LETTER TO DAVID C. ACHESON FROM WILLIAM J. CASEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP87M00539R000800960005-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 16
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 8, 2009
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: October 1, 1985
• Content Type: LETTER

STAT
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Central Intelligence Agency
Washn non. Q C. 20505
2 October 1985
David C. Acheson, EsQuire
Dear David:
Thank you for your recent letter.
I regret that you missed the Metropolitan Club
luncheon on 1 May 1985. I appreciate, however, your
requesting the text of my presentation and hope you
find it interesting.
illiam J. Casey
Director of Central Intelligence
STAT DCI/PAA
X26 Sept 8S
Distribution
Original - Addressee
- PAO 85-0427//
1 - ER 85-3334
STAT - PAO 1
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REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
BEFORE
THE METROPOLITAN CLUB OF NEW YORK CITY
1 May 1985
Metropolitan Club
One East Sixtieth Street
New York, New York 10022
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Today, I would like to tell you about the subversive war which the
Soviet Union and its partners have been waging against the United States and
its interests around the world for a quarter of a century\or more. This
campaign of aggressive subversion has nibbled away at friendly governments
and our vital interests until today our national security is impaired in our
immediate neighborhood as well as in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.
This is not an undeclared war. In 1961, Khruschchev, then leader of the
Soviet Union, told us that Communism would win not through nuclear war which
could destroy the world or conventional war which could quickly lead to
nuclear war, but through "wars of national liberation" in Africa, Asia, and
Latin America. We were reluctant to believe him then, just as in the 1930s
we were reluctant to take Hitler seriously when he spelled out, in his book
"Mein Kampf", how he would take over Europe.
Over the last ten years, Soviet power has been established:
-- In Vietnam, along China's southern border and astride the sea
lanes which bring Persian Gulf oil to Japan.
-- In Afghanistan, 500 miles closer to the warm-water ports of the
Indian Ocean and to the Strait of Hormuz, through which comes the oil essential
to Western Europe.
-- In the Horn of Africa, dominating the southern approaches to the
Red Sea and the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
-- In southern Africa, the source of minerals which we and the
other industrial nations must have.
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-- And in the Caribbean and Central America, on the very doorstep
of the United States.
This is not a bloodless war. Marxist-Leninist polices and tactics have
unleashed the four horses of the apocalypse--famine, pestilence, war and
death. Throughout the Third World we see famine in Africa, pestilence through
chemical and biological agents in Afghanistan and Indo-China, war on three
continents, and death everywhere. Even as I speak, some 300,000 Soviet,
Vietnamese, and Cuban troops are carrying out savage military operations
directed at wiping out national resistance in Afghanistan, Kampuchea, Angola,
Ethiopia, and several other countries.
In the occupied countries--Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Angola,
Nicaragua--in which Marxist regimes have been either imposed or maintained by
external forces, there has occurred a holocaust comparable to that which Nazi
Germany inflicted in Europe some 40 years ago. Some four million Afghans,-
more than one-quarter of the population, have had to flee their country. The
Helsinki watch tells us that they have fled because "the crimes of indiscriminate
warfare are combined with the worst excesses of unbridled state-sanctioned
violence against civilians." It cites evidence of "civilians burned alive,
dynamited, beheaded; crushed by Soviet tanks; grenades thrown into rooms
where women and children have been told to wait."
In Cambodia, 2 to 3 million people, something like one-quarter of the
pre-war population, have been killed in the most violent and brutal manner by
both internal and external Marxist forces.
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In Ethiopia, a Marxist military government, supported with extensive
military support from Moscow and thousands of Cuban troops, by collectivizing
agriculture and keeping food prices low in order to maintain urban support,
has exacerbated a famine which threatens the lives of mil\ions of its citizens.
It'has exploited the famine by using food as a weapon to forcibly relocate
people fighting an oppressive government in the north hundreds of miles to
the south where there is no preparation to receive them. In urban areas,
food rations are distributed through party cells.
In Nicaragua, the communist government killed outright a minimum of 1,000
former Somoza national guardsmen during the summer of 1979. In 1982, it
forcibly relocated some 15,000 Miskito Indians to detention camps, forced
many more to flee to refugee camps in Honduras, and burned some 40 Indian
villages. Last month, the Sandinistas forcibly move 60,000 campesinos from
areas close to the Honduran regions, burning their houses and killing their
cattle.
What is the purpose of all this carnage, this creeping imperialism?
my view, there are two primary targets--the oil fields of the Middle East
which are the life line of the Western alliance and the isthmus between North
and South America. Afghanistan, South Yemen, Ethiopia, as well as Cam Ranh
Bay in Vietnam, and Mozambique and Angola in southern Africa, bring Soviet
power much closer to the sources of oil and minerals on which the industrial
nations depend and puts Soviet naval and air power astride the sea lanes
which carry those resources to America, Europe and Japan.
Capabilities to threaten the Panama Canal in the short term and Mexico
in a somewhat longer term are being developed in Nicaragua where the Sandinista
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revolution is the first successful Castroite seizure of power on the American
mainland. They have worked quietly and steadily toward their objectives of
building the power of the state security apparatus, building the strongest
armed forces in Central America, and becoming a center for exporting subversion
to Nicaragua's neighbors.
