The photo above shows me in 1983  (the mustached fellow with glasses on the middle right)  in the company of a KGB agent (circled), attending a presentation at a Washington think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).  In the late 1970s and early '80s, Russians, Cubans and other promoters of Soviet foreign policy were well-received in D.C.  as they sold messages of  peace, love, and humane socialism. 

There was a modest amount written back then, by Rael Jean Isaac, The Wall Street Journal, David Kelly, John Rees, Barron’s, Evans and Novak, and a few others about the extent of Russian penetration of U.S. intellectual and political circles. It was largely ignored. The popular media hated Nixon, Ford and especially Reagan more than they doubted the good, "essentially defensive" ambitions of the Soviet Union.  So Soviet foreign policy, particularly its campaign for unilateral American nuclear disarmament, had American friends. The smart ones may have known what they were doing. The more numerous ones arguably didn’t—but liked the sound of anti-militarist slogans aimed at more-or-less conservative politicians. 

Orlando Letelier was one of the Soviet bloc’s men about town. A Chilean diplomat before the coup, he was director of the Transnational Institute (TNI) at IPS in the mid-’70s—until Chilean agents blew up his car along Embassy Row. In death, he was indiscreet. By some accounts it was Metro cops, first to respond to the bombing, who got their hands on Letelier’s briefcase, the contents of which exposed not only his pro-Soviet influence-peddling (e.g., financing a Massachusetts congressman’s trip to a World Peace Council session) but also, more interestingly, the flow of funds: directed by exiled Chileans in East Germany, disbursed through that international banking center, Havana.

You would think reporters would get hot on the trail, especially at the hometown Washington Post. Not so. What does a briefcase full of letters and contacts prove? I obtained copies of the briefcase’s contents informally. To make sure of the documents’ bona fides, I ordered a second copy a few years later by FOIA request to the Justice Department, which also delivered a well-redacted FBI file on Letelier.

Letelier was a small part of the picture. His TNI colleague Saul Landau, a friend of Castro’s, was a tireless propagandist for Soviet foreign policy. It was interesting one evening, as I was collecting material for a Wall Street Journal article, to hear Landau lay into iconic lefty I.F. Stone, who had expressed reservations about the Soviet bloc invasion of “that little country” Czechoslovakia. The Soviet willingness to use force, Landau steamed, made it “the one insurance policy of socialist revolutions” around the world. When the Letelier scandal broke, Landau was a go-to guy for insights on the Post editorial page.

Covert Cadre,  S. Steven Powell’s exhaustive expose of IPS, was published in 1987. It has a nice array of photos of the real deal, KGB officer Victor Taltz (in the photo at the top), Georgi Arbatov (with Saul Landau), third secretary Vladimir Strokin, Anatoliy Manakov, Igor Mischenko, and assorted Cubans and Sandinistas cozying up with IPS fellows. Also on hand from time to time were  writers with addresses at the Post and The New York Times, including John Dinges and Ray Bonner. Karen DeYoung, later the Post’s foreign editor, lectured at IPS’s Washington School about the Sandinista rebels. You could, for many years, be excused for thinking the Times’s op-ed page had nowhere else to turn but IPS for critiques of Reagan’s defense policy.

What’s interesting is that  Moscow's operations were out in the open. And they were  helped along in some measure by the same publications that today, driven by hatred of the current administration, have discovered comic-opera Russian troll farms as a threat to democracy.  Covert Cadre is worth tracking down, if only to remind oneself of who stood where  when the outcome of the Cold War was far from certain.  

 February 21 2018  . . .And from the November 1980 issue of Reason magazine, my review of a novel about Soviet influence,   online  or directly below.

The Spike, by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss.  374 pages. Crown, 1980. $12.95.

It's an open secret, if you accept the authority of Les Whitten in the Washington Post, that the model for the left-wing think tank in this roman a clef of Soviet influence is the Institute for Policy Studies. Besides enjoying wide access to Capitol Hill, of course, IPS has forged some ties within libertarian circles, especially in the disarmament camp, through joint projects with the San Francisco-based Cato Institute.

Those factors help to make The Spike a novel of compelling interest. On the face of it, the thesis is plausible: that the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union are at least as active as those of the West. The focus here is the dissemination through Western news media and institutions of false information—disinformation, a term fortunately coming into vogue—about Soviet intentions.

