cold war | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcast • September 30, 2019

The CIA’s Covert Chemist

We’re at home with Stephen Kinzer, the longtime reporter of secret U.S. operations in books like Overthrow and All the Shah’s Men. In a new book, Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer looks at a scientist named Sidney Gottlieb and the notorious “mind ...

We’re at home with Stephen Kinzer, the longtime reporter of secret U.S. operations in books like Overthrow and All the Shah’s Men. In a new book, Poisoner in Chief, Kinzer looks at a scientist named Sidney Gottlieb and the notorious “mind control” CIA program he led, MK-ULTRA.

Kinzer’s portrait induces the feeling of a bad trip: We’ve been to a completely different zone we know is there, but we can’t believe. He’s introducing us to the man who brought LSD into this world. Gottlieb’s experiments may have been responsible in part for Billie Holiday’s death, and putting Whitey Bulger on a two-year LSD regimen. At the CIA, Gottlieb was involved with assassination attempts of Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. There are resonances of James Bond and Doctor Strangelove. Or maybe Josef Mengele.

Stephen Kinzer

“This is the first time I’ve been shocked by something I discovered in writing a book. I’m still getting over my shock from the process of learning who this Sidney Gottlieb was,” Kinzer told us. “I now conclude he was the most powerful unknown American of the twentieth century.”

You can catch our last episode with Kinzer, “America’s Empire State of Mind,” here.

And if you can, give us a tip over on Patreon—and thanks!

Photo illustration by Conor Gillies, photo courtesy of the author.

This Week's Show •

The Siberian Candidate

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we ...

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James Bond or Jason Bourne have seen that we didn’t? What would George Smiley have been observing – Britain’s shabby, morose Number Two spy in the Cold War novels of the great John LeCarré? The line is out there in a hostile press that Trump and Putin in Helsinki wasn’t a chiefs-of-state summit so much as a huddle in broad daylight of a Russian-intelligence asset and his KGB handler. Outrageous if even remotely true. Without evidence, it’s just political rage talking. But what would those spies, and their authors, know drawing on their experience and their imaginations?

The Manchurian Candidate movie script is where the Donald Trump story has been trending for almost two years now: the wild notion in the Hollywood classic from 1962 that US presidential politics could be taken hostage by a brainwashed pawn of Russian spymasters. In the movie, Lawrence Harvey played the shell of a man, Raymond Shaw, who at the sight of a playing card, a Queen of Hearts, will do anything he’s told. Frank Sinatra played his pal from Army days who trying to snap Raymond back to sanity.

From the novelist Richard Condon and screenwriter George Axelrod, The Manchurian Candidate was thriller fiction, obviously. The suspicion after the Helsinki summit – that a “treasonous” Donald Trump is the witting or unwitting stooge of Vladimir Putin – is something else: a reading of circumstances, paranoid politics, perhaps. But fiction has its own claim on authority: it’s the lie that tells the truth, people have said; it’s the work of art and intuition, and the imagination that gets to the point ahead of the plodding facts.

Robert Baer was a CIA field operative in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in the Middle East. George Clooney played the rough and tumble Robert Baer role in the hit movie Syriana in 2005, from Baer’s first book: See No Evil — all about the evil underside of oil and arms trafficking, dynasties at risk and drone assassinations in something like the Iraq war. He made fiction out of facts, Robert Baer, a storyline out of chaos in the news.

The premise is that it takes the mind of fiction, a make-it-up imagination, to see what was going on at the Helsinki so-called summit. Richard Lourie is a Boston-born Russianologist who had the nerve and verve to compose the late dictator Josef Stalin’s autobiography.

Our guest David Filipov came home this year from a long stint as Moscow bureau chief of the Washington Post. He edits the News at Northeastern University.

Olen Steinhauer joins us from New York. He’s a rising star in Spy Fi, author of five novels set in Ukraine, decade by decade since the 1940s. The third season of his video series Berlin Station begins this fall on EPIX cable.

Who’s going to explain how it is we trust the best fiction on this stuff more than we trust the so-called intelligence?

