INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WHITMAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP91-00587R000201210002-6
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 45
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 1, 2010
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: February 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
The Fred Fiske Show - STATION WAMU-FM
February 8, 1985 8:00 P.M.
Interview with John Whitman
Washington, D.C.
FRED FISKE: This evening we're going to be talking to
John Whitman, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, who has written his
very first novel, titled Geneva Accord, and a very timely book it
is.
FISKE: With the arms control negotiations about to
reconvene in Geneva, with the President's support for the MX
missile and Star Wars funding,''John Whitman's novel Geneva
Accord, published by Crown Publications, is published at a
perfect time.
John Whitman served as the CIA's chief analyst of Soviet
policy for much of his 30-year career in that agency. He also
was the CIA representative in the SALT II talks in Geneva from
1977 to 1979.
Very nice to have you with us,-John.
JOHN WHITMAN: A pleasure to be here.
FISKE: This is your first 'novel,-and it's a corking
good effort.. Let me tell you that.
WHITMAN: Well, thank you.
FISKE: Very, very readable.
WHITMAN: Thanks.
FISKE: Must be very satisfying to be able to,. after
Matenol supplied by Rodlo TV Reports. Inc. rnoy be used for file and relerenoe purposes only. It may not be reproduced. sold or publicly demorxtrated or exhIbtted.
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spending a career, as you did, working for the CIA, to have the
time to sit down to do the sort of thing I suspect you've wanted
to do a long time.
WHITMAN: Actually, I had not thought about doing it.
It came to me after my retirement, and I was lucky enough to have
the time to carry it through.
FISKE: You have to wonder, as you read this book, how
much of the novel is autobiographical. There's a remarkable
congruence, a great similarity in the career of your hero in the
book -- you call him George Inago (?) -- and the career of John
Whitman.
WHITMAN: Yes, there is that. In fact, one of the
things I wanted to convey in this book -- basically, it's a spy
thriller, and I hope it's an exciting enough story to interest
people on that level. But I wanted to communicate some other'
things as well, and one was a little bit of the story of CIA from'
the side of the analysts.
Of course,- you always read about the spies and the
operators. You never read, because it's not very dramatic, about
the fellows who are trying to make sense out of all the collected
information and give the proper interpretations to the President
and the policymakers. So there's a bit of that in there.
FISKE: Your protagonist is a CIA veteran who is an
analyst all of his career and who goes to Geneva to represent the
United States in the SALT talks, as you did.
WHITMAN: That's right.
FISKE: And some of the people who have commented on
your book have commented that, in fact, you presented the
situation pretty much as it is there.
WHITMAN: Well, I also wanted to give a realistic view
of how arms control negotiations proceed. And those parts of the
book are really quite authentic.- The painstaking detail that you
must go through to write the treaty so as to leave no loopholes
that are unintended, the arguments that go on within the American
delegation, between that delegation and their bosses in Washing-
ton, and the actual process of negotiations with the Soviets.
FISKE: Tremendous tedium, apparently.
WHITMAN: Yes, it can be quite tedious. Yes. There's a
reason for that. SALT I, the predecessor treaty, was criticized
.for being very short, too general, and leaving unsuspected
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loopholes which the Soviet Union subsequently exploited, to our
surprise and dismay. So, in writing SALT II, there was an effort
to anticipate all possibilities and to gear, it as closely as
possible to what we knew about actual Soviet weapons, and to
close all those loopholes. The result was a lot of tedium for
the negotiators, and a treaty which is practically unreadable,
you know, for the general public.
O
FISKE: Long discussions about every word and every dot
and comma and dash.
FISKE: And consultations with Washington. So progress
is painstakingly slow.
WHITMAN: That's right. Because each side is trying to
put whatever limits it can on the other side, and yet write the
language in a way that leaves them free to go ahead with their
own programs.
FISKE: What was your role as the CIA representative?
WHITMAN: Well, of course, I had a headquarters working
back here, and they were carrying the main load. I was the
Geneva outpost. But one of my jobs was to inform the delegation
about as much as we knew about Soviet weapons systems, so that
the language we wrote would not just be limiting ICBMs in
general, but would be limiting the very specific systems that the
Russians had.
FISKE: Were you involved in the actual negotiating?
WHITMAN: Yes. Yeah. I sat at the table.
FISKE: As an adviser.
WHITMAN: Uh-huh.
FISKE: And the Soviets, of course, had a counterpart to
WHITMAN: Yes. They had Vladimir Pavlechenko (?) of the
FISKE: A career like yours., as an analyst, involves a
great deal of tension, competitiveness, even distrust, apparent-
ly, between those on the operations end and those on the anaysis
end, if in fact your book reflects the situation honestly. There
is almost two different worlds, really, as between the operations
branch and the analysis branch.
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WHITMAN: Yeah. Now, in the book a lot of that is for
dramatic effect and it is exaggerated, frankly. That is not part
of the realistic, authentic part of the book. I have, you know,
one part of the agency tracking down and shooting, and in fact
killing, a member of the other part of the agency. That is
fictional, truly fictional.
In fact, the two sides are rather separate. They've
come closer together in the last 15 years. But the fellows who
are responsible for covert operations are responsible for
protecting their sources, as well. And I don't want to know
where they get -- exactly who they're getting their information
from. Because if that fellow is every caught and executed, I
don't want to think that maybe I was careless one night at a
cocktail party and said something that compromised him.
For example, Arkady Shevchenko, whose book is out this
week. I knew we were getting information from a good source, but
I certainly didn't know who it was.
FISKE: You didn't know it was Shevchenko.
WHITMAN: No. And I think that's proper.
FISKE: I thought about Shevchenko as I read your book,
since you involved a defector. Ultimately, the Soviet intelli-
gence representative of the talk becomes a defector. And...
WHITMAN: You just blew the suspense.
FISKE: Huh?
WHITMAN: You just blew the suspense.
FISKE: Well, I think there's much more to it than that.
WHITMAN: Thank you.
FISKE: But as you describe the process, I related it to
what Arkady Shevchenko must have-gone through. And I suspect it
probably was rather similar.
WHITMAN: I just read his book and I was astonished at
how mine seems to anticipate it, although mine was fictional, in
the great apprehensions and agonies of serving as a defector in
place, still working for your home government, supplying inform-
ation to the Americans, and terrified at every turn that maybe
you were under suspicion by the KGB.
FISKE: Before we leave this business of the relation-
.ship between the operations branch of the CIA and the analysis
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branch, I suspect that probably the same relationship may exist
there as I found existing in the Air Force. I was flying
personnel, and those people who wore wings looked at themselves
as.something of an elite. Now,.the others were called ground-
pounders. You know, they were necessary, but they really weren't
Air Force. And I have a notion that maybe there's something of
the same kind of dynamic as between the operations branch and the
analysis' branch in the CIA.
WHITMAN: I've seen a fair amount of that, sure, in
terms of mood and self-image, and the fellows who are out in the
field recruiting spies, and so forth.
FISKE: The guys in the trench coats.
WHITMAN: In the trench coats. Naturally, they have
their own elan.
There are also people on the analytic side who thought
all that stuff was, you know, much overdone, and they were the
important part of the agency.
FISKE: In your story, which is fictional, of course,
parts of which you take some dramatic license with, you also
touch on some problems which I think are rather serious in the
CIA and in our government generally. You have a 30-year veteran
of the agency who has been there through changes in the White
House, through changes in the directorate of the CIA. Seven
directors he's worked under, and so on. And he's frustrated, and
others who work with him are frustrated with these changes, when
they get new people who have to be taught the business, whose
goals and understandings vary substantially.
Do we operate at a substantial difficulty with that?
WHITMAN: Well, relative to whom? I suppose you mean
relative to the Soviets.
FISKE: To the Soviets. Andrei Gromyko, for example,
has been in his post...
WHITMAN: 1957.
FISKE: All these years.
WHITMAN: 1957.
F I S K E : All these years. How many people have guided
American foreign policy during those years? I can't imagine that
that doesn't put us at a disadvantage.
WHITMAN: Well, I would say there are disadvantages on
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both sides. The lack of continuity on the U.S. side does mean
that you spend a lot of time in each new Administration learning
the ropes, learning the simple facts. When the Reagan Admini-
stration came to power in 1980, they were convinced that the SALT
II treaty was a bad treaty because it limited American weapons
systems. Now, in fact, they had to be shown it put no limits
whatsoever on our existing programs. The limits were all on the
Soviet programs. But it took a long time to get that through
their heads.
And I suspect this happens in many fields other than
intelligence and national security policy. So the Soviets have
that advantage.
On the other hand, they have the great disadvantage of
cumbersomeness, tradition. It's a very kind of hardening of the:
arteries, I would say is a fair description of the. system over
the last 20 years, because they don't renew their personnel and,
outlook. They just serve'on and on and on.
Now, Gromyko...
recently.
FISKE: That certainly can't be said of the top position
WHITMAN: Yeah. Well, I would even say so.- People have
changed but outlook hasn't. That's a very small clique, and
we've just been running through the last few members of that
clique as they age off and die.
Now, Gromyko is, you know,_a remarkable and a very able
man, and I wouldn't accuse him of being fossilized or having lost
his touch. But I think that those who, as some of the military
officers and some of those responsible for running the economy,
in particular, they would benefit from the kind of change in
administration that we go thorugh, and the rejuvenation and the
fresh viewpoint that that brings in.
FISKE: We were discussing Star Wars yesterday.
WHITMAN: Yes, I heard some of that.
