http://www.consortiumnews.com/022301b.html
February 23, 2001
Reagan-Bush Security Breaches
By Robert Parry
President Reagan's fans credit their tough-talking hero with “winning the
Cold War” and restoring respect for the United States around the world.
During his eight years in office, Reagan certainly made clear his disdain for
the “Evil Empire” and vowed never to compromise with terrorists.
But the Feb. 20 arrest of FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen on
charges of spying for the old Soviet Union underscored a very different
reality about the Reagan-Bush era: it was a time when American national
security was broadly compromised both by communist adversaries and various
regional powers.
The worst of those penetrations appear to have occurred around 1985, near the
height of Reagan’s confrontational strategies against leftist governments and
terrorist states. Despite the administration’s rough-and-ready rhetoric, the
record now shows that the United States was the victim of enemy tricks from
Moscow to Beijing, from Teheran to Medellin.
In 1985 alone, the evidence now shows that CIA officer Aldrich Ames began
betraying some of the CIA’s most sensitive secrets to the Soviet Union while
Hanssen allegedly began doing the same from his vantage point at the FBI.
Together these twin exposures of U.S. national security secrets may have
represented the greatest breach in American history – and neither spy was
identified or captured until after the Reagan-Bush era was over.
In bringing espionage charges against Hanssen, the FBI reported that Ames in
1985 identified three Russians who were working as “double agents” for the
U.S. government and that Hanssen later that year confirmed Ames’s information
to the KGB. The corroborated evidence sealed the fate of two of the Russians
who were executed, while the third was sent to prison.
All told, Ames has been blamed for the deaths of nine U.S. double agents and
the exposure of a wide variety of U.S. counterintelligence techniques. The
charges against Hanssen are possibly even more serious. Besides betraying
double agents, Hanssen disclosed "top secret" U.S. nuclear programs, the
latest advances in U.S. spy technologies and the investigation of suspected
spy Felix Bloch, the FBI alleged.
According to the FBI affidavit, Hanssen was most active from 1985 to 1991.
His alleged spying operations grew more sporadic after 1991, at about the
time of the Soviet Union’s collapse, though he renewed his efforts near the
end of the decade.
Those later contacts, made in more emotional letters to his Russian control
agents, indicated a far less disciplined double agent and reflected a new
carelessness that may have contributed to the FBI's arrest of Hanssen on Feb.
20.
Yet, beyond the Soviet Union’s thorough penetration of both the CIA and the
FBI in the mid-1980s, other sensitive U.S. military secrets may have reached
Moscow indirectly.
Some intelligence officials in the United States and Israel suspect that the
some of the secret documents obtained by Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard
eventually reached the Soviet Union, giving Moscow another window into U.S.
military strategies. Pollard was arrested for spying in 1985.
China & Nuclear Secrets
Evidence developed in the 1990s indicates, too, that the Reagan-Bush
administration suffered damaging spy operations from communist China.
U.S. intelligence officials believe that China gleaned sensitive nuclear
secrets from exchange programs with U.S. nuclear scientists in the 1980s,
contacts accelerated during the Reagan-Bush years as part of a strategy to
isolate the Soviet Union.
Many of the U.S.-Chinese scientific exchanges came after Reagan’s White House
solicited a favor from China – the secret supplying of surface-to-air
missiles to the Nicaraguan contra rebels in 1984. White House aide Oliver
North, who let Chinese authorities in on the secret White House contra-supply
operation, said China shipped the missiles, in part, to curry favor with the
United States.
U.S. intelligence now believes that between 1986 and 1988, the Chinese used
those scientific contacts to steal sensitive U.S. nuclear secrets, including
how to make a miniaturized W-88 hydrogen bomb. China successfully tested its
own small hydrogen bomb in 1992.
The Washington Post reported that Chinese documents turned over by a Chinese
"walk-in agent" showed that during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large
amount of classified information about U.S. ballistic missiles and reentry
vehicles. [WP, Oct. 19, 2000]
Snookered by Iran
The freewheeling Reagan-Bush foreign policy led to other secret compromises
with past and present U.S. adversaries. In the early 1980s, the Reagan-Bush
administration secretly permitted the shipment of U.S. military equipment to
the radical Islamic government of Iran through Israel.
"It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we
had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin
military equipment," said Nicholas Veliotes, the Reagan administration's
assistant secretary of state for the Middle East. [See Robert Parry's book,
Trick or Treason.]
Those early transactions set the stage for the expanded Iran-contra shipments
of U.S. missiles to Iran in 1985-86, even as President Reagan vowed that he
would never compromise with terrorists such as the Iranian-backed kidnappers
of Americans in Beirut, Lebanon.
On June 18, 1985, for instance, Reagan said, “Let me further make it plain to
the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices, wherever they may be, that
America will never make concessions to terrorists – to do so would only
invite more terrorism – nor will we ask nor pressure any other government to
do so. Once we head down that path there would be no end to it, no end to the
suffering of innocent people, no end to the bloody ransom all civilized
nations must pay.”
Again, the tough talk contrasted with the underlying reality in which Reagan
authorized the shipments of U.S. anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Iran
first through Israel and later through the CIA. In 1986, at the height of
these shipments, Pentagon officials were alarmed the diversion of HAWK
anti-aircraft missile parts into this secret Iran arms pipeline left U.S.
forces in Europe vulnerable to air attack if war had broken out with the
Soviet Union.