If one wonders at the persistent and widespread bent toward putting the best face on Kremlin military and subversive campaigns, The Spike argues that Directorate A, a well-heeled department of the KGB, has successfully influenced the accepted terms of debate within a broad spectrum of U.S. public opinion. That's an enormous allegation, one that I suspect is no more welcome to some libertarians than to many well-meaning liberals and moderates. But it's also one of such potential importance that it deserves a serious hearing.

The title of this novel refers to that instrument of the newspaper city room upon which the palms of harried editors and the prose of prolix reporters are impaled, along with, sometimes, the stories of impolitic reporters. As Robert Hockney, the novel's young hero discovers, it's far easier in the American press to expose the operations of the CIA than to expose those of the KGB. Indeed, on the strength of his revelations of American intelligence ties to European news media, he ascends in the turn of a few pages from free-lancer for a Ramparts-style Movement magazine to foreign correspondent for what could be mistaken for The New York Times. Having used tips from Movement friends—notably, fellows of the Washington-based Institute for Progressive Reform—to unveil CIA activities, Hockney is lionized by the fashionable left and bedded to a fare-thee-well.

But he comes a cropper. A counterintelligence chief whose career Hockney has helped to destroy plants seeds of doubt. "The Russians don't need to hand money out the back door of the embassy," the old man declares, "when they have tax-exempt foundations controlled by Marxist sympathizers in this country who can raise the money from guilt-ridden liberal millionaires and little old ladies who in other circumstances might leave their inheritance to a cats' home or a gigolo."

As Hockney pursues a lengthening trail, he finds that the socially conscious, trendy antimilitarists who have fed him scoops are oddly inconsistent. Decrying American espionage, an ex-CIA officer announces a trip to Rome to "expose every goddamn CIA agent in Italy"—and meanwhile passes intelligence to Marxist terrorists. The Institute for Progressive Reform taps him to head a branch in Amsterdam with a million-dollar bankroll. Friends of the West are systematically discredited, while radical regimes are adored as humanitarian. Putting together a saga of Soviet manipulation of US reporters and institutions, Hockney finds that his revelations are too much for his newspaper's liberal editors. The story is spiked.

There are many points on which one can fault the novel. Years of fame or privation are told in the style of "he spent 40 years in the wilderness." A bounty of satirical opportunities lies largely unexploited. Characters emerge as scarcely more than ambulatory names.

Yet it's written with such authority that the story is captivating. The authors—Arnaud de Borchgrave, Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent, and Robert Moss, an editor of London's Economist—insist that the characters are composites. But many of the examples of high-level espionage, they maintain, are true. At the end, when a KGB defector faces a Senate hearing and begins naming names—of "friendly persons" and of conscious Soviet agents—not all the cries of smear and McCarthyism can put the masks back on.

"When I worked for Directorate A," Colonel Viktor Barisov testifies, "I was part of the team that decided that we should hammer away at the following themes until they became conventional wisdom for the Western media. That our military buildup was inspired by the fear of encirclement by China. That a military conflict between Russia and America is unthinkable for either side, since there could be no winners in a nuclear exchange—when, in fact, our strategic doctrine has always maintained that it is possible to fight and win a thermonuclear war. That it is morally unacceptable for a democracy to tolerate covert intelligence operations."

Those themes remain popular in some quarters. The Spike invites its readers to wonder why.

                                                                                                                                                                           John C. Boland is associate editor of the financial weekly Barron's.

 A few footnotes forty-some years later. It’s always interested me that IPS failed to sue for libel when this book was published. There may have been a persuasive threat of litigation made later because when the paperback appeared, the Institute for Progressive Reform bore a name much less like its reported real-world model. I would like to see what letters went back and forth. The great danger of libel suits—as Oscar Wilde learned—is that the facts emerging in civil litigation might lead elsewhere . . . or at least not to the destination the injured party hopes for. IPS faced this reality again when the editor of Barron’s, Robert M. Bleiberg, wrote an editorial defending the “Chicago boys,” who were helping post-Allende Chile liberalize its economy. Bob was dismissive of the Letelier assassination (of which, see more below) and declared that according to documents found in the dead man's briefcase Letelier was a DGI agent and “bagman” for the KGB. IPS threatened a libel suit. One of Dow Jones’s spear-carriers at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler—I don’t remember if it was Rudy Guillani or Michael Mukasey—responded that a) you can’t libel the dead and b) the magazine was looking forward to discovery. There was no suit.

