuading the Russians that we had an active program going even after we had signed the treaty," Garthoff said.
It "kept them fooled for a long time" with several double agents feeding false information to the Soviets, he said.
"It was less successful in the sense that it turns out they developed both some very effective chemical and biological agents," Garthoff added.(SD-Agencies)
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