"I can only trust that somebody who is a patriot ... and interested in the
survival of this nation ... made the decision that the national policy
objectives were worth the risk of a temporary drawdown of readiness," said
Lt. Gen. Peter G. Barbules in a deposition to Iran-contra investigators in
1987.
While secretly shipping those weapons to Iran, Reagan-Bush officials also
were sharing military intelligence with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Substantial
evidence now exists that the Reagan-Bush administration also helped arrange
sophisticated military equipment for Iraq through third countries, such as
Chile.
In a sworn affidavit in 1995, one of Reagan’s national security aides, Howard
Teicher, described CIA contacts with Chile for arranging cluster bombs and
other armaments for Iraq.
This covert assistance helped Saddam Hussein build his army into a powerful
regional force and may have emboldened him in 1990 when he decided to invade
Kuwait, an action that touched off the Persian Gulf War and continues to have
geopolitical consequences to this day.
The Drug War
On another front, the Reagan-Bush administration let its anticommunist
obsessions interfere with its duty to protect the United States from drug
traffickers.Again while talking tough about the “war on drugs,” the
administration obstructed congressional and criminal investigations that
threatened to expose cocaine smuggling that would have implicated Nicaraguan
contra forces and their allies.In 1998, a CIA inspector general’s report
concluded that more than 50 contra and contra-related entities were involved
in the drug trade, dating from the earliest days of the contra war in 1981 to
its conclusion in 1989.The CIA report, along with another report by the
Justice Department’s inspector general, also detailed how the Reagan-Bush
administration frustrated investigators and withheld evidence of contra drug
connections in the mid-to-late 1980s as cocaine was flooding into the United
States. [See Robert Parry’s Lost History for details.]The Reagan-Bush
administration did take hard stands against some adversaries, of course. U.S.
forces invaded the leftist-ruled Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983 and the
CIA supported anticommunist guerrillas in Angola and Nicaragua.But it is now
apparent that many of the Reagan-Bush Cold War initiatives either backfired
or were compromised by spies within the U.S. government.
Winning the Cold War
Reagan's defenders argue, however, that his role in engineering the collapse
of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s justified whatever the
costs in financial and human terms. To Reagan's supporters, any missteps must
be relegated to footnotes of history and do not detract from Reagan’s
greatness.Many historians disagree about how much credit Reagan deserves for
"winning the Cold War." They cite other factors that caused the Soviet
demise, including decisions made 50 years ago that contained Soviet expansion
and invested in rebuilding war-shattered Europe.What finally pushed the
Soviet Union over the edge was not U.S. support for the contras or
extravagant spending on a nuclear missile shield, but the combination of
Western advances in computer technology and the lure of consumer goods among
young people in the former Soviet bloc, these historians believe.Even
Reagan’s authorized biographer, Edmund Morris, recognized the overriding
importance of the West’s technological advances in forcing the Soviet Union
into its perestroika and eventual collapse. “Since at least the time of
Brezhnev, Soviet realists had been aware that the West was computerizing
itself at a rate that threatened to advance the millennium, while Russian
shopkeepers in central Moscow were still using the abacus,” Morris wrote in
Dutch.Former State Department official George F. Kennan, whose seminal
analysis of the Soviet system in 1947 helped launch the Cold War, is among
the historians who dispute the idea of that Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold
War. In his book, At A Century’s Ending, Kennan calls this Republican claim
“intrinsically silly and childish.”In Kennan’s view, the hard-line military
strategy embodied by Reagan’s approach delayed, rather than accelerated, the
demise of the Soviet dictatorship.“The extreme militarization of American
discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles in this country …,
had the consistent effect of strengthening comparable hard-line elements in
the Soviet Union,” wrote Kennan. “Nobody ‘won’ the Cold War. It was a long
and costly political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated
estimates of the intentions and strength of the other side.”
Failure
A final irony of the Cold War, it now appears, is that the tough-talking
Reagan may have presided over some of the most serious compromises of U.S.
national security in American history.The record now shows that intelligence
projects aimed at the Soviet Union – Washington’s principal adversary – were
penetrated to such a degree that key double agents were rolled up and
executed. Meanwhile, both Moscow and Beijing gained access to some of
America’s most sensitive nuclear secrets and spying technologies.In the
Middle East, terrorist states were leveraging their criminal actions into
deliveries of sophisticated weaponry from the United States. In South
America, drug traffickers were exploiting their relations with Reagan’s
Nicaraguan contra forces to funnel vast quantities of cocaine into the United
States.Now, nearly two decades later, the final price for these national
security breaches still has not been tallied.The new Bush administration
wants to proceed with Reagan’s expensive dream of a nuclear shield, in part,
to protect the United States from the proliferation of devices such as
miniaturized nuclear warheads. In his first weeks in office, George W. Bush
already has authorized new bombing against Iraq, heightening tensions in the
Middle East.And the flow of cocaine from South America, that reached
tidal-wave proportions in the 1980s, continues to exact high costs both in
terms of expended tax dollars and ruined lives. The United States now is
embarking on a $1.3 billion plan for pacifying the Colombian countryside.In
contrast to Theodore Roosevelt’s old adage, “Walk softly and carry a big
stick,” the motto of the 1980s could have been: “Talk toughly, while your
adversaries make off with your big stick.”Robert Parry is an investigative
reporter who broke many of the Iran-contra stories in the 1980s for The
Associated Press and Newsweek.
