FORKED TONGUE, WILL TRAVEL

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00806R000201090024-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: June 25, 2010
• Sequence Number: 24
• Publication Date: September 18, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/25: CIA-R
ARTICLE APPE~AP"D
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WASHINGTON TIMES
18 September 1985
Forked tongue, will travel
An unfair amount of publicity in the cur-
rent East-West public relations war is going
to Mikhail Gorbachev, when indeed other
Soviet officials also toil away at what seems
an impossible task: portraying the U.S.S.R. as
a peace-loving, trustworthy, and
misunderstood kind of place with whom
deals can be made.
Mr. Georgi Arbatov was on the Larry King
show the other night and as usual was intro-
duced as head of Moscow's USA-Canada
Institute, which sounds something like a
Brookings Institution - independent, non-
ideological, credible. But the USA-Canada
Institute was created by Yuri Andro v when
he too over the in 1967 to sweet talk
t e est and Bga.t.her lntelli ence. Defectors
say that at least half the staff is KGB or GRU,
the Soviet military intelligence unit. No won-
der he says such funny things.
The Cold War, he explained, was launched
by the U.S., the first shots of which were fired
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Forget Stalin
and the Berlin Wall and the rest of it, Mr.
Arbatov counsels. That's just more Cold War
rhetoric. When Mr. King asked if everything
was America's fault, Mr. Arbatov admitted
that the Soviet officials were only human, so
they make mistakes like everyone else.
Therefore, Stalin, whose policies killed at
D P90-00806 R000201090024-3
least 17 million people, was not one of the
great beasts of history, but one of the great
bunglers. Whew.
Human rights abuses in the U.S.S.R.?
"How about the U.S.?" wonders Mr. Arbatov.
"We all have them:' he insists, and those cou-
ples like the Scharanskys who wish to live
together "number only about four or five,"
and they often owe their separation to the fact
that one of them is held on criminal charges.
The crime Anatoly Scharansky committed,
of course, was to join the Helsinki Watch
group - a naive act perhaps, but hardly one
deserving imprisonment.
If the on-air calls this Shakespeare of
moral equivalence received are any sign,
Americans don't buy any of it. This caused
Mr. Arbatov to mourn the high level of igno-
rance about his country, which could have
something to do with the lack of a free press
there, but let it pass. Underneath all the talk
about the PR fight is a presupposition that
both sides have the same product to sell, and
the hearts and minds of the world will go to
the slickest hawker. But most people have no
trouble deciding between life in the U.S. and
in the U.S.S.R., which explains the Cold War
better than Georgi Arbatov ever could. But
Lord knows he'll get plenty more chances
before November.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/25: CIA-RDP90-00806R000201090024-3