...
despite that CIA characterized it as a fantasy based on the black
propaganda that had invented itself to smear the Soviet Union!
To persuade
the President [Ronald Reagan], the neoconservatives set out to prove
that the Soviet threat was far greater than anyone. They would
demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary
movements around the world, were actually part of a secret network,
coordinated by Moscow to take over the world.
The main
proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative who was the
special adviser to the Secretary of State. His name was Michael
Ledeen and he had been influenced by a best-selling book called "The
Terror Network". It alleged that terrorism was not the
fragmented phenomenon that it appeared to be. In reality, all
terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof Group in
Germany and the provisional IRA, all of them, were a part of
coordinated strategy of terror run by the Soviet Union.
But the CIA
completely disagreed. They said this was just another neoconservative
fantasy.
But the
neoconservatives had a powerful ally. He was William Casey, and he
was the new head of the CIA. Casey was sympathetic to the
neoconservative view. And when he read "The Terror Network"
book, he was convinced. He called a meeting of the CIA's Soviet
analysts at their headquarters and told them to produce a report for
the President that proved this hidden network existed.
But the
analysts told him, this would be impossible because much of the
information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA themselves
had invented to smear the Soviet Union. They knew that the terror
network didn't exist because they themselves had made it up.
Melvin
Goodman, head of CIA office of Soviet Affairs from 1976 to 1987,
states: “And when we looked through the book, we found very
clear episodes where CIA black propaganda - clandestine information
that was designed under a covert action plan to be planted in
European newspapers - were picked up and put in this book. A lot of
it was made up. It was made up out of whole cloth. [...] And we even
had the operations people to tell Bill Casey this. I thought maybe
this might have an impact, but all of us were dismissed. Casey had
made up his mind. He knew the Soviets were involved in terrorism so
there was nothing we could tell him to disabuse him. Lies became
reality.”
In the end,
Casey found a university professor, who described himself as a terror
expert and he produced a dossier that confirmed that the hidden
terror network did, in fact, exist. Under such intense lobbying,
Reagan agreed to give the neoconservatives what they wanted, and in
1983, he signed a secret document that fundamentally changed American
foreign policy.
The country
would now fund covert wars to push back the hidden Soviet threat
around the world.
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