FISKE: And I referred to some thinking that I have
seen, which was that if in fact we should decide to go ahead with
Star Wars, it might influence the Soviets to chuck out the
stratified, aging leadership that they've suffering under and to
go to a more dynamic, youthful kind of leadership,- which might
ultimately wind up to our disadvantage.
Is that a reasonable approach, to you?
WHITMAN: Well, who's going to chuck them out? It's
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really almost impossible to dislodge a Soviet leader, except by
the agreement of the four or five key men who are his colleagues.
And for the last -- every since Khrushchev fell in 1964, these
fellows have been pretty much of a mind. I'm sure they've had
their disagreements, but there's no evidence that any one of them
has harbored radically different policies and sought to -- well,
we've seen Brezhnev and then Andropov and now Chernenko, and
we've seen that as they successively take power, there's not any
substantial difference in the policies that they pursue.
FISKE: Even though Andropov was an intelligence man,
his years as head of the KGB didn't affect his administration?
WHITMAN: Well, he was also a diplomat. He was also a
party secretary. But he was the head of the KGB. I think it
made him a little tougher on internal dissent, on cracking down
on the dissidents. I don't know that there were other important
divergences. And that one is only marginal.
FISKE: One of the characters in your book was the
departing Director, early in your book speaks about the pressure
that had been brought to bear on him to overstate or underesti-
mate information in order to serve the purposes, policy purposes
of various departments or officials. Is it reasonable to think
that that sort of thing does go on?
WHITMAN: I think it's sort of endemic. Sometimes it's
weak and not to serious, and sometimes it's more severe.
FISKE: Right now, for example, we've been following the
trial of CBS, the case brought by General Westmoreland, which is
similar to that. Westmoreland, they charged, had doctored
figures. This sort of pressure is brought on our intelligence
analysts?
WHITMAN: Well, that was a time, during the Vietnamese
War, when I think the pressure was higher than usual. Yes. And
we used to be asked regularly by the Director, "Don't you have
any good news I can take to Lyndon Johnson's weekly meetings?
Because it's getting to be embarrassing always to be the bearer
of gloomy tidings."
WHITMAN: We regularly said, "No, sir. We don't." And
he regularly carried that bitter message down there, and took the
flak, took, you know, the upset and dislike of the President.
FISKE: But it's conceivable that another Director might
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insist upon such good news?
FISKE: And in your book, the new Director, who really
doesn't know the ropes, does exactly that. He's asked, when this
high Soviet official becomes a defector, not to tell the Presi-
dent because the information -- they want to hold the information
very, very closely. But he wants to make points with the
President in his new job, and insists, for political reasons, in
doing so. And I suspect that is not at all unusual.
WHITMAN: Well, no, it isn't. And there's a tension,
you know, between wanting to be independent and objective in the
supply of intelligence an wanting to be part of the team, a
member of the President's inner circle.
My own prejudices are that one should resist that
temptation to be a member of the team who's a cheerleader and a
helper, and say -- the Director, I think, should say to himself,
"My job is intelligence, pure and simple. Policy is beyond my
purview, and I'm going to stay out of it."
That's why I think it is not a good idea to have, you
know, politicians, partisan figures of high political level
appointed to the Directorship.
FISKE: Well, that's the kind of person we. do have.
WHITMAN: Yes, we do. And I regret it. I don't work
there, I haven't worked under Bill- Casey. I retired before he
came, and, you know, I don't have a lot of stories about how he's
twisted intelligence.
FISKE: Well, how many Directors did you work under?
WHITMAN: Oh, my goodness. About seven or eight, I
FISKE: Was any of them not a political appointee?
WHITMAN: Well, by political I mean a professional
vote-getter. Of course, everybody who -- almost everybody who
gets to be prominent enough to be Director of Central Intelli-
gence has some political background, except those who come from
inside, like Richard Helms and Bill Colby, or a kind of a
quintessential civil servant, like Jim Schlesinger, or some of
the military men who have served in that post. Now, they're not
all politicians.
I think that the tradition was fractured most seriously
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when George Bush was appointed to be the Director. Now, I think
Bush made an excellent Director, but he was the Chairman of the
Republican National Committee before he took that job. And since
then it has sort of been a new tradition that you put a leading
political ally or crony into the job, as opposed to a more
professional man.
-FISKE: Postmaster General used to be reserved for that.
WHITMAN: That's right. Yeah.
FISKE: And I'd feel a lot safer if, you know, that were
still the situation.
WHITMAN: I would too. But maybe I'm old-fashioned.
Those are my feelings about it.
FISKE: By the' way, did you have to have this book
approved by the CIA?
WHITMAN: Yes. Yes.
FISKE: Did they make any changes?
WHITMAN: And that, by the way, is a system that I
approve of. I don't object at all to having to submit my
manuscript because I was writing about material, a large part of
which is classified, and I didn't want to stray across the line
inadvertently. Yes, they took it and they sent it around for
review in all the different parts of,-the agency.
There was one sentence that I was worried about and I
particularly wanted their view on. And they came back saying,
"You must take out one sentence," and it was the very one I was
concerned about. I called them up and I said, "Nice eye, fellas.
Good eye."
FISKE: You'd been there long enough to know.
How many Americans at these negotiations speak Russian?
I ask you that because in describing the negotiations, you talk
about the Russian negotiator who speaks English, across the table
presents his views in Russian, and then the translator translates
them into English.. It makes the process slow and cumbersome, but
gives him the opportunity to, consider twice what his answers will
be, and also, of course, maintains the pride, I suspect, he takes
in his own language.
WHITMAN: Oh, yes.
FISKE: One of the criticisms we hear of American
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education and American foreign policy, and maybe American
intelligence, is that altogether too few of us speak the foreign
languages.
WHITMAN: Uh-huh. Well, certainly the Russians outdo us
enormously in that, and that was evident in the SALT negoti-
ations, where their English competence was several times higher
than our Russian competence.
Now, that's partly because the people that we have
there, you know, didn't train in the Russian field. They were on
the delegation because of their special military knowledge or
their special legal knowledge, and so Russian wasn't their career
work. But in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, they just train a lot
of people in Russian -- in English.
FISKE: Does that give them a considerable advantage
WHITMAN: Well, I think it probably does in facilitating
their -- in their facilitating their understanding. They can
read our press in a way that we can't read theirs, you know, so
easily, so flexibly. On the other hand, there's not very much in
their press. But they can keep up with currents of American
opinion because they can talk freely and read and do analysis of
sources.
FISKE: Do you speak Russian?
WHITMAN: Yes, but I don't speak it as well as my KGB
counterpart spoke English.
FISKE: How'd you come to be in charge -- the chief
analyst in the Soviet Division?
WHITMAN: I worked my way up. I came in 1951 to the
agency and started out as an economic researcher, and then went
through, you know, various levels.
FISKE: Had you started in Soviet investigations?
WHITMAN: Uh-huh.
FISKE: Had you prepared for it, or...
WHITMAN: No. At that time -- this was 1951. And the
best way to learn about the Soviet Union was to join the CIA,
which had all the research resources and the jobs in which one
could train.
I began, really, in an odd way. I got very interested
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in the music of Shostakovich in the late '40s. And then I read
one day the denunciation, the self-denunciation of his own works,
as dictated to him by Stalin and Stanov (?). And it bemused and
intrigued me a great deal. I thought, "What kind of a system is
it that would force a great composer like this to condemn his own
works?" And that was my first interest in the subject, the first
thing that drew me into being a Sovietologist.
FISKE: In your story, John, it seems very clear that
the Soviet negotiators are sincerely interested in reach agree-
ment, in wanting a treaty, as individuals, and they all argue to
your protagonist in the story that their government wants it and
wants it very, very badly. There's a widely held perception in
this country that, in fact, the Soviets have been insincere.
How do we resolve those things?
WHITMAN: Well, part of this is the requirements of
drama in my book. I could not assert that the real Soviet
delegations all, to a man, sincerely favored a treaty.
FISK.E: Well, that can be said of the American delegat-
ion too. Obviously. How many people on that delegation?
WHITMAN: Well, officially, sitting at the table, about
eight or nine, and then twice that many advisers.
FISKE: Sure. And, you know, they don't all come with
the same view. Some of them would, if they could, throw the
whole thing out. And there are people in Moscow on the General
Staff and people in the Pentagon on the General Staff who feel
that it's foolishness and a waste of time, and we ought to throw
it out and we can't trust them, and so on. So that sort of
balance exists on each side.
But what was your impression, as a participant in the
negotiations, about the general sincerity of the Soviets?
WHITMAN: Okay. My impression -- and you know, I don't
want to put too much weight on it because we weren't intimate
with these men, and you couldn't...
FISKE: No socializing at all?
WHITMAN: Yeah, sure there was socializing, but we
weren't socially intimate. They didn't become close friends.
And they had, of course, to maintain their official government
position, which was one of sincerity.
My guess, my hunch is that, to varying degrees, all of
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them had invested enough of their career into the arms control
negotiations that they wanted to see them succeed. And I think
.this was generally true on the American side. But, you know,
what is success? Success can be a treaty that's sort of even-
handed, or you can think success is a very one-sided treaty in
favor of your side, and it's only in that sense that you're
sincerely interested in arms control.
And this is to a considerable extent kind of academic
because the controls exercised by the capitals, Washington and
Moscow, were pretty stringent. And if a fellow was a zealot for
SALT and he was on the delegation, he couldn't get very far off
the reservation. He couldn't take excursions and get the treaty
changed to his liking. There were just too many controls from
the respective capitals.
FISKE: There's a lot of talk these days-about Soviet
treaty violation. You know, recently it was revealed to us that'
they built this big radar installation which was not in keeping'
with the treaty. And from this, a great many people have
concluded that we just can't trust the Russians and that the new
round of negotiations are likely not to be fruitful, and any
agreement we reach, they won't live up to, and so on.