I never got to know Robert Moss, who wrote more spy novels and then turned to mystical themes involving American Indians and lucid dreaming. De Borchgrave I knew slightly through a friend, John Rees. It was Rees who related the writing technique of the collaborators, Arnaud sunning himself on a hotel balcony and calling out periodically to Moss, who pounded a typewriter and chugged brandy in the room, “How are we doing, dear boy?” The collaboration lasted only for a couple off novels. One evening I got a glimpse of a book that I believe Arnaud had privately published (this was in the days before vanity could be satisfied on websites such as this one). Arnaud de Borchgrave had interviewed many of the world’s political notables and had his picture taken with them. The book was a collection of Arnaud-with–celebs. The only picture I remember is of two younger men—de Borchgrave and King Hussein of Jordan—clutching little toddler flotation rings below their midsections as they prepared to jump into the King’s swimming pool. I wonder if  the picture was as comic-lewd as I remember. 
n

Assassination on Embassy Row, by John Dinges and Saul Landau. 411 pages. Pantheon. $14.95.

The victims were Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the U.S., later foreign minister, interior minister and, as Salvador Allende’s government teetered, defense minister, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American. Both worked at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, where Letelier was director of IPS’s Transnational Institute. An IPS-TNI colleague, Saul Landau, and a former Santiago correspondent for The Washington Post, John Dinges, have put together a fast-paced, highly readable account of the Washington car-bombing four years ago in which Letelier and Moffitt died.

It’s a fascinating tale. Much of it springs from the testimony of Michael Vernon Townley, the American-born Chilean agent who, steeped in James Bond thrillers and anticommunism, admitted to having arranged the assassination. Cut loose by Chilean President Augusto Pinochet and shanghaied back to the U.S., Townley turned state’s evidence in a case that yielded two murder convictions and indictments of several other figures, including Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, chief of the Chilean secret police.

The assassination became a cause célèbre for the American left and right alike—for vastly different reasons. To the left, it underscored the brutality of the military junta that had ousted the socialist government in Chile. To the right—because of an unpredictable turn of events—it raised questions about the activities of Letelier and his associates.

The unforeseen event was the recovery of Orlando Letelier’s briefcase from the wrecked car. While it was being held as evidence, the contents were photocopied and leaked to conservative journalists and others. Letelier had been planning to fly to Cuba the day he died, and records and correspondence he was carrying suggested that what remained of the Chilean Socialist Party enjoyed more than fleeting contacts with Cuban intelligence.

On these points, Dinges and Landau offer less detail than on other matters, and the omissions seem significant. When Letelier announced that he would be visiting Cuba, we’re told in the book’s third-person style, “Landau gave Letelier a letter to take to a friend in Havana.” Parts of the letter were quoted early in 1977 in a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak; the column normally appears in The Washington Post, but this one didn’t. Nor is the letter, which was addressed to Pablo Armando Fernandez, quoted in Assassination on Embassy Row. But  it affords an interesting perspective on co-author Saul Landau.

Sept. 13Dear Pablo,      Since Orlando is going to Cuba, I will give him a quick letter to bring you. Orlando was Allende’s Minister of Foreign Relations and before that Ambassador to the U.S. Now he works with me as director of the international progrma [sic] of the Institute.     The film we did in Jamaica is finished. Michael Manley [the Prime Minister] has begun to use it in his campaign for reelection. So I feel useful. It is a nice, fast-moving film, with lots of reggae music and pretty colors. I hope you’ll get a chance to see it. . . .      I enclose a reprint of my piece [on Jamaica] in the Washington Post. It appeared in the [International] Herald Tribune. But I plan to phase myself out of the Jamaica work and get back to the U.S. I think that at age forty the time has come to dedicate myself to narrower pursuits, namely, making propaganda for American socialism. It is still a forbidden word here, but eventually someone, or some group of people will have to put it together with a serious political movement. We cannot any longer just help out third world movements and revolutions, although obviously we shouldn’t turn on backs on them, but get down to the more difficult job of bringing the message home. Well, it’s a serious letter, but no poems come to mind today. Love to all the family and you. s. 

