The demise of communism belongs amongst the most important yet most mystifying and most overlooked events of the 20^th century.  And perhaps for the first time in known history, we’ve walked through a revolution without realizing who are the winners and who the losers… 

Joseph D.Douglass

Communism is notoriously known for a central planning.  If they decide to self distract the system there must be a plan behind it.  It was very carefully orchestrated, obviously it was designed from within, and we even had some indication that something was coming.  For example, very notable western spokesman for the Soviet system professor Arbatov had written number of articles which appeared in Western press, said: “We are going to do terrible thing to you. We are going to take away from you your treat”.  These comments came a year before the system started to self-destruct.  The question in my mind always was why? Obviously it was planed.  What was the plan?  This is something what even the most anti communists don’t want to address.  Communism is dead, lets applaud and take a credit.  It seems to be a way to progress. I think that people who thing that danger is over just don’t see too far. In other words we have change in strategy and tactics but no change in goals.  But it may be an even stronger treat because it doesn’t receive any attention.

It was promoted in Western media as an end of the communism, almost like a script from the play.  But we had something similar in 1920’ when it was promoted like communism was changing in Russia and the West came back to Russia and helped their economy rebuild.  It came again after the WW 2 in the form of so-called piece coexistence.  And again in 1968 deception known under the name détente.  Now we have this Perestroika deception.

The past has gone down in a large memory hole.

Vladimir Bukovsky

Yuri Andropov was one of the fathers of these changes.  He already started in the end of seventies think tanks to work out alternative scenarios.  In foreign policies and later economic fields.  Mostly everything what Gorbachev was trying implement was worked out theoretically under Andropov in different think tanks patronized by either under KGB or Central Committee.  Economic issues were worked together with some Western economists in Austria in the center secretly created by KGB.  He was engaged in program of training the next generation; creating a second echelon, third echelon…

Gorbachev himself admitted that.  When in a meeting he was blamed that the program of Perestroika was badly thought out and he butchered the process, he said: “It’s not true comrades! When I came to power there were 102 papers formulating what should be done”.  He admitted that he was only following orders prepared by Andropov.

Jeff R.Nyquist

Who won the cold war? I don’t think anybody won it.  I believe it’s still going on.

Putin is a controversial person. He is, as he described himself, a Soviet person. When he was on the Larry King Live Show, Larry King asked him why he was wearing the cross, trying him to say that he was a Christian. That’s the impression somebody is creating when wearing the cross. Putin couldn’t say he was a Christian and when asked if he believe in Christianity he said, “I believe in power of men”. That’s a very Soviet answer. So Putin is not a democrat, he is not a person the West should trust.  He is moving Russia back to a totalitarian order. Step by step, very slowly, In his inauguration they toasted Stalin and that was shocking to some people. In the anniversary celebrations of Cheka, the KGB, the organization that killed tens of millions of Russians, his nickname was “Little Andropov”.

I believe that as a society America rationalizes a way playing down the basic threat to it’s existence because we want to preserve that good feeling. So we can just go out and start shopping, rent videos and entertain ourselves. Entertain ourselves to death…

Oleg Gordievsky

“In the early 80’s the CIA and FBI acquired more then 10 excellent agents in the Soviet establishment. Aldrich Aims and Robert Hanssen betrayed them all. In the time between 1985 and 1988 they were all arrested and executed. On the list of Aldrich Aims I, Oleg Gordievsky, was number one. I was a British spy, British agent. I was the only one who survived. And I survived only because the British Service organized for me the escape from the Soviet Union. The escape from the execution.”

Russia is now a perfect KGB state. And it will remain like that, forever probably, because there is no other political force to compete with them. Since late 90’s Russia sent so many spies to Germany that now Germany is full of Russian agents. Also KGB is very influential in countries like Finland, Hungary, Yugoslavian Republics, Bulgaria, Austria, and also fairly influential in Italy and France. The perspective plan of the Putin’s Russian government is to become the boss of Europe. That’s why there is so much pressure on the countries that don’t want to dance under the Russian pipe.