As somebody who's spent his entire career analyzing the
Soviets, the Soviet military and other aspects of their lives and
politics, what's your advice?
WHITMAN: Well, I agree that you can't trust the
Russians. And I think that the-violations that are now being
reported in the American press are quite serious.
If there were no treaty, of course, there would be even
more things going on that we dislike, because the treaty is
imposing some restraint on them.
But I think that you've got to take those violations
very seriously. You've got to challenge the Soviets. on them.
And if they really give you no satisfactory explanation -and
refuse to alter their behavior, bring it into conformity with the
treaty, then I think you've got to be willint to take counter-
measures of your own that will either defend you against their
violation or give you some corresponding advantage. And I think
-- I have some hope, still, that if we pursue it in that kind of
hardbal-l way, we can improve the compliance record.
But, no, it's not something to wish away at all.
. FISKE: What's your reaction to the dispute that's going
on now about the MX and the Star Wars defense system?
WHITMAN: Well, those are two big subjects. We take the
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Star Wars first. I'm certainly no scientist or engineer. I just
have the feeling that -- well, I'm impressed by all the scien-
tists who are testifying as to the great difficulty in making
this effective.
Your guest last night was talking about a three-layer
defense. I just wouldn't be at all surprised to find that it had
to be a four-layer or five-layer or six-layer defense by the time
we were through, and it still wasn't going to do the job.
I think there is one historical record here, that,
invariably, the Soviets, with a lag, do match us. We can't
expect to create such a system and keep a monopoly of it. And if
the Russians reach a position where they have become invulnerable
to our missiles, we're going to be quite worried. We're going to
be worried about the recklessness that this might unleash in
their policy.
FISKE: If you heard the program last night -- and I was
talking to Harrison Schmitt, the former astronaut and Senator --I
put forth the theory that the Soviets would be very reluctant to
get into a foot race with us in this area, not only because their
technology is not as advanced as ours, but because I argued that
their economy didn't allow them to expend the tremendous amount
of money. Ours doesn't allow us to do it, and theirs, of course,
is only half the size of ours. And I suspect that this is one of
the reasons that they're so concerned about our talking about
going ahead with it.
Would your experience confirm that or deny it?
WHITMAN: I think it's a factor. I think it's never
been a decisive factor. I take them seriously when they tell us
that, "We are prepared, if necessary, to match and overmatch you.
It will be difficult. It will require sacrifices, but we will do
it. We will not be outspent."
Now, the point that it's more difficult or it requires
more sacrifices on their side than on ours has been true for the
whole missile era, and they have sustained that drive. And, in
fact, even when we slacked off at various cycles, they did not. .
FISKE: That's one of the luxuries that a totalitarian
society has.
WHITMAN: That's right.
And, you know, in international competition, this great
military power is the only asset the Soviets have. They don't
have the political or the economic or the cultural influence that
the United States does. They are paid attention to only because
of their military strength. So they're prepared to give up a lot
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FISKE: I spoke to somebody not too long ago who said
that the United States wants to be loved in the world, the
Soviets want to be feared. Is that fairly accurate?
WHITMAN: The second part is. The second part is. You
can speak to the first part. You're the American expert.
[Laughter]
FISKE: How about the state of the Soviet alliance?
There have been people who have argued that, in fact, it's coming
apart. They're no longer able to control their client states,
their satellite states the way they have in recent decades.
They're showing relatively more independence, and that this poses
great problems for the Soviet Union, and to a certain extent
weakens them.
WHITMAN: Well, this would be a question about Eastern
Europe. It's going to be periodically problematical. We had
1956 with the Hungarian Revolution. We had 1968 with the Czech
Spring. We have the Solidarity movement in Poland another 10 or
12 years after that. I expect that sort of thing to continue.
But insofar as there is a large premium on force, the
Soviets have the force. And I don't expect to see them dis-
lodged.
They're showing some flexibility. For example, letting
Hungary go its own way economically. They have decided that
there's no way to make Romania fall into line in foreign policy.
FISKE: They long ago decided that with Yugoslavia.
WHITMAN: Long ago with Yugoslavia. And, of course,
China has escaped them altogether.
FISKE: Doesn't that reach serious precautions?
WHITMAN: Yeah, but it's apparently not the end of the
world, because we've seen the Chinese split really began in 1956.
That was when at the agency we first began to notice evidence of
that. And it's a bad setback. It's a bad setback. But it has
not brought down the Soviet Union.
FISKE: Every now and then, shudders go through our
spines when we read of approaches between the Soviet Union and
the Chinese. It's held out that they may cozy up to one another
again. And, of course, our defense strategy, our world geopoli-
tics is very largely premised upon this enmity between the Soviet
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How likely do you think it is that, in fact, they may
patch up their differences?
WHITMAN: Well, I think if one looks a decade or two
ahead, they'll probably both find it to their advantage to
improve the relation somewhat, so that they're not, you know, so
vulnerable to each other and can't be whipsawed by other'parties.
I expect never to see the restoration of the relation-
ship of 1950, the really close coordination of policy. For one
thing, the ethnic enmities are enormous. For another, the pride
on both sides is enormous.
What they really brought over was issues of authority,
of who was the boss, who got to run the international communist
movement. And China fractured the Soviet authority, and they're
certainly not going to serve it back up to them.
So, I don't think it is plausible to expect that they
should really be confederates or allies in another 10 or 20
years.
FISKE: Our telephone number is 885-8850. We're very
pleased to have at our microphones John Whitman, who served as
CIA's chief analyst of Soviet policy during a 30-year career in
that agency. He was the CIA representative in the SALT II talks
in Geneva. He's the author of a new novel titled Geneva Accord,
which is very, very enjoyable reading, and it's published by
Crown Publications....
MAN: I'd like to talk to the Star Wars thing. I was
reading this weekend in Time magazine a section of Arkady
Shevchenko's book that's coming out. And one thing which caught
my eye was that he mentioned that in 1971- he was sent to sound
out Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania on a treaty to liquidate
chemical and biological weapons. But then he goes on to say that
the Soviet Union, although it depicted itself as a leader in the
effort to destroy, get rid of biological weapons, has always
expanded its biological and chemical weapons programs. And he
seemed to -- he made a great emphasis of this, that the U.S.S.R.
is much better prepared in this area than the United States.
And my question, when it comes to the Star Wars thing,
is -- your guest was saying just a minute ago that the Soviet
people can take the kind of burden that defense expenditures puts
on people. They always have and they probably will for some time
to come. Let's say we decide to forego the Star Wars thing and
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let's say they continue and accelerate their program to research
and develop, and even deploy these weapons; and then we find
ourselves in a position of some inferiority in this situation.
What do we do then?
WHITMAN: Well, I think then we will wish that we had
negotiated some controls that had kept the Soviet Union from
making these advances. Because I agree with you that they will
do the research. And if they find a workable system, they will
deploy it, whether we do or not. It's not that we're driving
them to it. It's that they are driving themselves to it.
And with respect to your point about biological and
chemical weapons, any treaty of this kind that we sign does have
to be verifiable unilaterally by our own means. That, unfortun-
ately, limits what you can negotiate, because you can't verify
what they're doing in their weapons laboratories, as Senator
Schmitt was saying last night. And you can only verify parts of
a weapons program. So you can really only afford to limit by'
treaty parts of a weapons program.
MAN: So I- guess the point I'm making is that if we
decide to forego this, it's not as simple as, "Well, then we have
no more problems with space." In other words, it's not just us
that's going to militarize space. It could be the Soviets who go
ahead and decide to militarize space too. So there's something
of a gamble in this, I would say.
WHITMAN: Yeah. That's correct.
FISKE: Good evening.
MAN: There's something that I've always been interested
in, which was the level of -- I guess how- the CIA and the KGB
view each other. Is there a level of professionalism? Is there
any kind of a, I guess, respect for the other agencies, and how
they compare to each other. And I'd like to hang up and listen.
WHITMAN: I'm not your best source on this. As Fred was
saying, I come from the analytical side of the agency, although
I've written a book about -- Geneva Accord is about the spy side
of the agency.
I imagine, nevertheless, that there is a fair amount of
respect, and also a fair amount of enmity. But I don't think I
could really carry it any further on the basis of personal
knowledge.
FISKE: Aside from respect or enmity, having worked for
as many years as you did as a Soviet analyst, what's your
evaluation of their intelligence?
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WHITMAN: I think it's pretty good. I think it's pretty
good, although there are some blind spots, and sometimes there's,
apparently, inhibitions about reporting to the leadership.
FISKE: You mean things that they don't want to hear?
WHITMAN: Information that they don't want to hear and
that don't fit their stereotypes.
FISKE: Does that not exist in our intelligence at all?
WHITMAN: No. I think we're pretty free of that, at the
field level, certainly.
FISKE: Okay. Tha-:'s
WHITMAN: Oh, yes.
FISKE: Good evening.
important.
WOMAN: I'd like to ask your guest a question. I lived
in Europe for. many years, and I've also been to Russia, and I
noticed a lot of things. I was also married to the delegate of,
you know, the treaty about the seas at one time, and was in
Geneva and lived there, and so forth. And I love Europe. And as
a matter of fact, I went to Russia. I was only there a month,
but I liked the Russians to. And I've always felt that there is
something about the outcome of the last world war that is behind
all the failures we've had in negotiating with the Russians, and
that has to do with -- the treaty that you're talking about, you
know, we set off the atom bomb and a lot of our generals were
saying, "Let's bomb Moscow," and everything. I was right here in
Washington when that was going on. And then they got the bomb
and everything. I remember a lot of people here thought that it
was possible to keep it a secret. And then there was John Foster
Dulles, whom you may remember. And I was living in Europe when
he was... _
FISKE: What's the point that you'd like to make?
