ABC'S '45-85' SCARY BLEND OF HALF TRUTHS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201460010-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 20, 2012
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: September 20, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201460010-1
i0L- APPEARED
ON PAGE
WASHINGTON TIMES
20 September 1985
ABC's 145-85' scary blend of
Any resemblance between the history
of the US.-Soviet confrontation since
World War II, as portrayed on ABC's
41/z-hour special "45-85" and what actu-
ally happened, as I covered it for 39 years,
was purely coincidental. It was a scary
blend of information, disinformation,
truth, untruth and half-truth.
Take poor Fidel Castro, the
misunderstood Jeffersonian Democrat
who was, we were told (in- countless
promo spots leading up to the big event),
pushed into the Russian bear's arms by a
chowderhead called Uncle Sam. This
eisegetical innocent was the Rodney
Dangerfield of international relations.
He got no respect. Thrned down by a mid-
town hotel in Manhattan in 1960, he
sulked to Harlem's Theresa Hotel with
his revolutionary entourage. As ABC
recounts the story, Nikita Khrushchev -
who gave us the invasion of Hungary, the
Berlin ultimatum, the Berlin wall and the
Cuban missile crisis - raced up to Har-
lem to give Fidel Dangerfield the respect
he desperately craved.
ABC did not even bother to look up the
full text of its own Barbara Walters' inter-
view with Mr. Castro in 1977. Perhaps
today's young researchers did not realize
that some key excerpts were not aired by
ABC, for reasons best known to whoever
was in charge of censorship by omission
in those days. But Foreign Policy mag-
azine did run the long interview verbatim
et litteratim. Mr. Castro, to his credit, told
Miss Walters that he had been a Commu-
nist since law school. He dared not tell his
guerrillas where he really stood.
By the same token,'Ibmas Borge, Dan-
iel Ortega and his brother Umberto con-
cealed their lily-red credentials and
postured as Jeffersonian Democrats-,
until they had hijacked the Nicaraguan
revolution from the genuine democratic
forces.
While Mr. Castro was in the United
States in 1959 for his first post-victory
visit, vehemently disclaiming any Com-
munist connections, a young Cuban
secret service recruit was in Havana
with a group of 120 KGB agents (85 offi-
cers and 35 interpreters), headed by a
Colonel Ulianov. His name was Andres
Alfaya'Ibrrado. He served in Mr. Castro's
DGI the Spanish language branch of
the KGB - for 19 years and worked in 12
countries before defecting to France.
wINWI:to
Mr. Alfaya and oth r Cuban recruits
were lectured by their Soviet trainers on
the importance of di information and
agitation during the "t sition" already
under way in Cuba. They were young and
didn't really understand much about
what. the Soviets were saying. It all
sounded more like psychiatry than spy-
ing. At the end of the course, Mr. Alfa a's
superior, Ramiro Valdez, to this a
Cuba's top intelligence operative, warne
that anyone talking about their new wor .
would be executed.
Mr. Alfava and his classmates were
assigned the task of completing the "sei-
zure of cultural power." They were given
a Mum anti-ITS and anti-CIA stones a
day for media consumption. They came
?traight from Moscow and were then
adapted for local needs. Seventy-five
percent of local media space was arbi-
trarily earmarked for "agitprop" and to
cultivate permanent hatred for all sym-
bols of capitalism."
Mr. Alfaya told me that one of the most
brilliant disinformation campaigns
launched at that time was to make world
opinion believe that it was U.S. hostility
that was pushing Cuba into the Soviet
embrace. The story sticks to this very
day - certainly at ABC.
Hundreds of "progressive"
intellectuals gathered from all over the
world in Havana in January 1968 for the
International Cultural Congress. Mr.
Alfaya was astonished at how easy it was
for the KGB-DGI net to manipulate them
and orient their writings.
At the first Tricontinental Solidarity
Conference in Havana in January'66, the
Soviet bloc secretly decided on a two-
track approach for destabilizing Western
democracies. On a government-to-
government level, it was to be what the
Soviets to this day call "peaceful coexis-
tence," the smokescreen behind which
the Soviets were to achieve global mili-
tary supremacy while disarming the
West psychologically. On another level,
the Havana '66 compact agreed to organ-
ize, fund and train international terrorist
groups through a variety of proxies. This
strategy of expelling the United States
from centers of influence continues to
this day.