Landau is no stranger to Cuba. Since the ’Sixties, he has made at least two films on the island extolling the regime and persona of Fidel Castro. (The films are distributed by the Institute for Policy Studies.) Is it unfair to wonder if Landau, experienced in “making propaganda” for Cuban, Jamaican and U.S. socialism, would balk at making propaganda for a Marxist martyr?

The Dinges-Landau report is also incomplete on other letters. We’re told that IPS “colleague” Juan Gabriel Valdes “also gave Letelier an envelope, finally making good on a long-overdue promise to a Cuba official for some research on Christian Democratic movements.” Unmentioned: the “official” was “Comrade Emilio Brito, American Department. Central Committee,” of the Cuban Communist Party.

Nor do the authors disclose that in his letter, Valdes reports having received documents “by hand from Julian Rizo.” At the time, Julian Torrez Rizo was first secretary of the Cuban delegation at the UN; he was widely suspected also of being a ranking officer in the Directorate General of Intelligence (DGI), Cuba’s espionage unit. (In 1979, Rizo became charge d’affaires in newly Marxist Grenada.) If there’s good reason for the omissions, from the authors’ point of view, it may be this: The letters establish a chain of communication linking Cuban Central Committee members and two fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies.

But the key omissions concern Letelier and his contacts in Havana. He was traveling, we’re told, to see Beatriz “Tati” Allende, a daughter (since dead) of the late Chilean President. Tati Allende, treasurer of the Chilean Socialist Party, had been living in Havana since the coup. Her husband, Luis Fernandez Ona, is identified by Dinges and Landau as “a Cuban government official” and “a Cuban diplomat.”

A recent edition of the Directory of Officials of the Republic of Cuba, an unclassified publication of the Central Intelligence Agency, identified Fernandez Ona as of November 1976 as “an unidentified section chief” at the Central Committee, General Department of Foreign Affairs. He had been stationed in Santiago during the Allende years, during which he and Tati were married, Some intelligence-watchers believe he is the second in command of the DGI.

A letter from Tati to Letelier is reprinted by Dinges-Landau in bowdlerized form, without ellipses. The deletions are bracketed:

Havana, May 8, 1975[Year of the First Congress]Dear Orlando:     [I am very sorry that you could not come to the meeting of the Socialist Party. I showed your letter to Carlos and to Jorge Arrate, who promised to arrange the Harrington matter.]     I know that Altamirano wants to communicate with you to offer a solution to the problems that have arisen there, and he asked me to inform you that, from here, we will send you, in the name of the party, a thousand dollars ($1,000) per month to support your work. I am sending five thousand now in order not to have to send it monthly. . . .Tati
The reference to Altamirano is to Carlos Altamirano, general secretary of the Chilean Socialist Party, who was living in exile in East Berlin. Letelier’s apologists usually pooh-pooh the payments from Tati as representing funds raised among Chilean exiles in Western Europe; but it’s clear that (a) the orders came out of the German Democratic Republic and that (b) the money, despite currency restrictions in Cuba, flowed through Havana.In the version of this letter that was published in the Congressional Record, the name Harrington is deleted “pursuant to House Rule XIV,” which governs mentions of members of Congress.

There’s a related reference in Letelier’s office expense notes: “Payment differences pending to Representative Harrington for his trip to Mexico. 174.00.” The trip was apparently to attend the 1975 “international Commission of Inquiry” into the Chilean junta’s crimes. The conference was backed by the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council.

Was Orlando Letelier an agent? So far as his assassination on U.S. soil goes, and the murder of an American citizen, it’s beside the point. But the issue remains of interest because of the intensity of the denials—and the attempt to obscure the record—by those who worked with Letelier and who continue to “make propaganda” for socialist dictatorships.

Letelier clearly had access to a number of Congressional liberals and State Department officials (as noted, ironically, by Landau and Ralph Stavens, another IPS fellow, in the March 26, 1977 issue of The Nation.) His address book suggests contacts with staff members of Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including two who later joined the staff of the National Security Council. Money, however modest, found its way from the house of a Cuban government official, through Letelier, to defray expenses for at least one member of Congress on an elbow-rubbing session with international leftists.

If the Post never opened its pages to most of the evidence against Letelier, a prominent staff member, Scott Armstrong (co-author of The Brethren), nonetheless lent a hand in the preparation of Assassination on Embassy Row. The authors also acknowledge the help of IPS (“our base for writing”) and its staff. A reasonable question might arise on why Pantheon Books, a respected publishing house, lends its name to cooked history.