Podcast • November 16, 2014

Stephen Kotkin: Who’s Bigger Than Stalin?

Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin has taken on the most important biography he can imagine: the life, rise and thirty-year reign of Josef Stalin. The first book of a trilogy (out now) goes from Stalin’s birth in ...

And he’ll defend the statement. Stalin was nobody from Georgian who became the longest-serving leader of the century. He’s the man who won (or survived) a world war and forged the nuclear, industrial power called the Soviet Union. And he combined, with terrific force, the features of the totalitarian leader: an impossible dream — of a personal, Communist “paradise on Earth” — and real, unmatched brutality. So, forget Putin — forget everyone. Stalin stands alone in the century.

The new Russian patriotism is playing its own memory: it does away with Stalin’s Communism in favor of the iron man who whipped the Nazis and changed the map of Europe. Vladimir Putin’s game of equivalences extends to distant history, too: yes, Stalin was bad, he conceded, but no worse than Oliver Cromwell.

So, Kotkin says, as Putin’s Russian Federation revises its textbooks, menaces memory organizations, and stirs up hate and anger, it’s an old playbook they’re using — at a less dire moment and to more muddled effect.

As the conversation ended, Kotkin noted how his subject’s shadow lingers over Putin’s current war. Stalin notoriously starved Ukraine, but he also kindled the idea that they were their own people, with their own nation — another inconvenience inherited from the father of the Russian century.

April 10, 2014

Are We Numb to Nukes?

We’re thinking our way through a plausible nuclear emergency with Elaine Scarry who reminds you – we’ve got a weapons monarchy in this democracy. How can we call it a democracy, the rule of the people, when there’s one man’s finger on the trigger that could destroy us all?

Eric Schlosser: Nuclear Nightmares

Cold Wars, and How to Survive Them

Richard Rhodes

Nukes by the Numbers

Guest List

• Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, and author of Thermonuclear Monarchy, along with The Body in Pain and On Beauty and Being Just;
• Hugh Gusterson, anthropologist, professor at George Mason University, and author of People of the Bomb and Nuclear Rites.

We’re thinking our way through a plausible nuclear emergency with Elaine Scarry who reminds you – we’ve got a weapons monarchy in this democracy. Two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall and a nuclear football still accompanies the president at all times, nuclear missile silos still dot the great plains, and hundreds of nukes remain constantly on alert. How can we call it a democracy, the rule of the people, when there’s one man’s finger on the trigger that could destroy us all?

Other people have shown, without alluding to nuclear weapons, how odd the picture of Hobbes had gotten around the 1950s and beyond. He seemed to have been turned into a monster. And yet, if you look at the timing, that is the nuclear age, and he was made to serve that purpose. These things take many different forms, and if our structures of thermonuclear monarchy demand that we give up the Constitution, it’s not that an executive goes out and says (except maybe Nixon), “Okay, now I’m saying let’s get rid of the Constitution.” That would be preposterous. But, people start giving all different kinds of accounts of why we don’t need to follow the Constitution. “Oh, that was something from several centuries ago,” “Oh, that was something associated with nation-states and we’re above thinking of nation states now.”

Now, sometimes, you do have executives willing to say, “Look, we can’t do things constitutionally because I have a lot of power here.” There’s the amazing moment when Dick Cheney said—and I cite this in the book—on a television program, in response to questions about torture in the Bush administration and Guantanamo, instead of saying, “You’re over-estimating executive power,” says, “You guys are not thinking clearly. What we did is nothing compared to the power the president has. Day and night, he’s being followed around with a nuclear briefcase. Don’t deceive yourself. His power is far beyond what you imagine.”

We seldom have people talking so candidly, and when they do, we think, “Oh that’s just a bizarre stylistic feature of Dick Cheney.” That’s not a bizarre feature; that’s a candid statement of fact.