WOMAN: Well, what I often think is that all of these
treaties, as long as they regard Russia as the enemy, you know,
that you never look forward to settling the European problems on
which this whole thing was based, somehow or?other. And now we
have the atomic bomb.
The seems to me the conditions of enmity in this world
are completely changed, especially when you talk about 20 years
from now. A lot of the people I know in Europe who are working
on these problems...
FISKE: I'm finding it difficult to get to the nub of
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what you're saying. Are you saying that we ought to approach
this thing as though, in fact, the Soviets were not our antagon-
ists?
WOMAN: Yes, because...
FISKE: What do you think about that, John?
WOMAN: It's a political...
WHITMAN: I would say to that that you're right to
connect it with World War II and that World War II left everybody
else pretty prostate -- prostrate, and just two big powers in the
world. So there's a natural rivalry between them.
I would go further, though, and say that I do believe
that the Soviets are a very expansionist power.
WOMAN: More than we are?
WHITMAN: Yes, I dod.
WOMAN: Well, aren't we sort of the heirs of the British
Empire, what with our spreading democracy all over the world and
everything?
WHITMAN: I think we like to maximize our influence. I
think that the Soviets like to spread their control, and you see
this in the countries around their periphery where they've been
able to do it.
WOMAN: Well, weren't we in Persia? I mean compare
Persia, for example, with Nicaragua and Mexico.
WHITMAN: Well, compare Persia with Afghanistan. We
played games in Persia and we sent money there and we supported
the Shah. We never sent in the American Army, as it's been sent
into Afghanistan.
WOMAN: Our CIA overthrew their Mossadegh while I was
living in Europe. I remember everybody knew about that. And I
remember everybody thought that the Americans had a lot to do
with trying to encourage the Hungarian Revolution. I remember
when that happened in-the fall of 1956, when we had all those
revolutions in the Middle East and the Hungarian Revolution and
everything.
I mean I felt that both sides were interfering in the
politics of the countries on the borders of Russia. And I mean
we criticized them for going into Cuba and all that kind of
thing. It seems to me that it's a political problem, that you
never can solve this arms control thing.
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FISKE: Well, you want to give a reaction to that, John?
And then we have to move along.
WHITMAN: Yeah. Well, I guess we just have a difference
of opinion. I don't want to support every international action
of the United States, but I do think that the Soviets are
animated by a much more thoroughgoing ambition and a much more
irreversible ambition than we are.
FISKE: We're talking to John Whitman. His book is
titled Geneva Accord.
Good evening.
MAN: I would like to ask two questions. One, is it
possible that -- is it possible that the international board,
which is in the United States intelligence forces, can make a
formula to stop the sales of nuclear or nuclear devices selling
in the United States? That is one.
And two...
FISKE: Hang on. Let's take them one at a time.
WHITMAN: Did you get that, Fred? I'm not sure I
understood the question.
MAN: The question is, is it possible that the CIA
intelligence force can get a formula to stop the selling of
nuclear forces, nuclear force...
FISKE: You mean nuclear weapons?
MAN: Nuclear weapons, such as high-tech technical
things.
WHITMAN: Okay. No, it is possible that the CIA can do
that. That's a domestic matter and that's the responsibility of
domestic agencies. The CIA can and should, and I presume still
does, try to provide these agencies with its own information
about the leakage of technology to the Soviet Bloc. But the
actual policing of that is not a C,IA function, nor should it be.
FISKE: What's your second question, sir?
MAN: My second question is, when will Ronald Reagan
will be able to meet the Russians face-to-face, rather than
allowing Mrs. Thatcher and -- Mrs. Thatcher and the German Prime
Minister to meet the Russians first and then allowing them to
come over and explain certain things to him, and then he keeps
dodging? Is it possible that he will be able to meet and be rid
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of all these dodging games that he's playing?
WHITMAN: I surely don't know, sir. But I don't expect
FISKE: Thank you very much.
In your book, your CIA Director and others in the
organization, even down to the person who had to do the job that
you did at Geneva, are pressured from time to time to enter into
the field of policymaking decisions. They have to resist that.
The role, as you see, it, is to provide information as objective
as possible.
WHITMAN: Yes., And, you know, it's the only way that
the agency can retain its unique usefulness. Lots of people can
make policy, but you need some place that can make estimates that
is not influenced by policy.
FISKE: Woul.d it be fair to assume that during all those
years that you were chief Soviet policy analyst, that you.
frequently sent up estimates and information, and then saw policy
decisions made which were completely out of keeping with the
conclusions that that information would lead you to?
WHITMAN: Oh, surely.
FISKE: It must be a very frustrating thing.
WHITMAN: Uh-huh. I remember an extensive briefing of
President Carter before he was elected. We went down to Plains
and briefed him about the Soviet Union eight hours straight. He
took it all in like a wonderful student, and it presented a
rather hard-line view of the Soviet Union. 'And then, four years
later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Carter said, "I was
astonished and had to change my entire view of the Soviet Union."
And it made me feel like a failure, as though I had failed to
educate him, that he should be so surprised by this.
FISKE: I could never ask you this question if you were
still working for the CIA. But based on the information that you
have accumulated all these years, do you think that there is a
justification for labeling the Soviet Union as the focus of evil
in the world?
WHITMAN-: I wouldn't like to put it that way, because
that really distracts attention from all the other problems that
could be characterized as presenting evil problems, evil conse-
quences. I think they're perhaps the most important problem we
face. Maybe I'm, you know, overfocused on them in that sense.
But the focus of evil in the world? No, no, no. That goes much
too far.
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FISKE: And you think that the difficulties, the
differences that we have with the Soviet Union are more based on
differing perceptions, differing premises that we start at in
each society, misunderstandings? What's the source of our great
difficulty?
WHITMAN: Well, the misunderstandings don't help. And I
think the "focus of evil in the world" is one of these misunder-
standings that does makes it difficult to compose our relations,
somehow. But I think the Soviet Union, for its part, has a
pretty good understanding of the United States, and it's not --
it's in the field. It's taken the field globally against
ourselves and our allies, and it wouldn't change if its under-
standing of us was somehow improved. I think it's a rather
impervious country.
I'm not as worried about it as some people because I
think it has inherent weaknesses and it's going to fail in its
ambitions. But it's not going to be talked out of them, and we
are going to have to contend with them.
FISKE: Does the expectation that you have that they
will fail make you fearful? It makes me fearful because I
suspect that if in fact they depend ultimately on the exercise of
force, of power to achieve their goals, that if the Soviet
leaders see failure on the horizon, that they may attempt to
thwart that failure, to deal with that failure with the most
important weapon they have.
WHITMAN: Well, I couldn't rule it out. But I must say
that that is a tough political system and it's hard for a madman
to get to the top in that system. I think it's hard for a Hitler
to prevail in that system. And they have shown much sobriety
about nuclear weapons during the whole nuclear era.
Also, I don't know what form this failure would take,
but I imagine it is taking, you know, just some kind of gradual
and persistent running down of the system, rather than a great
upheaval and a revolution.
FISKE: When you speak about their system, what you're
saying leads me to the conclusion that you think that they're not
quite as totalitarian as we have thought, that in fact the
President of the Soviet Union, or the chairman of the party,
doesn't hold full sway, that he's accountable in some way?
WHITMAN: I think he's accountable to his colleagues, a
small collective. And, you know, we're talking about a dozen
men. There's some safety in that, if you're thinking about the
possibility of a Hitler and an Armageddon and a Walpurgisnacht.
But I don't think -- on vital issues, of -course, they have to
take into account the interests of their country, and they do it.
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But they do it by themselves.
FISKE: But there's a kind of collective judgment there.
WHITMAN: Yes.
FISKE: You're on the air.
MAN: I was a little bit confused by a couple things Mr.
Whitman said. Early on he said something to the effect, in the
context of Star Wars, that if we develop a weapon, the Soviets
tend to follow us. And then a little later he said that they
develop things whether we develop them or not, and their weapons
development really doesn't have anything to do with what we do.
I'm wondering which he really thinks is the case.
WHITMAN: I guess I would emphasize the second of those.,
I think that what we do may shape their responses. Naturally.
they're trying to respond to our offense by improving their
defense in an appropriate way. But if you're looking for the
fundamental driving force on their side, I wouldn't say it is,
just to match us. I'would say that they are out to accumulate as
much of an advantage as they can.
MAN: Well, I agree with that. And that's.what makes me
wonder why you seem the question the Star Wars concept, from the
point of view that it doesn't seem to. me to make sense to let
them have it and us not, if they're going to develop it anyway.
WHITMAN: My preference would be, since I regard it as
an extension of the arms race that will ultimately be matched by
the other side and will be kind of proven fruitless, my prefer-
ence would be that it could be controlled, and neither side would
do it.
MAN: Well, but you've already discussed the difficulty
of verification. How are we going to verify what they're doing
in their satellites?
WHITMAN: Well, I'm not sure what the exact verification
problems are these days. I've been retired for about five years.
And that would be an important consideration. But I think people
are too quick to dismiss the possibilities of verification in
this area. But it is a 'true stumbling block.
MAN: Well, I'm glad to hear you say that. . But I would
hope that we wouldn't dismiss too quickly the idea of a defense
initiative, jus as you say that people ought not dismiss too
quickly the idea of verification. I think it's very difficult,
but nevertheless I guess I don't dismiss it. But I'm a little
concerned by your dismissing, apparently, Star Wars without --
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and at the same time sort of stating the case for it.