They (KGB) started to control different business organizations where Mafia was strong. Replacing Mafia. So in a way today it’s less organized crime and rather more KGB, which is now, called FSB/SVR. Over the whole world, especially in countries like Austria, Spain, Hungary, there are a lot of organizations looking like Mafia. But it’s practically KGB - FSB who runs it. But then when they have too much money, like on the level of the state, they use money to influence other countries.  Like offering huge bribes to politicians of the Europe and America. The big money of Russia is now used to influence the political situation in Western countries.

Robert Gates

Administration was divided in its assessment in what was going on in the Soviet Union but unified in what we should be doing about it. I think it’s fair to say that Secretary of Defense Cheney and the deputy Secretary of State Eagleburger, Condi Rice and I all felt that reforms were going to fail.  That Gorbachev was presiding over the process he couldn’t control. We also saw that much of what he has done was reversible had he been replaced by somebody else. And so we were more skeptical that his reforms would work. However we did not at all disagree with the approach the President and secretary Baker and Brent Scowcroft advocated, which was get a deal with them. And we had to interact with these folks and help manage this process from the West. There was no disagreement not manage the process of collapse but manage the relationship in a way that contributed the continuing change in the Soviet Union and that was no disagreement in the administration on that. I was very pessimistic from the very beginning that Gorbachev’s economic reforms would work.

It was quite clear that Kryuchkov, who had embraced reforms that Gorbachev was undertaking in 1986 and 1987, by 1989 and 1990 had become quite hostile. That the pace of reforms he felt was going far to fast and it was danger to the system. And I told both the President Bush and secretary Baker after the third meeting that I think Gorbachev has now the enemy at his own house. And in fact it was Kryuchkov who would lead later the coup attempt.

Tenneth H.Bagley

till his retirement, his death. As head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union he was certainly the key figure in campain of terror and diversion. He was the key figure in any long range planning for operations to survive invetible changes in Eastern Europe. I know of no one who was in influencing and manipulation senior to Andropov.

I would say they have long range goals, have no interest whatsoever in supporting, even the survival of the United States, much less the prosperity. So, what may happen in the future is anybody’s guess

Golitsyn was certainly telling the true as he new it. And there comes the other story. Because Golitsyn had a lot of information about penetrations of Western governments, when that information was past to the governmet it became outraged and unhappy because no governmet wants to discover in its mist. It’s not in the interest of the government, it’s not in the interest of people in power to find out they had been fooled, they had been manipulated and therefore they will take all pieces of information they can to reject this.  It’s, again, the human tendency it’s undesirable, but it’s bureaucratic tendency because it’s politically poison.

Ion Mihai Pacepa

Contemporary political memory seems to be conveniently afflicted with some kind of Alzheimer’s disease. In the early 1970’s, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for persuading the governments of Iraq and Libya to join the terrorist war against the US. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov told me that either of the two countries could inflict more damage on the Americans than could the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof group and all other terrorist organizations taken together. The governments of those Arab countries, Andropov explained, not only had inexhaustible financial resources (oil), but they also had huge intelligence services that were being run by “our rozvedka advisors” and could extend their tentacles to every corner of the earth.

PLO was dream up by the KGB. The National Liberation Army of Bolivia was created by KGB in 1964, National Liberation Army of Columbia in 1965, Democratic Front of the Liberation of Palestine and Secret Army for Liberation of Armenia in 1975. In 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter—a document that had been drafted in Moscow.

The whole foreign policy of the Soviet-bloc states, indeed its whole economic and military might, revolved around the larger Soviet objective of destroying America from within through the use of lies. The Soviets saw disinformation as a vital tool in the dialectical advance of world Communism. KGB priority number one was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Sen. Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov managed anti-Vietnam War operation.

When I met general Sakharovsky at his Lubyanka office he pointed to the red flags pinned onto a world map hanging on his wall. “Look at that,” he said. “Airplane hijacking is my own invention,” he boasted. Each flag represented a plane that had been downed. The hijacked airplane became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy—and eventually the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001. Sakharovsky’s subordinates are now reigning in the Kremlin. Until they fully disclose their involvement in creating anti-American terrorism and condemn Arafat’s terrorism, there is no reason to believe they have changed.