The American Intelligence Community over recent months unanimously
concurred in four National Estimates on the military buildup, the consolidation
and the strategic objectives of the Soviets the Cubans and the Sandinistas
in Nicaragua. If I were to boil the key judgments of those estimates down
to a single sentence it would be this. The Soviet Union and Cuba have established
and are consolidating a beachhead on the American continent, are putting
hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military equipment into it, and
have begun to use it as a launching pad to carry their style of aggressive
subversion into the rest of Central America and elsewhere in Latin America.
Let me review quickly what has already happened in Nicaragua. The
Sandinistas have developed the best equipped military in the region. They
have an active strength of some 65,000 and a fully mobilized strength including
militia and reserves of nearly 120,000. These forces are equipped with Soviet
tanks, armored vehicles, state of the art helicopters, patrol boats and an
increasingly comprehensive air defense system. This gives the Sandinistas a
military capability far beyond that of any other Central American nation put
together.
-- In addition to this military hardware so threatening to-neighboring
countries, there are now in Nicaragua an estimated 6,000-7,500 Cuban advisors,
and other Communists and radical Arabs total several hundred in assisting
the regime in its military buildup and its consolidation of power.
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-- Under Cuban direction and guidance the Sandinista security forces
control the media, create and spread propaganda and disinformation and expel
or neutralize those who oppose Sandinista totalitarianism'.
Today, we see Managua becoming to Central and Latin America what Beirut
was to the Middle East for almost 15 years since 1970 when the PLO was
expelled from Jordan and Lebanon became the focal point for international
and regional terrorists. Managua's support for training of Central American
subversives is well documented--they support Salvadoran communists, Guatemalan
communists, radical leftists in Costa Rica, and are attempting to increase
the number of radical leftist terrorists in Honduras. More recent evidence
indicates Nicaraguan support for some South American terrorist groups and
growing contacts with other international terrorist groups.
Yet, just last week the American congress refused to approve $14 million
for people resisting commmunist domination of Nicaragua, on the very day that
a Soviet ship unloaded aout $10 million worth of helicopters, trucks, and
other military cargo at Corinto, the principal port in Nicaragua. On the very
next day, Ortega, the Nicaraguan Communist dictator, traveled to Moscow to ask
the Soviet Union to make $200 million available to him to consolidate a
Leninist communist dictatorship across a stretch of land which separates
South America from North America.
This development in our immediate neighborhood should not be viewed in
isolation but as part of a worldwide process which has already worked in
Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America.
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Let me now give you an insight on how all this happens. In early 1981,
I had a talk with Bob Ames, our CIA Middle East expert, who died at the hands
of a terrorist attack in Beirut in 1983.
In Ethiopia, Angola, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Grenada, dedicated
Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries followed this Soviet blueprint with only
slight modifications.
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Our analysts have studied this blueprint for taking over a government
and consolidating a totalitarian regime as it has. been exemplified in seven
totalitarian regimes; six Marxist-Leninists in Cuba, South Yemen, Ethiopia
Angola, Grenada, Nicaragua, and the Islamic revolutionar) government of Iran.
They have identified 46 indicators of the consolidation of power by a Marxist-
Leninist regime. These indicators measure the movement toward one-party
government, control of the military, of the security services, of the media,
of education, of the economy, the forming,or takeover of labor or other mass
organizations, exerting social and population control, curbing religious
influence and alignment with the Soviet bloc.
Of the 46 indicators, Nicaragua in five and one-half years has accomplished
33. They have established control of the media, taken over radio and TV,
censored the broadcasts of Sunday sermons of the Archbishop of Managua, and
subjected the only free newspaper, La Prensa, to a brutal daily censorship.
They have taken control of the education system. Nicaraguan textbooks now
teach Marxism. They attack the tenets of Western democracy. They attack
traditional religious teachings and encourage children to maintain revolutionary
vigilance by watching for signs of ideological impurities in their neighbors,
friends and relatives. The Sandinistas have taken control of the military.
They have taken control of the internal secret police and have established a
Directorate of State Security. That directorate, according to our reports,
has hundreds of Cuban, Soviet, East German and Bulgarian advisors. There are
Soviet advisors at every level of the secret police. In fact, it is safe to
say that it is controlled by the Soviet Union and its surrogates. Block
committees have been established to watch and control the people. The Church
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has been persecuted. Witness the campaign mounted by the Directorate
of State Security to harass and embarrass Pope John Paul II during his 1983
visit to Nicaragua. They have used political mobs (similIr to the Red Guards
of Soviet and Chinese revolutionary history) to attack democratic politicians,
union members and religious leaders. And finally, just as Abd'al Fatah told
Bob Ames what he must do, and following Hitler and Khrushchev, the Sandinistas
have told the world, that they would spread the example of Nicaragua beyond
El Salvador to Honduras, Guatemala, and the entire region.
An integral part of this blueprint for subversive aggression is deception
and disinformation to manipulate and influence public opinion and policies in
western countries. This takes many shapes and forms.