WHITMAN: Well, I don't think there's any danger of our
dismissing Star Wars. It seems to have a lot of momentum behind
it. I would prefer that an equal momentum was placed behind
verification capabilities that could enable us to monitor a
treaty that would spare us this system, both on our side and
theirs.
MAN: Since most human endeavors, if not all, are not
perfect, and since it seems obvious that perfect verification
would be necessary if we're not going to find ourselves at their
mercy, I'm wondering what the justification is for depending upon
verification.
WHITMAN: Well, it's true that verification is not a
hundred percent, just as probably Star Wars would not be a
hundred percent effective either. So you can't operate in a?
totall risk-free way. You cannot ask intelligence to provide you
with day-by-day comprehensive reports of what the Soviets are
doing. It's a question of how much chance you are prepared to
take. And in that instance or in that procedure, what is
normally done is you figure, you know, what could the Russians do
prior to our finding out what they were up to, because eventually
they have to deploy in the field, and then'we know. And how
serious would it be, or what measures are available to us to
counterbalance that? Could we respond in time to match them? A
very specific weapon-by-weapon calculation. And the intelligence
people come out with judgments about our capabilities, weapon-by-
weapon. You know, it somes to some two or three hundred judg-
ments on a treaty like SALT II.
FISKE: Was there something else?
MAN: Could I just make the point here? Mr. Whitman
talks about us responding to something when we find out that
they're developing a new sort of weapon. The difficulty that I
see there is twofold. First of all, if there's a strong enough
peace movement to achieve passage of a treaty in this country,
you can be very sure that any attempt to respond will be labeled
suicidal or nuclear madness, or what have you. And secondly, ans
as a consequence of that, we 'tend to debate things for years and
years and years. So they could have their system in place and
we'd still be debating it, as we do with the MX or the B-1 or the
Trident or all the other controversial weapons systems.
WHITMAN: That is a feature of our politics that we'd
have to overcome, I grant you.
MAN: Well, don't you think that we ought to, you know,
be realistic and take into account that that's what's likely to
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happen, and therefore not put ourselves into that position?
WHITMAN: Well, I don't necessarily accept that, that
the American people are always going to somehow be sluggish and
lazy and refuse to respond to the facts. No, I don't accept
that.
'FISKE: Thank you very much, sir.
What do you make of the Russian civil defense system?
Some people argue that the fact that they have spent more in
developing a civil defense system is evidence that they're
intending to go to war.
WHITMAN: I take it as evidence that they are not
satisfied with deterrence, simple deterrence, limited deterrence,
and that they take seriously the possibility of war. Not
necessarily that they mean to start it, but they take it serious-
ly enough as a possibility to think it through and spend the
enormous amounts of money that would be required not just to
deter, but to go beyond deterrence and to try to actually fight
and survive such a war.
Now, they're probably pretty unrealistic about this, and
it shows the depths of their military priorities that they will
pursue such a goal.
FISKE: John, would you stand by? We have news on the
network, and then let's talk some more.
John Whitman. His book, published by Crown, is titled
Geneva Accord.
FISKE: We're talking to John Whithman, who served in
the CIA as analyst of Soviet -- chief analyst of Soviet policy
for much of a 30-year career. He was also the CIA representative
in the SALT II talks in Geneva. He is now the author of the book
Geneva Accord, in which the principal character has a career very
similar to John Whitman's. Interesting story of intrigue. Gives
you a great idea of the way those negotiations work, and it's
just a doggone good dramatic story, as well.
If you have any questions or comments, we invite
Before we go back to the phones, John, I have read that
the Central Intelligence Agency, while our umbrella intelligence
organization, actually has less personnel than the other intelli-
gence agencies in our government, combined. We have the Defense
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Intelligence Agency and several other intelligence agencies, and
that frequenty they are working in the same field, may they come
up with different conclusions or information.
How does that serve us, actually? Is there a competit-
ion between these intelligence-gathering organizations?
WHITMAN: I don't really know about the intelligence-
gathering side. You know, one way to put that question is, do
you have two or three agencies trying to recruit the same
foreigner? I think that's pretty well arbitrated out, pretty
well negotiated out.
On the analytic side, which was my business, yes,
there's competition. And I think it's healthy competition. The
CIA's positions get challenged by the Defense Intelligence Agency
or the intelligence organs of the Army or the Navy or the Air
Force. And they have to be defended, and maybe they're changed.,
And vice versa. And there's no monopoly on truth in this.
FISKE: How-does that mechanism work? Do these intelli-
gence agencies get together and battle it out and reach a common
conclusion that they send to the White House or to the Congress?
Or, in fact, do they present their differing views, with a
judgment being made by the President?
WHITMAN: It is fought out in documents that are called
national intelligence estimates. And what that label means is
that all of the intelligence agencies have participated in
preparing the estimate. Consensus is reached where possible. A
great deal of attention is given,- however, to making sure that
true dissents and important dissents do get reflected in there.
And so, consumers will read that this main text is the
view of the Central Intelligence Agency; the Defense Intelligence
Agency, however, believes that. And then they-are given space to
present their views and their argument.
And I understand from the newspapers that these days
they're given prominent space, frequently on the first page. So
that the reader is immediately alerted to the fact that after
prolonged discussion, there continue to exist different view-
points.
FISKE: Of course, it serves to point out that even
judgments made after the most thorough and extensive study can be
divergent.
FISKE: Can be wrong. And there's some element of
danger there.
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Another thing that might be disturbing is that in the
attempt to reach agreement, we frequently have the same kind of
difficulty that we have when we do things by committee elsewhere,
a dilution of...
WHITMAN: A wishy-washy...
[Confusion of voices]
WHITMAN: And I did a lot of work on those things, and
that's one of your main efforts, is to make sure that you
separate out the important differences that should be conveyed
and don't cloud them up with unimportant differences, and that
you don't sweep the big differences under the rug. It takes a
lot of seriousness and good faith to do that.
FISKE: Good evening.
MAN: I have a comment and then a question. A famous-
news commentator, a very famous news commentator of one of the
other stations once told about how William Randolph Hearst
started the Spanish-American War by stirring up a lie about the
Spanish Government. Now, in fact, this reflects the power of the
media.
Now, my question is to Mr. Whitmore [sic]. Do you think
it's possible that during continued negotiations between the U.S.
and the Soviets, that they will find a common ground of -- I mean
a common enemy other than themselves, in terms of such things as
maybe the international media or neo-Naziism or Zionism or
population explosion, or something other than themselves? Do you
think that's possible?
WHITMAN: Well, I would like to think, you know, that we
would find common cause against real problems of the globe.
MAN: Well, do you see such a problem?
WHITMAN: I must say that hasn't happened yet in any
substantial degree.
FISKE: Good evening.
MANN I'd like to ask John a two-part question about the
nature of the Soviet Union. And that is, number one, how do the
Russians perceive their relationship to the non-Russians in the
Soviet Union? And number two is, what will be the likely
consequences of the demographic change which is currently taking
place in the Soviet Union vis-a-vis Russians and the non-
Russians?
WHITMAN: Well, there's considerable evidence *that the
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Great Russians take a fairly superior attitude toward the
non-Slavic populations. And this is clearest of all, I think,
when you go to Central Asia and the Central Asian peoples. But
there's also a Great Russian feeling of superiority over those in
the Baltic states, and to some extent -- or even over the
Ukrainians. So it's kind of a festering social problem.
The consequences in the long run? The trends you're
talking about, of course, are that the birthrate is much higher
in Central Asia than it is in the Slavic regions, and that, in
fact, most of the increase in the labor force in future years is
going to come from the increase in the Central Asian populations.
Those people don't migrate. And as industry expands,
it's going to be a problem where to locate it, because the
increment of the labor force is going to be and want to stay in
Central Asia.
MAN: However,. will the power or the political power
change any with the change in demogrpahics, let's say, from the,
Great Russians to the non-Russians?
WHITMAN: That's a question of how flexible and under-
standing and clever the Russians turn out to be. And I don't
think they're especially adept at this.
FISKE: John, we have been witnessing the emergence of
nationalism all over the world, various groups who in fact have
not been heard from, who have not stirred much in.centuries are
now demanding nationalistic rights and identities and so on. We
see it throughout the world.
In the Soviet Union they have over a hundred different
ethnic groups, I understand. In Moscow, in the Kremlin, the
White Russians hold sway. These ethnic groups have really not
had a great deal of power or influence, or even representation,
in the Soviet Union.
It seems to me that they're hardly likely to.be immune
from this phenomenon that's sweeping the world. And if it does
strike them, what change is it- likely to produce in the Soviet
Union?
WHITMAN:. Well, this is a question of how flexible they
are. And now I think we're talking about one of our advantages,
is that we can adjust our political situation to accommodate
things like demographic change, bring minorities in, spread
power.
The leadership so far, I think, has not been adept at
that. It's possible that a younger leadership over the decades
of the future will get better at it. But certainly the record so
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far indicates that this is not one of their political gifts. And
as a result, for example, they just cannot afford to in any sense
lose the war in Afghanistan, with all these Central Asian nations
of their own right across the border.
MAN: Well, this raises a third question, then. From
what I understand you to be saying, that if they are not flex-
ible, would that then follow that not being flexible to this type
of change, that they would be more repressive, that the regime
would be more repressive than it is now to control these other
populations?
WHITMAN: If necessary, yeah. I think it will.
FISKE: Sir, thank you very much.
We're talking to John Whitman. His book, Geneva Accord.
You're on 88.5 FM.