In the 1970s, when I last met him, Andropov's elongated, ascetic fingers always felt cold and moist when he shook my hand. "We are replacing all those so-called professional diplomats, who do nothing but sit around drinking and gossiping, with deep-cover KGB officers," Andropov began. His habit of plunging directly into the subject of a meeting without introductory remarks was legendary among intelligence chiefs. In his soft voice, Andropov laid out the historically Russian roots of his new technique, for he was a Russian to the marrow of his bones. Some two hours later, the KGB chairman concluded our meeting as abruptly as he had started it. "Our gosbezopasnost" had kept Russia alive for the past five hundred years, "our gosbezopasnost" had made her the strongest military power on earth, and "our gosbezopasnost" would steer her helm for the next five hundred years, he concluded, looking me straight in the face.

Andropov was also a dependable prophet. Thirty five years later, his gosbezopasnost is still running Russia.

Edward Jay Epstein

The CIA throughout its entire history was looked at as a pragmatic organization.  Something dedicated to action. We did not understand the ideological nature of the KGB.  And in some sense only with the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn were the eyes open to that KGB was involved in much more than simply operation intelligence. General Sejna, who I spent some time with, and Golitsyn and other people that were describing why the purpose to intelligence as intelligence was means to an end not an ending itself. The CIA didn’t know what to make of them. American political leadership wasn’t interested in hearing these very complex views of Soviet ambitions.  They wanted to be black and white. So when General Sejna came and started to talk about the use of drugs, for example, as means of weakening Western society, that wasn’t on the agenda. 

The successful deception often depends on telling people what they want to hear.  Now when you tell American politicians and American elected officials “You won the Cold War”, it’s a message they want to hear. Why should they question it?  Why should Ronald Reagan question it? Why should George Bush question it?  They can now take credit for it. So it wasn’t in anyone interest, and also they believed it, that’s what makes deception. And so with Glasnost, and with Gorbachev moving the Soviet Union from hard line ideological enemy committed to something called communism to a more flexible, pragmatic society much more like existed in Northern Europe, it was accepted.

I think there is actually more danger from Russia and its exceeding influence over the world now then it was at the height of the so-called Cold War. Russia now controls oil and large proportion of oil and natural gas needed by Europe and needed by the United States and by the industrial world then they did in the height of the Cold War.  And it actually has more influence over the Western Europe that it had before.

Angelo Codevilla

The American foreign policy establishment is very blind for variety of reasons. One of the truest things I ever heard when I got to Washington, when I got inside the US intelligence establishment, was that variest arguments that were going on concerning the Soviet Union were not at all about the Soviet Union. They were about the people next door. People down the hall. The great contraversies were among various agencies, various power centers within the agencies, among certain personalities and views about the Soviet Union were made to fit in those strugles, to serve those strugles. So there is another reason for strategic blindness as certain kind of miosis. A certain type of miotic concentration on our own internal difficulties. Then of course the other reason for strategic blindness is the continuing decline quality of personal in Americal foreign policy establishment. Fewer people have a real aqueitnants with the outside world, and they are simply of lower quality. We have tended to choose for high places people who are not abrasive thinkers but people who go along. Who say pleasant things. The Bush’s National Security Council is full of pleasers rather than thinkers and pleasers are not strategists.

The CIA did their best to kill idea that there was a Soviet participation as a sponsor of international terrorism back in the 1970’s which continued till the ridicules nature of their efforts were exposed in 1981.

Ludvik Zifcak

I was the intelligence officer with the objective to create and organize a fake dissident group called Independent Student Organization. This Organization was charged to infiltrate other dissident groups and develop contact with their leaders throughout the Czechoslovakia. The groups like Charta 77, Democratic Initiative, Host, and so on. This objective was achieved. Our organization’s final task was to bring the November 17 students’ demonstration to Narodni Trida. There was a confrontation, physical contact with the riot police, body of the man on the ground. Other things happened around it to support the fable. The dead body (my body) was then transported to the hospital Na Frantisku. I had false passport, fake ID, and the one way air ticket to Moscow to leave Czechoslovakia after this operation was over. Everything was set but then, unfortunately, I didn’t get the order to leave the country. So till today I have that fake passport and the air ticked to Moscow in my possession.

So, in other words, by 1988 the majority of so called democratic elements or anti-communist elements operating in Czechoslovakia were manipulated by communist secret police. These groups knew they were infiltrated but had no idea who within them was actually working for intelligence or counter intelligence services.