Elaine Scarry in The American Reader

Take a look at Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto’s animated view of every nuclear test from 1945 to 1998 — no less terrifying because of its retro look:

Reading List

• More of Elaine Scarry’s interview with The American Reader, and a feature on the book in Harvard Magazine;

• Hugh Gusterson’s audit on an Orientalist double standard in nuclear weapons:

The presumed contrast between the West, where leaders are disciplined by democracy, and the Third World, where they are not, does not hold up so well under examination. The governments of Britain, France, and Israel, not to mention the United States, all made their initial decisions to acquire nuclear weapons without any public debate or knowledge. Only in India was the question of whether or not to cross the nuclear threshold an election issue. Pakistan also had a period of public debate before conducting its first nuclear test… There also have been problems with U.S. command and control.

• Louis Menand’s review of Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, “Nukes of Hazard,” The New Yorker, and an excerpt from the book;
• The Memory Palace (audio), “Babysitting,” a radio story on Donald Hornig, babysitter to the bomb.

From the Archives • April 8, 2014

Cold Wars, and How to Survive Them

Ahead of our show with Elaine Scarry this week, we're reminding ourselves of how we got into the nuclear standoff called the Cold War, and how Ronald Reagan dreamed we would get out of it. With a nuclear cold war taking rhetorical shape between Israel and Iran, with Pakistan and India ever in range of the brink, it is no academic or merely historical question: how did the US and USSR get out of their four-decade staring contest without a single one of their many thousands of nuclear guns going off?

Ahead of our show with Elaine Scarry this week, we’re reminding ourselves of how we got into the nuclear standoff called the Cold War, and how Ronald Reagan dreamed we would get out of it:

The danger of a nuclear weapon being used, whether against us or against somebody else, is actually greater now than it was in the Cold War. But the big difference is that it’s only going to be one or two, and it’s not going to be five thousand or seven thousand … We have to take this very seriously, but at the same time, it’s not a Cold War scenario.

John Lewis Gaddis on Open Source

Ronald Reagan dreamed of disarmament. A final, total abandonment of nuclear weapons…

He and Gorbachev would come to Iceland, and each of them would bring the last nuclear missile from each country with them. Then they would give a tremendous party for the whole world…. The President would be very old by then and Gorbachev would not recognize him. The President would say “Hello, Mikhail.” And Gorbachev would say, “Ron, is it you?” And then they would destroy the last missile.

John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War

With a nuclear cold war taking rhetorical shape between Israel and Iran, with Pakistan and India ever in range of the brink, it is no academic or merely historical question: how did the US and USSR get out of their four-decade staring contest without a single one of their many thousands of nuclear guns going off?

Richard Reeves’ revisionist appreciation of Ronald Reagan, subtitled “The Triumph of Imagination,” compounds the impression in Gaddis’ history that part of the answer was Ronald Reagan’s Hollywood intuition that the picture of two cowboys each pointing 10,000 six-guns at each other — forever — made for a lousy screenplay. The script needed a doctor, Reagan realized. Around the same time Mikhail Gorbachev remembered saying to his wife, Raisa, “We can’t go on living like this.”

Gaddis writes that to break the human habit of escalating violence, and of using all the tools that worked: “It took visionaries — saboteurs of the status quo — to widen the range of historical possibility.”

The heroes of his story are: Pope John Paul II, who “set the pattern by rattling the authorities” throughout the Soviet bloc. Margaret Thatcher, “who relished being tougher than any man” in reviving the reputation of capitalism in the world. Ronald Reagan, who used his theatrical skills to rebuild confidence at home, to spook Brezhnev and enlist Gorbachev. And Gorbachev himself, who put his private instincts ahead of the party line in softening communism’s emphasis on the class struggle and its old claims of historical infallibility.

But most of the other players in the last half-century — including Truman after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Stalin and Eisenhower and most assuredly Reagan — came to realize, each in his own epiphany, that the damned nukes were un-usable.

The lesson among all of us Cold War survivors, Gaddis writes, was that “war itself — at least major wars fought between major states — had become a health hazard, and therefore an anachronism.”