WOMAN: I just wanted to call to your attention and to
the attention of people in the audience who may be interested to
a book called Weapons and Hope by Freeman Dyson. Either one of
you know it?
WHITMAN: Yes, I've read parts of it.
WOMAN: You have read it. Well, I don't have to go any
farther. Do you have any comments to make on this book?
WHITMAN: _I think you prol5ably have something to say
WOMAN: Well, no. I haven't read the book. I've only
read a review of it in the New Republic, and it is very highly
recommended by the New Republic's reviewer, who is named Michael
Mandelbaum, who, it says here, is an author of three books
himself on nuclear weapons.
It sounds very enticing. I'm trying to get a copy of
it. If I can get a copy of it in paperback, I will.
WHITMAN: It's a book by a serious scientist who has a
lot of knowledge of these matters, and who wants them -- who
feels it important that we find some more humanistic resolution
to these problems than just continuing to pile up the weapons.
FISKE: Thank you.
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MAN: I wanted to ask your guest, Russia is still the
.country of the Gulag, it has thousands of people enslaved in
labor camps. And, you know, when the West encourages them by,
for instance, this pipeline that's being built through the Soviet
Union for gas to Western Europe, and it's well known that they're
using slave labor to build this pipeline, and the West goes along
with it because it's to their economic advantage, this is morally
corrupt. And I think by these kinds of actions we encourage them
in their repression of human rights of people.
I wanted to ask the guest, what does he think that we
can do, as a government, as individual people, to help the people
in the Soviet Union who are fighting for their human rights --the
Refuseniks, for example, people who want to emigrate? What can
we do to assist them?
WHITMAN: Very. difficult matter. And the answer, I'
think, is not much. As I was saying earlier, this is a pretty
impervious system, and they're not likely to succumb to our
values or oblige us in our priorities. They don't get pushed
around very easily.
MAN: Well, what about withholding technology, not
cooperating in having the pipeline built to the West, this kind
of thing?
WHITMAN: Well, we had an experience that approximated
this situation with the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson Amendments
relating to Jewish emigration. And on that occasion, the Soviets
were interested and, if not pushed too far, were willing to allow
Jewish emigration to increase because they did have some hopes of
acquiring American capital and technology. But once that got to
a point where they felt they were being subjected to open and
blatant pressure, they sacrificed those hopes and cracked down.
The internal priority, the internal political priority took
precedence.
MAN: Do you agree that no empire, no country has ever
survived on a slave labor basis?' Do you agree that the Soviet
Union will eventually fall because of the pressures from within?
WHITMAN: I don't really know about fall or somehow be
transformed. It's very hard to imagine. I think that system
cannot sustain itself in its present from for another hundred
years, and I think they do have these difficulties within
flexibility. But just how that all works out, I think is pretty
unpredictable.
FISKE: Their inflexibility, of course, has long been
apparent. They operate on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, as
though it were the Bible. And it is their Bible, some people
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say, and they don't vary from it. And our ability to vary, to
move, to change is a great strength.
But having studied the Soviet Union for as long as you
did, have you in fact noted any substantial movement, any c'iange
that is impressive?
WHITMAN: Certainly the absence of mass terror after the
death of Stalin is an enormously positive step. And we tend to
forget how paralyzed the country was, how initiative was prac-
tically nonexistent because the price of independent thought, or
even the appearance of independent thought.was so high. Fre-
quently it was death. So there's that one big step.
Then we had an unusual period from 1957 to '64 when
Khrushchev was in power, and he was a sport in the Soviet
political system. We haven't seen anyone like him since. But he
had a very keen sense of these rigidities, particularly in
running the domestic economy, and he was willing to try a lot of
experiments. Now, that was one of to big reasons he was ousted,
because it was upsetting the power structure. He was challening.
the power of the party, which is one of the big dead hands on the
Soviet economy. So he had paid the price.
And since then, the movements toward reform have been
very modest, very tentative, and often undone. They are not
impressive at all.
You have to keep in mind that Khrushchev experience. It
was not expected. Nobody had identified Khrushchev as this kind
of person. I'm sure his colleagues hadn't identified him as this
kind of person. But he does remind -us that it's not impossible,
it's just very much-against the odds.
FISKE: Was he party chairman as well?
WHITMAN: Uh-huh. That was his main source ofpower,
First Secretary of the Party.
FISKE: But it was the party that ousted him.
WHITMAN: Oh, yes.
FISKE: You're on the air for John Whitman.
MAN:_ I just want to say it's a real privilege to have a
chance to talk with a man 'of Mr. Whitman's background. My own
area of interest has been focused largely on the Third World, the
military and political problems of developing countries. And I
made a comment last night related to Star Wars. I wonder if Mr.
Whitman might offer his view.
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I certainly understand the need for strategic defense. I
don't think I suffer from many illusions about the nature of
totalitarianism or the Russian system. But on the other hand, I
made the comment that we really must find some way, either
unilaterally, or perhaps even bilaterally with cooperation of the
Soviets, to shift the focus of our competition into constructive
channels. And I made the comment about finding ways to combat
hunger, poverty, disease, illiteracy and injustice, and to see
if, again, whether buy ourselves, on a unilateral basis, or
perhaps to draw them into it, while maintaining the strategic
defense or maintaining the balance of terror, and so forth, or
deterrence, but somehow finding a way to avoid this immense new
towering arms race which Star Wars is going to set off.
And I wonder if Mr. Whitman might want to comment on
WHITMAN: Well, I think it would be very desirable to
draw the Soviet Union into cooperative work with us on these
truly important and objectively difficult world problems. I
don't -- I cannot be encouraged about the prospects for that, and
there is fresh evidence on this matter.
When you read the book that's just been published by
Arkady Shevchenko, who was at the United Nations as a deputy to
the Secretary General for a number of years before he defected,
and he documents over and over again how the Soviets have used
the United Nations, and I would say all other international
organizations, for the pursuit of their nationalistic aims, which
they mostly conceive in an anti-Western framework.
I just can't be encouraging about that prospect. But of
course it would be a grand thing if it came about.
MAN: Well, I appreciate your comment. And, of course,
we all have to be careful about our own idealism or our own
naivete. But I truly do feel that it's an area that we need to
give some thought to, because I sometimes think we can't break
their systems, but we might find ways to melt it.
I'll hand you on that note.
FISKE: Good evening.
MAN: You know, Mr. Whitman, there's some talk going
about in Europe that the world chess championships in Moscow
between world champion Anatoly Karpov and the challenger Kasparov
is rigged in Karpov's favor. As a matter of fact, in the October
the 13th edition of the London Times, a writer named Harry
Gallumback (?) alleges that the Soviet authorities have threa-
tened Kasparov and his family if he should play, you know, too
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well against Karpov, if he should even win too many games.
What's your opinion of this?
WHITMAN: I'll plead total ignorance.
MAN: Okay. Thank you very much.
?FISKE: We're talking to John Whitman. His book, Geneva
Accord. It's a novel.
You're on the air.
MAN: I'd like to point out to the gentleman on your
program that only an American who was raised in a culture of
white man, black man; Nordic European, non-Nordic European;
Protestant and non-Protestant; and now English-speaking and
Spanish-speaking can possibly see Russian and non-Russian
divisions in the Soviet Union as you see them.
True, the modern worker relate to the man who is still'
Moslem or is a Christian, as someone who is a bit less than his
brother. But he relates to both of them in the same way. And
the modern worker comes from a family which was of some religion,
so he relates to the people of his own religion -- that is to
say, of. his former religion -- maybe a little bit closer than
those of some other former religion.
But what you saw, which was reminiscent of the American
culture and the pre-Bolshevik culture, was only a relationship
between the people who are still ChE.istian and the people who are
still Moslem. You didn't see it as it really is. You saw it as
you wanted to see it.
WHITMAN: I'm not sure I understand your question.
MAN: It's not a question, sir. It's a statement.
FISKE: On what do you base that, sir?
MAN: . It is a fact. .
FISKE: Well, you say i.t is an immutable fact, but on
what do you base this? This is your perception? You're saying
your perception is different from John's? That doesn't make it
fact, does it'?
MAN: Your perception is based on the fact that you are
an Anglo-Saxon.
FISKE: Well, okay. Hey, thank you.
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In the course of your career, did you have an?opportun-
ity to spend much time in the Soviet Union?
WHITMAN: I spent a month there, yes. I only made the
one trip. And I spent...
FISKE: Attached to the embassy, or touring?
WHITMAN: Yes, attached to the embassy, carrying a
diplomatic passport for protection. And it was what we call area
familiarization. I traveld all over the place, covered as much
ground as I could, just to get the taste of it, the feel of it,
the sight of it, the smell of it.
FISKE: Now, your hero in the book is an analyst who
becomes involved in spy activities. Does this sometimes happen
in the CIA, actually?
WHITMAN: No. 'I would have to say that that's fictive.
That was the kind of story I wanted to tell. But...
FISKE: Not.likely.
WHITMAN: The analysts aren't trained that way. They're
not inclined. If they get into a situati.on where they get
accidentally involved, they're generally pulled out-and replaced.
The two activities are kept separate.
MAN: I'd like to ask Mr.. Whitman if he has heard from
or heard about Alexander Solzhenitsyn lately. I haven't heard
much about him for a couple of years. I know he lives or he was
living in Vermont. And I was wondering if he knows what he's up
to.
Also, I know that Solzhenitsyn was a great admirer
--well, is somewhat of an admirer of Nikita Khrushchev. At least
he seemed to be, from reading Gulag. And I'm-wondering what he
thinks about that relationship, what Solzhenitsyn really thought
of Khrushchev.