It’s perhaps for the same reason the Post welcomes the ruminations on Jamaica by Saul Landau on his return from making propaganda films for Michael Manley. And for the same reason that both a successful reporter and a deputy foreign editor of the Post lectured at IPS’ Washington School spring series. And for the same reason that the social whirl that brought together Post editors, IPS fellows, and Teofilo Acosta, Washington’s most charming DGI agent, raises scant concern. Radicalism, even the variety that interfaces with foreign operatives, has become part of the capital Establishment.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       John C. Boland

                                                                                                                                         ~~ ~ ~

Footnote 40 years later: This hatchet job, published  in the twilight of the Carter years, evoked strong complaints from the book’s publisher, André Schiffrin, author Saul Landau, and a University of Maryland assistant professor who found it one of the most “contemptible pieces of writing” he’d seen in a while, noting my “filthy” sources (the briefcase evidence). 

I enjoyed the letters almost as much as I’d enjoyed writing the piece. The Communists’ dead remain martyrs—to something, the lies of idealism?—and the generations they gulaged are  ledger entries of historical determinism. Whatever. The only offended letter-writer still among the quick is the professor, Philip Brenner, who now teaches U.S.–Latin American foreign policy at American University, specializing in Cuba. He was the author, with Saul Landau, of “Farewell, Monroe Doctrine” in 2009. Lucky students. 

See also Remembering Cuba.

 Among Washington think tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies sets a mean pace. It criticizes the United States as engaging in militarism, imperialism and domestic repression, assails multinational corporate power, and provides a forum and political lobbying arm for Third World liberation movements. A recent colloquium at the Institute's headquarters here brought together about a hundred persons, including fellows from IPS and its Transnational Institute affiliate, at least three congressional staff members, a U.S. coordinator for Palestinian organizations and a number of university students. The theme was “Prospects for Peace and War,” and the purpose was to try out ideas for building a major U.S. disarmament movement. 

That cause already has enlisted dozens of other groups, from pacifist Catholic bishops to the Soviet-influenced World Peace Council. While the campaign resembles the Vietnam-era resistance movement, its ambitions are far grander: nothing less than the Atlantic Alliance's demise, a neutral Europe and U.S. disarmament. 

Soviet militarism aroused little alarm. Amid chatter about the “reaction” and “viciousness” of the Reagan administration, about capitalism's “hegemonic presumptions,'' Fred Halliday, a Transnational fellow, tried to explain Soviet missile deployment against Western Europe. “All the Russians have done with the SS-20 is try to catch up,'' said Mr. Halliday. Agitation in Europe by an “unflinching neutralist and pacifist movement,” opposing the basing of NATO nuclear weapons, Mr. Halliday observed, could mark a breakthrough against East-West “bloc logic,” and hasten the alliance's dissolution, “which in my view is what should happen.”

“The idea that we're going to win the arms race is absurd,'' declared Richard Barnet, a former official in the Kennedy administration, and a founder of IPS in 1963.  “The hopeful element in all that is that by turning on the rhetoric, Reagan has scared the American people and the allies more than the Russians. That's done more for the European peace movement than anything else.”

Citing a poll finding that 47 percent of the American people expect a nuclear war within five years, Mr. Barnet added: “That the security policy developed by the administration is disbelieved by so much of the population suggests great possibilities for an American peace movement. The possibilities will increase as we see the economic damage of the arms race.” 

Marcus Raskin, co-founder of the Institute, urged a moral campaign to put nuclear weapons “outside the frame of reference of any strategic defense of the United States.” Building them and aiming them at cities, he insisted, could be treated as a “war crime.” American scientists could be pressed to take a “Hippocratic oath” refusing to build nuclear weapons. 

One early test for that kind of thinking is the United Nations Second Special Session on Disarmament, scheduled for June 9 to July 7 in New York. A favorable public and media response to demonstration and pulpit-pounding surrounding that session will encourage IPS and other groups that the U.S. may be receptive to a peace mobilization. In coming months, the Institute plans to train speakers for campus road shows in hopes of having a disarmament bandwagon rolling by fall. 