A worldwide propaganda campaign has been mounted and carried out on
behalf of the Sandinista regime and Salvadoran guerrillas which would not
have been possible without the capabilities, the contacts, and the communications
channels provided by the Soviet bloc-and Cuba. The Sandinistas themselves
have shown remarkable ingenuity and skill in projecting disinformation into
the United States itself. Perhaps the best example of this is the systematic
campaign to deceive well-intentioned members of the western media and of
western religious institutions.
There are many examples of Nicaraguan deception. The Sandinista press,
.radio and government ministry have put out claims that the US used chemical
weapons in Grenada, that the US was supplying Nicaraguan freedom fighters
with drugs, and that the US might give the opposition bacteriological weapons.
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The. debate in the Congress last week disclosed few who think that what
is happening in Central America is a desirable state of affairs or that it is
compatible with avoiding a possibly permanent impairment ff our national
security and a serious deterioration in the American geopolitical position in
the world.
There are some who will be content with an agreement that the Nicaraguans
will now forego further aggression. Our experience in Korea and Indochina
provides some lessons on the value of agreements with Communist governments.
Korea started to violate the Korean Armistice within days of the truce signing.
Under the 1973 Paris Accords, North Vietnam agreed to cease firing in
South Vietnam, withdraw its forces from Cambodia and Laos, and refrain from
introducing additional troops and war materiel into South Vietnam except on a
one-for-one replacement basis. North Vietnam never observed the cease-fire
and troops withdrawal requirements, and within little more than two months
after it had signed the peace agreements it had already infiltrated some
30,000 additional troops and over 30,000 tons of military equipment into
South Vietnam.
We believe the Sandinistas' main objective in regional negotiations are to
buy time to further consolidate the regime. History and the record.and
purposes of Marxist-Leninist regimes in general and the Sandinistas in
particular lead us to believe that unless Nicaragua has implemented a genuine
democracy as required by the OAS such assurances could not be adequately
verified and would not be complied with. Cuban officials have urged the
Salvadoran Commmunist guerrillas to slow down their attacks against the Duarte
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government in order to fortify and consoidate the Nicaraguan revolution. We
believe that Cuba has assured the Salvadoran Communists that it might take as
long as 5 to 10 years, but as long as the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua
remains, that country will serve as a base for Communist 'expansion in the
area and the Salvadoran insurgency will be renewed once the Sandinistas have
been able to eliminate the armed resistance.
What does all this mean for America's future? Should Central America fall
under Communist control, it could mean a tidal wave of refugees into the US.
Every country that has fallen under Communist control since Warld War II
has sent refugees streaming over the borders--first Eastern Europe, then
Cuba, and more recently Vietnam and Afghanistan--and the potential influx
from Central America is even higher than from any of these. Since 1980, some
200,000 Salvadorans fleeing the Communist-initiated violence in their own
country have entered the US illegally. Illegal movement from Mexico has
increased, with some 1,000,000 Mexicans illegally entering this country in
1983 alone. In 1984 the Bi-partisan Commission on Central America warned
that a Communist Central America would likely be followed by the destabilization
of Mexico and that this could result in many millions of additional Mexicans
fleeing into the US.
Today, the Cuban and Nicaraguan military forces are together four times
the size of those of Mexico and are equipped with vastly superior weapons.
Today, with armed forces larger and better equipped than the rest of Central
America, Nicaragua could walk through Costa Rica, which has no army, to
Panama, and Cuba can threaten our vital sea lanes in the Caribbean.
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The insurgency is a major obstacle to Sandinista consolidation in
encouraging the erosion of active support for the Sandinistas, creating
uncertainties about the future of the regime; challenging`\its claims of
political legitimacy; and giving hope to leaders of the political opposition.
The largest anti-Sandinista insurgent group, the FDN, is still providing
strong military resistance despite cutoff of US aid almost a year ago.
Popular sympathy for the insurgents is increasing in the countryside,
and the FDN continues to receive significant numbers of the new recruits.
That opposition can increase the pressure until the Sandinista support
has eroded sufficiently to leave them no option other than modification of
their rejection of internal reconciliation. The objective is to allow for the
same process of democratization that is taking place in the rest of Central
America to occur in Nicaragua.
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EXECUTIVE SECRETARIAT
e-" , ROUTING SLIP
ACTION
INFO
DATE
INITIAL
1
DCI
X
2
DDCI
3
EXDIR
4
D/ICS
5
DDI
6
DDA
7
DDO
8
DDS&T
9
Chm/NIC
10
GC
it
IG
12
Compt
13
D/OLL
14
D/PAO
15
VC/NIC
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Remarks
To # 14: Please prepare response for DCI
signature.
STAT
4J
Sep 85
3637 10'81) Date
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August 30, 1985
Honorable William J. Casey
Director
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Dear Bill:
I understand you gave a talk at the
Metropolitan Club on May 1st, which it was my
bad fortune to miss. Do you have a text that you
could let me have? The accounts I have of your
talk made it seem extremely interesting.
Sincerely,
DCA/em .
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