WHITMAN: I don't have any fresh information on Solzhe-
nitsyn. I feel confident that he's writing because he's a man of
great energy and passion and dedication. But I don't have any
direct information on what he's up to.
Khrushchev made it possible for some of Solzhenitsyn's
work to get published in the Soviet Union, but the Khrushchev
himself felt that this cultural thaw and this liberalization had
One too far, and he began to rein it in. And I think
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Solzhenitsyn lost his affection for Khrushchev at that point,
because Solzhenitzyn is a very uncompromising man, as you know.
MAN: Is it possible that we've neglected to think that
we might possibly be the big threat to the world? We are, I
think, still only four to six percent of the world's population,
and we use like 40 percent of the world's resources. And I just
wonder about that. I just wonder who is the threat. And if
Russia is not -- I'm not a pro-Russian, for sure. I'm certainly
pro-American and pro-capitalist. But I think that capitalism is
something that's horribly abused, and I don't hear anybody
mentioning these things.
WHITMAN: I take your argument to be that the high
levels of production and consumption in this country are going to
deplete the world's resources, and that makes us a force for ill
in the world. Is that right?
MAN: Yeah. I think that we -- when we see how much'
waste there, is, when I see an awful lot of hungry people right
here in America and I see people dumping things that could help
other people because it's economically feasible to do that, I
tend to question that.
WHITMAN: I agree. I think those are dismaying phenom-
MAN: I also question the fact that there are people who
are working out in Fairfax County who don't have places to live.
They have jobs but no places to live. There are people in
California living 'in automobiles who have jobs. And I just
wonder about that.
We always hear what is wrong with Russia, but we never
hear too much of what's wrong with us.
WHITMAN: Well, let me respond to that by telling you
that after I retired from CIA, I pursued another interest, which
is to become a social worker. And I am, myself, engaged in the
kind of problems that you're talking about.
FISKE: But to say that we don't hear about those
problems, of course, is erroneous. We do hear about them. You
know about them because you hear about them in the media. And
there are divisions in this country about what should be done.
We're right now i.n the midst of extensive debate about allocation
of resources, whether or not we should cut social programs or
whether we should cut military programs. So we certainly her
about it.
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MAN: We hear about it, but I don't think we have a
proper dimension. I wish we were as moral as we say we are. I
really wish that.
I'm only about 20 miles out of Washington. And honest-
ly, I see people with attitudes, they should be wearing sheets,
you know. They should be -- well, the things they say and all
that, it's just appalling to me that some people, especially at
the lower level, have to work so hard that they still maintain
the attitudes of their parents and the parents before them and
the parents before them. They still have the hatreds and the
ugliness, and they cover it up with some sort of fundamental
patriotism.
WHITMAN: Well, I hear your concerns, sir, and I think
they'do you credit.
MAN: Okay.
FISKE: Good evening.
WOMAN: I'm delighted to hear Mr. Whitman tonight.
Mr. Whitman, I'm pleased about your view about the Star
Wars program. I think -- well, I suppose it's because it agrees
with mine, that it makes sense.
I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask you. Since
you were involved in the working out of SALT II, I'm wondering if
you'd care to express an opinion as to how come it was never
passed here. Approved by the Senate; you know.
WHITMAN: Yes. It was initialed in 1979 and debated in
the Senate, in committee, through the fall, and it aroused a
great deal of opposition among people who subsequently because --
you know, staffed out the Reagan Administration. I think their
concern was one of the concerns we've heard expressed tonight,
that the Americans, if they sign an arms control treaty, would
just go limp and not support the necessary defense program. I
think there was also some partisan politics in it.
And the President, President Carter, simply by that time
had lost enough strength so that he couldn't get the votes. So I
would say that it was- the first casualty of the succeeding
presidential election.
WOMAN: May I ask, in your opinion, was it -- would it
have been wise to have passed it?
WHITMAN: Well, that's my feeling. And as a matter of
fact, most people, even those who argued vigorously against it
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and eventually forced it to be withdrawn, think that it's a good
idea that we agreed with the Russians to observe its provisions,
even though we hadn't ratified it. It's a kind of an anomalous
position to be in...
WOMAN: It certainly is.
WHITMAN: ...to argue that this is a rotten treaty, but
we're going to obey it. Nevertheless, that's the way. it came
out .
FISKE: How did you feel, having sat there at those
tables for two years attempting to hammer out this agreement, to
see it meet that fate? What was your own personal reaction to
that?
WHITMAN: I thought it was a loss. I thought it was a
FISKE: Was this generally shared by other people who
participated?
WHITMAN: It was mixed. But I think a number of people
who participated, yes, felt that good work had gone down the
drain. It was a modest treaty. It didn't provide for deep
reductions in arms. It did call for the Soviets to destroy ten
percent of their forces. Naturally, the oldest, the least
capable of their forces. But it was a beginning, in that sense.
And it also made some inroads in Soviet secrecy, which
pleased me particularly because ^I think Soviet secrecy is
pernicious and keeps the world uncertain and agitated and
alarmed. And we're all going to be better off if they can be
persuaded to give it up. And they were in several of the
provisions of the treaty.
The treaty, in its present state, non-ratified but
supposedly observed, is weak. And I think the violations that we
see are in part a function of the fact that it never really did
come into force.
WOMAN: I'm disappointed too. I think it was a loss.
May I ask another question that sort of goes farther
back into Russian. history? I've been making a small study of
Russia in the past year or so. And from what I have picked up,
is this continuum of this inflexibility, going back through the
czars and that. I mean the current regime there seems of a piece
in that way.
WHITMAN: Oh, I agree. There's much that's Russian in
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the Soviet Union. And that kind of inflexibility is -- yeah, it
goes way back. There's an old Russian saying,. "Every initiative
must be punished," just because it's initiative.
FISKE: Ma'am, thank you very much.
You're on 88.5 FM.
MAN: I was a little bit concerned because during the
first hour it seemed to me that there was some reluctance to
identify the Soviet Union as the evil empire. But at about 9:35
this evening, we had this caller who was almost ready to identify
the United States as the evil republic.
For the benefit of that particular caller, I would like
to say this: The United States has had a pernicious influence
only in those respects where population control methods have been
fostered through the United States aid program. These population
control methods have included the subsidy of forced abortion;
forced sterlization, etcetera, which in effect have told our
so-called Third World friends that there are literally too many
of you.
It is, in particular, for some of these reasons that we
have had the tragedy in Iran, where the first thing that the
Ayatollah Khomeini has done is to shut down the American-
sponsored abortion mills, and then the American-sponsored
population control clinics and birth control clinics and that
sort of thing.
So this needs to be kept in mind.
FISKE: All right. Thank you very much, sir.
He mentions the United Nations. What conclusions do you
come to regarding the United Nations as a medium, as a way of
solving some of these very, very difficult problems that exist
between us?
WHITMAN: Not critical. I think it's worth keeping in
being. It can occasionally defuse a situation or provide some
channels of communication. But it's not a strong reed. I don't
think one should expect it to solve our fundamental problems.
And if you *do, you're going to be disappointed, and you might
destroy it by putting on it more than it can handle.
FISKE:. The new Ambassador to the United Nations is
almost certainly going to be the man you worked under, Vernon
Walters, who was Assistant Director of the CIA. What do you
expect from him in that capacity?
WHITMAN: He's an interesting fellow. He's very
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articulate. His views are conservative. He's fair-minded, and
he connects well with a lot of people. He's an-enjoyable fellow.
I remember once he quoted to me a piece in the New York Times on
himself. He's a instinctive and brillian linguist, by the way,
and he quoted to me the judgment of the New York Times that Dick
Walters is a man who can converse in 13 languages and think in
none. And I enjoyed him telling that story on himself. .
It'll be interesting. He's the first, I think the first
man who ever served in CIA who has gone on to head our delegation
to the United Nations. He may take some flak about that from
colleagues up there. But I think he should be effective there.
FISKE: We're talking to John Whitman, former chief
analyst of Soviet policy for the CIA, author of the book Geneva
Accord, a novel.
MAN: I guess I have to side somewhat with the gentleman
on the evil republic, although I think it's getting to be more
like-the incompetent republic. It seems that more of our
problems, especially those on the economic side, we're not
addressing. We're coming up with rhetoric, and in many areas
these problems are getting worse and worse, and instead we hear
talk about things like Star Wars and the military budget, while
at the same time we seem to be letting the deficit slide, letting
the balance of trade slide.
Aren't these truly, certainly in the short run, as
serious a problem as are these military issues?
WHITMAN: You know, your question, like some of the
others that have come in tonight, makes me feel as thought I'm
being put in the position of deciding on who's the worse country,
whom shall we condemn the most. It's not really too relevant. I
have a view on that. I think that it is, frankly, absurd to
compare this society unfavorably with that society. That society
is an oppressed society, it's a police-ridden society, a society.
where freedoms that we take for granted just don't exist. It's a
society where the oppression of the defense budget -- that is,
the subject that we're concerned about in our country now -- it's
hard to imagine how much the defense budget oppresses the Soviet
people. It's just another several orders of magnitude more than
here. And I guess I'm responding to not only you, but some
others who have somehow wanted to equate the two countries in a
moral sense. And you have my view.
MAN: Well, I don't -- I think I couldn't agree with you
more. But the issue is that, really, the world, I think, depends
upon the United States to supply a measure of stability. And not
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just on the military side, but essentially in the business of the
.world, the ability to provide the oil for international trade --I
mean the lubricant, the money system, a place where there is a
stable medium of international trade. And my concern is that our
leadership is not bringing -- is not addressing these problems as
they really do exist and trying to grapple with the solutions.