Is all this wishful thinking? Especially given Afghanistan, Poland and the public's seeming rightward drift? Skeptics within the IPS orbit argue that two major elements needed for a neutralist movement are lacking in the United States: exploitable fear of a limited nuclear conflict in one's backyard, a theme the left has been drumming home in Europe; and the nationalistic exhilaration of kicking Americans and their weapons out. With the audience generally sympathetic, some speakers felt free to let their hair down more than they do when writing for The Nation and The New York Times op-ed page. There was general agreement, for example, that the disarmament message couldn't be sold on its merits all the time, but such issues as economic burdens and unemployment would help recruit support. 

Chester Hartman, a visiting fellow at IPS, referred to “savage” domestic budget cuts in food stamps, Medicaid, public housing and other welfare programs. By identifying the cost of C-5 transport planes and other military hardware in terms of numbers of people cut from social benefits, he suggested, the left could excite resistance. “Don't forget that this becomes a two-way argument,” he counseled. “The more money we succeed in pulling to domestic uses, the less will be available for getting those C-5s built and our rapid deployment force around the world.” 

Issues of Soviet expansion and repression were deflected with denunciations of U.S. support of the “murderous oligarchs of El Salvador” and of plots for intervention against the struggling democrats in Nicaragua. Declared Fred Halliday: “The hypocrisy of the Reagan government on Poland is just beyond belief,” because while assailing repression there the U.S. has been aiding El Salvador, Pakistan, the Sudan and other repressive right-wing regimes. “The actual level of repression is less” in Poland, according to Mr. Halliday, than in “20 or 30” of the U.S. and Britain's allies. A bit later, IPS fellow Michael Moffitt referred in passing to Third World countries that are “more democratic in the bourgeois sense”—-as opposed to those that have been liberated. 

One schism disrupted things. Fred Halliday announced that if Western Europe had rejected U.S. Pershing II missiles in return for the Polish government's granting Solidarity a role, Poland wouldn't be under martial law. The suggestion of NATO complicity in Poland evoked an outburst from one of left journalism's elders, I. F. Stone. Condemning the Soviet Union's sentencing of members of the Helsinki watchdog committee, Stone cried: “Why did they have to send these few brave people to Siberia? What were they so afraid of? . . .  The rigidity of this regime is a disgrace. They've destroyed socialism morally.” On Poland, he snapped: “You can't blame it on Reagan. It's a big event. . . . These clichés are not good enough for reaching our fellow citizens and urging caution.” Fred Halliday was wounded. “It's not cliché,'' he said. “It's a central theme of the European peace movement—shared responsibility.” 

Mr. Stone wasn't present for later sessions, so he missed a ringing apology for Soviet expansion by Saul Landau, a TNI fellow recently returned from conferring with Sandinista officials in Nicaragua*. Said Mr. Landau: “Anti-Sovietism is the key to the [Cold War] ideology. It's one of the great divisors within the progressive movement, and we have to deal with it. . . .  The Soviet Union has been the one insurance policy of successful [Third World] revolutions.” Mr. Landau, who a few years ago told a Cuban friend that he planned to dedicate himself to “making propaganda for American socialism,” saw hope for advance of the liberation cause. The language of Catholic priests in denouncing economic injustice and the language of Marxist-Leninist guerrillas are identical, Mr. Landau observed.

                                                                                                                                         ~ ~ ~
 
Footnote 40 years later:  Richard Barnet escapes embarrassment by being dead.  But the quoted statement is memorable: "The idea that we're going to win the arms race is absurd." Barnet posed as a civilized fellow,  chamber musician, scholar.  I don't remember if I ever reviewed his 1980 book The Lean Years, but I recall an image in that exercise in anti-liberal wishful thinking, written on the cusp of the Reagan boom:  a  bloated capitalist choking to death on a mouthful of steak. Left imagery wasn't subtle. Liberal capitalism had to fail, just as the West couldn't win an arms race.  Nice, too, the quote from Barnet's colleague Marcus Raskin, also beyond embarrassment: that a moral crusade should put nuclear weapons "outside the frame of reference of any strategic defense of the United States." Morality? Not a lot changes. Raskin's son, an occasional IPS hand, represents Maryland 's wealthiest district (tenth richest in the nation) in Congress.

* For a reader interested in how the Sandanista venture has worked out, the December 16, 2021 issue of The New York Review of Books carries a long article by Alma Guillermoprieto describing  the husband-wife rule of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. The Nicaraguean legal system rejected allegations by Murillo's daughter that stepfather  Danny raped her from early puberty.  Droit du seigneur.

Looking Back on the Cold War