First of my questions, awaiting yours: do the nuclear players and wannabes on the 21st Century stage know the futility of those weapons as well as, say, Reagan and Stalin did?

Second question, especially for Richard Reeves, who recruited me for the New York Times in the late 1960s: as Ronald Reagan’s reputation is revalued upward, what needs to be said of Reagan’s worst enemies in the Republican power elite (figures like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger) who envisioned “limited” nuclear conflicts but successfully labeled Reagan for most of his career as the “extremist.”

And which of those Republican forebears — Rockefeller’s imperial personification of oil power and Wall Street, and Ronald Reagan’s cowboy populism — is the true ancestor of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd that rules our roost today?

John Lewis Gaddis

• Robert A. Lovett Professor of History, Yale University

• Author, The Cold War: A New History

Richard Reeves

Journalist and Presidential BiographerVisiting Professor,Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern CaliforniaAuthor, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination

March 20, 2014

Suzanne Massie: Reagan and Russia

Suzanne Massie is the freelance American friend of Russia, Russian people, and Russian culture. I call her the woman who ended the Cold War, because of the almost unimaginable persuasive power that she brought to bear on Ronald Reagan, now 30 years ago. She’s just published her memoir, Trust But Verify: Reagan, Russia and Me. “Trust but verify” is the old Russian motto that Suzanne Massie taught to Ronald Reagan, which he kept repeating to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last chief of the Soviet Union, when those two leaders conspired to call off the conflict and get rid of their nuclear stockpiles, almost.

It was Suzanne Massie who gave me my first unforgettable walking tour of St. Petersburg — of the Hermitage, the Royal Palaces, Pavlovsk, Dostoevsky’s house and grave, the Italianate churches — in 1992. It was all part of my assignment to write an account for The Atlantic of her extraordinary service to Ronald Reagan and all of us. I thought the title of The Atlantic piece in February, 1993 should have been “The Woman Who Ended the Cold War.” Here it is, under the headline “Agent of Influence“.

Podcast • June 4, 2013

JFK & his Papa: David Nasaw’s light on The Patriarch

David Nasaw’s smashing biography of The Patriarch: Joseph P. Kennedy smashes not least the legend of a giant gap between cranky father and radiant presidential son. JFK himself gave some substance and flavor to the ...

David Nasaw’s smashing biography of The Patriarch: Joseph P. Kennedy smashes not least the legend of a giant gap between cranky father and radiant presidential son. JFK himself gave some substance and flavor to the legend in a delicious impromptu line in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s court account of A Thousand Days. The story was that late in the 1960 campaign, when the Jack and Bobby Kennedy were both extending themselves to keep Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail in Georgia, King’s venerable namesake, “Daddy” King of Atlanta, a lifelong Republican, announced that he’d never thought he could vote for a Catholic… “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father,” JFK said, in Schlesinger’s telling. The line JFK added “quizzically,” was “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

The gap was broader than that. Joe Kennedy had been an outspoken isolationist even as Franklin Roosevelt’s ambassador to Great Britain; he was a Neville Chamberlain appeasement guy while JFK was learning to love Churchill’s rhetoric of indomitability. Joe Kennedy, tainted by soft-core anti-Semitism, was “absolutely, totally opposed” to the war in which his 3 older sons raced to enlist.

So the differences are sharp and significant, but in the masterful researches and close readings of David Nasaw, the continuities are clear, too, and for a new century maybe more telling. Joe Kennedy’s was ready to “make a deal” with Hitler in 1939-40 on the realistic reading that England was not prepared to defend itself in battle. This became JFK’s college thesis and first book, Why England Slept, an echo of his father’s analysis.

The flip side of Joe Kennedy’s appeasement policy was his zeal to negotiate a rescue of European Jews and a peace that would have saved Europe from war’s devastation. Nasaw is emphatic in our conversation on the point that Joe Kennedy knew more, cared more and was ready to do more about the Jews’ predicament than either Roosevelt or Churchill. The instinct for negotiation shows up, of course, in JFK’s inaugural doctrine: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” And it’s confirmed in all the posthumous evidence of JFK’s mostly secret scurrying in his last year of life to make back-channel peace with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro — to end nuclear testing, to withdraw US forces from Vietnam, in truth to cancel the Cold War. Both father and son can be read (in part anyway) as rueful, near-radical peaceniks up against the merciless war habit.