All I hear coming out of the Congress and the Admini-
stration are responses that always seem to be addressing special
interests in these areas.
Take, for example, Mr. Stockman's remarks last week and
how they were treated. I think the only person that I heard that
gave a good response was Mr. Dole, in regards to that there are
some very hard decisions"to be made. And unless we start getting
on with making them, we're going to be in very bad shape very
soon.
FISKE: Thank you, sir.
Have you formed any personal view of the wisdom of a
nuclear freeze?
WHITMAN: I think the nuclear freeze-was, as a movement,
quite important in pressuring a reluctant Administration to
getting moving on arms control. I think without the freeze
movement and the bishops' letter on nuclear war and initiatives
of that sort, arms control, and particularly the strategic talks,
would have just suffered from benign neglect under this Admini-
stration. But those movements activated enough Congressmen and
brought the MX under challenge, so that the Administration had to
take it seriously. Nothing has come of it yet, but I hope
they're going to get their act together and, when they go over to
Geneva next March, address it in a more serious way than they
have to date.
FISKE: If you were John Whitman, member of -the Cong-
ress, how would you vote'on the MX?
WHITMAN: Let me talk about it as John Whitman, former
intelligence officer. It has sometimes occurred to me that if we
got word that the.Russians had decided to skip the deployment of
a large and vulnerable missile and go straight from the fifth
generation of missiles, or whatever it is, to the sixth, which in
our case is represented by the Midgetman, I think if we reported
that, it would be very alarming in Washington. they would think
that the Russians had made a brilliant storke, they were going to
save one whole cycle of deployment and come at us with something
better a few years later.
FISKE: So you think that would be the wise way to go.
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WHITMAN: Yes, I think I do.
FISKE: It'd save a lot of money and a lot of time.
WHITMAN: Uh-huh.
FISKE: You're on the air.
MAN: Mr. Whitman, I'm intrigued by your analysis of why
SALT II failed of ratification. Let me be sure I've got the
background straight here. Jimmy Carter was President at the
time, a Democrat, and there was a Democratic Senate, wasn't
there? And wouldn't the Senate have to vote on the ratification
of the treaty?
MAN: Okay. So we had a Democratic President and a
Democratic Senate.
Now, as you explained it earlier -- let me make sure I
have this straight -- you see that the problems raised for the
Democratic Senate and the Democratic President on ratification of
SALT II were the people who are now Reagan advisers raised
political objections to SALT II, and that's why it wasn't
ratified?
WHITMAN: Yeah, by and large.
MAN: Okay. Now, there wa`s an event that the rest of
the world noticed that occurred on Christmas Eve of that Decem-
ber. Do you recall what that was?
WHITMAN: Which December are you thinking of?
MAN: Of '79.
WHITMAN: The treaty was dead by then.
MANN Yeah, that's interesting. I hear now that it was
dead, but at the time, as I recall it -- well, you remember what
it was. It was the...
WHITMAN: The invasion of Afghanistan. Yeah.
MAN: ...a hundred thousand troops into Afghanistan to
overthrow a puppet government that they themselves had installed
earlier.
The rationale, the excuse given by the leadership in the
Democratic Senate at the time was that it would be useless to
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submit SALT II for ratification, to continue-the debate, because
the Democratic President had suspended grain sales to the Soviet
Union in response to their invasion of their own puppet state.
Now, what I wonder, Mr. Whitman, is, in the analysis,
why do you think that the effectiveness of the argument, if there
was one, raised by the Republicans would supersede the real-live
real-world actions of the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why would that
be more important than the Soviet invasion of their own puppet?
WHITMAN: Well, let me straighten out the history a bit
here. As one who was a witness in the Senate hearings, I
remember quite clearly that it was evident that the votes to
approve SALT II were not available before the invasion of
Afghanistan occurred. And that was just kind of -- that put the
seal on it and made it sort of manifest to everyone in the
country.
My own view on that is that arms control treaties should
not be thought of as rewards for Soviet good behavior. They
should be things that are in our interest. If they are not in
our interest, they shouldn't be negotiated or ratified. But if
they are in our interest, then I think we ought to stick to them
even when the Soviet Union does something outrageous.
Now, in the next four years, when the Reagan people are
trying to negotiate treaties with the Soviet Union, the Russians
are bound to do something outrageous, like shooting down a
civilian airliner or invading a neighboring country. And I don't
consider that to be grounds for', you know, suddenly discovering
what pariahs they are and backing 'away from a treaty. If the
treaty is in our interest, then I think we ought to proceed with
it.
MAN: Since all treaties, of course, have a measure of
mutual respect and mutual concern and mutual trust, if you will,
none of them are technologically verifiable completely to the
satisfaction of most folks who look at-it, I think-it would
behoove us not to ignore what the Soviet Union does when it
shoots down a civilian airliner or builds radar systems that are
expressly prohibited or stockpiles third stages for weapons or
puts more warheads on SS-18s than are required or agreed to or
invades puppet states. I don't understand why, in the interests
of a process, that we should ignore their behavior. Why can't we
look at- their activities as part of their state psyche, how their
state operates, and consider what validity would our treaties and
agreements have with them, since they're not ironclad -- and
we're talking about the survival of mankind -- when they can't
even seem to get along with their own puppets?
I fail to follow-the logic that says, "Well, if a treaty
is in our best interest, then we can ignore everything about the
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person with whom we're making an agreement."
WHITMAN: Well, I fail to follow your logic. Because
when I talk about the treaty being in our interest, I include the
provision that it be satisfactorily verifiable. And if it's that
good a treaty, then I think we want it for our own sake and
should be prepared to negotiate it with a government which does
abhorrent things in other areas..
FISKE: Sir, thank you very much.
Good evening.
MAN: I was wondering, Mr. Whitman, what you think about
Soviet technocrats. I read a book a number of years ago by
Seweryn Bialer and it's called Stalin and His Successors, and he
said in that book that -- I think it was around the late 1960s
that the Soviet Union was graduating a third more engineers than
our society. And I was wondering what you know about the dynamic
of that system that might allow for technological progress in
that society, and also what you think about the conventional
wisdom about them being technologically inferior and they have to
steal or buy technology from the West.
WHITMAN: Well, I think there's something to that
conventional wisdom, but not a great deal. I don't think that
that -- you know, if we could cut that off, we would find that we
had somehow preserved a decisive technological lead.
You know, in effect, there are three different economies
in the Soviet Union. One is the military-industrial economy, and
that's where those engineers are going. That economy has a lot
of privileges that the civilian economy doesn't have. Quality
control, for one. The Ministry of Defense can refuse to accept
products that don't mean quality standards, whereas a fellow
who's buying a generator or a tractor just has to take what he
can get. So there's that privileged and relatively efficient
economy.
Then there's the civilian economy, where innovation and
standards and quality are much'less enforced.
And then there's a private economy having to do with the
producton of food and services, which is ideologically wrong, but
nevertheless has developed just because that's the only way to
get along in-a minimum creature way.
Is that responsive to your question?
MAN: Yes, it is.
One other thing. This group of technocrats -- or I
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don't know if you could say there is an age group where there are
a lot of technocrats. I was wondering if these people resent the
old fogeys they have in charge there and may be trying to make
moves into the leadership areas right now, and what that portends
for the future.
WHITMAN: That's very hard to tell. I would imagine
that there's a great deal of frustration over this rather dead
hand.
WHITMAN: At the same time, the leadership replaces
itself. It selects its successors. And it's got a strong
tendency to select the same kind of people as itself.
FISKE: Thank you very much, sir.
Good evening.
MAN: I had a question for your guest there. I guess
you've reviewed past historical relations between the United
States and Russia, as far back as the '30s. Am I correct?
WHITMAN: You mean have I just reviewed them?
MAN: No, not just, but I mean in your position that you
had with the intelligence group. Have you gone-over anything
historically?
WHITMAN: As necessary, yes.
MAN: I had a question concerning that. I think it was
back during the early days of Stalin. He invited, I believe back
when we were having a depression, he invited some people from the
United States to help, I think, improve the technology in his
country, railroads, communications, what have you. Are you
familiar with this?
WHITMAN: Uh-huh. Yes. Not only the United States, but
other Western countries too.
MAN': Right. Now, it was my understanding that a lot of
people that went over there to work, because they were jobless
here, found it very difficult to leave once they got there.
MAN: I think they were put together in one community,
or something like that, and some literally had to either buy
their way out or escape, or what have you.
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Can you shed a little bit of light on that or elaborate
WHITMAN: I think you have that just about right. Is
there some relevance to the present that you're concerned about?
MAN: The only reason I question that is because I
almost landed up there myself.
WHITMAN: Did you really?
MAN: Yeah.
WHITMAN: Well, good for you.
FISKE: You mean as a scientist?
MAN: No, as a child of one of the workers. And I'm
sort of thankful because a friend of mine had to escape across a
lake into another country to get out.
WHITMAN: These people tended to get caught up in
Stalin's spy mania, and it was very difficult. You're lucky you,
didn't go.
FISKE: How did this government or the other governments
react to that sort of thing?
WHITMAN:" Well, I'm not 'sure. That's a bit of history
that the American reaction -- it's a bit of history that I'm not
sure of. I'd rather not try to guess at that.
FISKE: Well, sir, thank you very much. Our time has
John, we appreciate your coming, and I found what you
had to say very interesting, and found your book very enjoyable
reading.
WHITMAN: Well, thank you. Thank you. And I've enjoyed
this. You get some very good questions here.
We've been talking to John Whitman, who is a former
chief analyst of Soviet policy for the CIA. His book, which
we've been discussing Geneva Accord. It's published by Crown.
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