Nary a word about all this in 41/2 hours
of TV "history." ABC managed to convey
the image of two bumbling superpowers
whose motives and objectives are inter-
changeable. Despite their enormous eco-
nomic difficulties, the Soviets and their
proxies remain extraordinarily skillful
at pursuing by all means short of open
warfare objectives that are more tradi-
tionally pursued, at least in Western
minds, by war itself. The tactics include
state-sponsored terrorism, increasingly
funded by narcotics rackets; subversion;
penetration; and, above all, disinfor-
mation. And on all these fronts, ABC
remained silent.
Mr. Castro's covert emissaries con-
tinue to have success in dealing with
quite influential Americans who would
not consciously enter into any similar
arrangements with the Soviets. Cuban
agents continue to lead a charmed life in
the United States although the DGI is a
KGB surrogate. Whatever the explana-
tion, Fidel Castro's people are able to con-
tact, to cultivate and in many cases to
recruit American citizens in the media,
congressional and other influential cir-
cles and get them to depict Central
American and other Third World
Marxist-led guerrillas as the good guys
and the United States as the arch "impe-
rialist" villain.
ABC seems to yearn for yet another
period of detente between the superpow-
ers. By signing two dozen bilateral agree-
ments with the Soviet Union in 1972 -
including SALT I, ABM and the space
rendezvous program - President Nixon
and Henry Kissinger were hoping to
weave the superpowers into a web of
mutual interests that would somehow
temper Soviet behavior. A year later, Leo-
nid Brezhnev told his Warsaw Pact col-
leagues that "peaceful coexistence" with
the United States was designed to bring
about an irreversible shift of forces
favorable to socialism.
ABC did not tell us what happened
when 35 heads of state met in Helsinki in
the summer of '75 to sign the European
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP90-00965R000201460010-1
haff-truths.
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0201460010-1
2.
Accords on Security and Cooperation
and Presidents Ford and Brezhnev hailed
a new era of detente in the world. That's
when the Soviet Union began secretly
manufacturing the SS-20 missile which
was targeted against West Europe two
years later, changing the balance of
world power.
A few weeks after Helsinki, Moscow
caught the United States by surprise by
introducing Cuban proxy troops into
Angola to seal a Communist victory in
that country, repeating the same sce-
nario in Ethiopia two years later. 'Ibday,
the Soviet Union exports 11 times more
weaponry to Africa than the United
States. It is also the world's biggest arms
exporter.
The Soviets' goal, as Richard Nixon
reminded us this week (and as he prob-
ably told ABC but that part must have
wound up on the cutting room floor), is
victory without war. America's goal is
peace without victory - which is, as
Nixon says, a recipe for defeat for the
West. The Soviet leadership does not
want war. That is a given. Their primary
goal is to achieve nuclear superiority to
have the political leverage to support
their expansionist foreign policy - to
exact surrender on the installment plan.
Hence, Moscow's desperate desire to do
away with SDI.
The discovery that Mikhail Gorbachev
knows how to handle a knife and fork is
more important to our media stars than
the fact that Mr. Gorbachev rose to the
top through the patronage of Mikhail
Suslov, the steely custodian of Commu-
nist orthodoxy, and Yuri Andropov, the
man who ran the KGB for 15 years. ABC
owes its viewers another 41h hours of pro-
gramming - this time with the world the
way it is, rather than the way our media-
crats would like it to be.
The year 1968 was when many things
fell apart, according to ABC. But it omit-
ted to tell us that was also the year our
mediacrats snatched defeat from the
jaws of victory during the Tet Offensive.
The former Minister of Justice of the
National Liberation Front - the Viet
Cong - who escaped among the boat peo-
ple, testified that Tet was an unmitigated
disaster for Hanoi, but that through a
disinformation campaign they convinced
U.S. opinion that it was the other way
round. President Johnson felt compelled
to abdicate.
A high-ranking French socialist who
watched the ABC production in Washing-
ton told me, "They even had me wonder-
ing what on earth we were all doing in
Korea in 1950. Overlooked in all those
quick flashes of historical revisionism
was the fact that the United States and its
allies resisted and turned back a North
Korean invasion, aided and abetted by
the Soviet Union."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/20: CIA-RDP9O-00965ROO0201460010-1