Joe Kennedy could count the price of war in his own family. “I hate to think how much money I would give up rather than sacrifice Joe and Jack in a war,” he wrote his father in law in 1937. John Kennedy, in the American University Speech in June, 1963 which now sounds like the heart of the man and his most precious legacy, spoke with the same poignancy in plain language: “For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

Podcast • March 2, 2010

Tom Gleason’s Liberal Education: Memoir with Music

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you're blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

Call this a musical-conversational extension on the memoir of a beloved teacher, the historian of Russia at Brown University, Abbott Gleason, known as Tom. We’re connecting dots from Tolstoy to Orwell to Louis Armstrong in a big roomful of friends at Brown’s Watson Institute.

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you’re blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

A Liberal Education is the title of his memoir. It’s the private side of a career in Russian studies coinciding with four decades of Cold War. It warms and deepens my pleasure in the book to have known Tom well from odd angles: our daughters were college roommates; we’ve listened to jazz bands many Monday nights at Bovi’s Tavern in East Providence; we read War and Peace together in a small group two summers ago, then Moby Dick last summer. The Brothers Karamazov is next, in summer of 2010…

The fun of the book is in the disgressions — to the Tolstoyan family farm in Connecticut where young Tom spent his summers, where “workhorses… and a team of massive white oxen lingered, long after tractors and hayloaders were the rule on the more serious farms in the neighborhood… The haying was all done manually, with pitchforks, and many a wobbly load slid or topped off the wagon before it could be brought home to the barn. Farm work was usually over in time for drinks at the Big House before the sun had sunk much below the yardarm…”

The fun of our conversation is in our version of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, as Tom Gleason free-associates on the music of Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Tom’s Harvard roommate John Harbison.

Maybe the meat of things is a reflection on the academic wars that came with Tom Gleason’s job:

CL: You we born into the Cold War, in a certain sense. You kept your powder dry in it. But in the book, as in life, you observed all the high and low politics of it, the ideological and academic politics of the Cold War period. So in the end, Tom, what the hell was it all about? Over here and over there, who got it right? Who, in retrospect, had wisdom on that huge subject?

TG: Well, I’m not sure that getting it right and being wise are exactly the same thing. As far as getting it right goes, I tend to think — and I was a sort of left center person on the Cold War — the people on the two extremes, further to my right and further to my left, got it more interestingly at least, if not absolutely more right. By that I mean people like my colleague the British historian Michael Cox, who teaches at the University of Wales, and his Trotskyite friends always had a view that the Soviet Union was conceived in sin and betrayal, and it didn’t really belong in the world and it would someday pass away — and of course from their point of view, be replaced by something that was truly revolutionary, as Trotsky had believed. And on the other side, my more conservative colleagues Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, also from a quite different point of view believed that the Soviet Union did not belong in the modern world. They believed that any nation or any empire which denied the market and denied the economic realities of the world, would not ultimately survive. So in a certain sense the two extremes met, behind my back, so to speak, and in many ways they were the people who were sort of least surprised – Martin Malia being another one of the conservative ones. But I think the two extremes were not necessarily the wisest people. I think the wisest people in dealing with the cold war were those who tried to question their own motives and tried to question themselves and tried to take it one step at a time… I think the cold war got us into places where rhetorical flights could take us out of ourselves and get us well beyond where we wanted to be. Once in a while I would catch myself saying something and my little super-ego would sort of pick itself up and rub its eyes and say “I’ve been asleep all this time, did I hear what you just said?”

Abbott (Tom) Gleason in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 1, 2010.

It’s a nice Gleasonesque thought that the folks who saw the Cold War prophetically were his adversaries at far opposite ends of the argument, and the very last people you’d have asked to do something about it.