REVIEW OF SOVIET COUP EVENTS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-01448R000401850001-0
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 12
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 22, 2012
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: August 22, 1991
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO
WRERORTS
C, ! ',i~1!orC Avee~e, #2 8
Hevv Chase, MD 20815
PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
Nightline WJLA-TV ABC Network
August 22, 1991 11:30 P.M. Washington, D.C.
Review of Soviet Coup Events
TED KOPPEL: The news came suddenly.
NEWSMAN: Mikhail Gorbachev has been removed as
President of the Soviet Union.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV [translated]: At about ten minutes
to five in the evening, I was told by the chief of the guard that
a group of persons had arrived. I told him, "I'm not expecting
anyone. I haven't invited anyone."
RAMON CARMEN [translated]: And then a call went out for
all women to leave the building and only men stay inside. And
then they were giving people weapons and gas masks because they
expected the use of tear gas.
MAN [translated]: Today we have plenty of proof that
they planned physical elimination of the leadership of the
Russian Republic.
KOPPEL: Tonight, some remarkably vivid and moving
stories of what went on behind the coup.
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KOPPEL: It happens with even the strongest men and
women in the period immediately following the survival of an
intense personal crisis. They become acutely conscious of their
own mortality. They display a certain vulnerability, which under
normal circumstances they wouldn't reveal. That is why Mikhail
Gorbachev's news conference here in Moscow today was so remark-
able. It's probably safe to say that we will never again see
Gorbachev's stripped so emotionally bare.
At the same time, he had a whale of a good yarn to tell,
and he was clearly eager to tell it. His story of how he, his
family and a loyal band of personal security guards lived through
the 72-hour coup will be the spine of this broadcast tonight,
fleshed out by the inside stories of some of the others who
briefly believed that their careers, and possibly even their
lives, were on the brink of ending.
It's been quite a week in the history of the Soviet
Union, and it began just as the sun was rising over Moscow this
past Mondy. The Soviet news agency Tass announced that a
six-month state of emergency had been declared by a new leader
who demanded compliance from the Soviet people.
Down in the Crimea, where Mikhail Gorbachev, his wife,
his daughter, his son-in-law and granddaughter were vacationing,
the nightmare was already well underway. It had begun the
previous afternoon.
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[President Gorbachev's remarks are translated.]
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: I picked up the telephone in the
office that I happened to be in and picked up that receiver, and
the phone wasn't working. I picked up another receiver, a third
one and a fourth one and a fifth one. None of them were working.
They were dead. So I was isolated.
Then I understood that the situation was very serious,
that either they will try to blackmail me or there'll be an
attempt to arrest me and take me away. Anything could take place
at that point.
KOPPEL: In Moscow, the tanks and armored personnel
carriers began rolling into the heart of the city around nine
o'clock Monday morning. They took up positions around the
Russian Parliament.
It has been reported, according to officials of the
Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, that the military phase
of the coup had actually been planned to begin the next day,
Tuesday. But when the plotters learned that Gorbachev was going
to return to Moscow a day earlier than expected, they placed him
under house arrest on Sunday.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: I said, "Both you and those who
sent you are adventurists and you will ruin yourselves. But the
hell with you. Those that's for you to worry about. Only
suicidal people could propose that we introduce a totalitarian
system, regime at this point in the country."
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And the demand was heard that I should resign, render my
resignation. I said that "You will not get that from me, neither
one nor the other."
KOPPEL: The military operation in Moscow began before
it was completely ready. The elite forces which would have been
the ones to seize Boris Yeltsin and his advisers at the Russian
Federation building didn't get to the city until ten hours after
the armor moved in. By then, thousands of Muscovites loyal to
Yeltsin had surrounded the building. It was already too late.
Although Yeltsin and those with him inside, like Russian tele-
vision cameraman Ramon Carmen, were still expecting the worst.
CARMEN [translated]: And then a call went out for all
women to leave the building and only men stay inside. And then
they were giving people weapons and gas masks because they
expected the use of tear gas.
KOPPEL: Alexander Yakovlev, an old Gorbachev adviser,
gives Boris Yeltsin a lot of credit.
How was Yeltsin?
ALEXANDER YAKOVLEV: You know, it's very, very
interesting case, extremely interesting. They demonstrated who
is who, who is who, very clearly. And Yeltsin demonstrated
courage, decisiveness and confidence. You know, I liked how he
behaved himself.
KOPPEL: Can you give me an example?
YAKOVLEV: At the first minute when tanks came to the
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building, he left the building...[asides in Russian]...on the
tank and began to speak, to make a speech. It was not, it was
not very, you kow, wise step, because somebody could, you know,
shoot him. But probably soldiers and the KGB at that time did
not have the order of such a kind. But he did not know about
that, but he did it.
KOPPEL: There's a seven-hour time difference between
Moscow and Kennebunkport Maine. By Monday morning at President
Bush's vacation retreat, the Soviet coup was already well
underway, but some of the President's top advisers felt there was
a good chance that the coup would fail. Mr. Bush agreed.
PRESIDENT BUSH: It's also important to know that coups
can fail. They can take over at first and then they run up
against the will of the people.
KOPPEL: In Moscow, members of the Emergency Committee
held a press conference. Gorbachev, they insisted, was too ill
to govern.
He wasn't sick, but he was completely cut off.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: Complete isolation from the land
and sea. Thirty-two persons remained with me, of the guard, and
they stayed with me to the end. They decided to make their
stand there. They shared all their duties with my family. They
were deployed. And they made a decision to stand to the very
end.
Seventy-two hours of the isolation. I think all of this
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was done in order to break me psychologically. It's very
difficult. I don't need to tell you that. But that's how it
went on.
Everything was shut off. But they found some sort of
receivers in the service quarters and they jerry-rigged some
antennas, those fellows who understand these things, and they
started receiving whatever they could on them. They were able to
receive BBC. That was the best reception. BBC was the best that
we could hear. Radio Liberty and then Voice of America. At any
rate,. that's what I was told. That was the information I was
given.
KOPPEL:- When we come back we'll look at the events of
Tuesday, when the coup began to crack and the tide began to turn.
KOPPEL: Tuesday morning. The people of Moscow who
manned the barricades around the clock were symbolically
important. They were the visible evidence that the Soviet
Union's young flame of democracy wasn't going to be extinguished
without a struggle. But there were other, even more important
activities going on behind the scenes.
One of the leaders of an informal intelligence network,
the existence of which is revealed tonight for the first time,
was former Gorbachev adviser Alexander Yakovlev, who remained in
his office throughout the coup.
YAKOVLEV: Yes, I was here all the time.
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KOPPEL: What was happening inside?
YAKOVLEV: Well, you know, it was necessary to know
everything what they are going to do. And every minute, every
all time, night and day, I used to get the information.
KOPPEL: Also significant, but unknown to the people
keeping their vigil on the barricades, was the inactivity of the
Soviet military throughout most of the country. U.S. inteligence
satellites found little military mobilization. And even Gorba-
chev, trapped at'his vacation retreat in the Crimea, learned that
military units were staying away from the coup in droves.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: Seventy-two hours in a very awful
tension. And the guards got this idea that we might be taken
from the sea. But as it turned out, the sailors let their
President know that they can help him out, and the Navy didn't
participate in these actions. And not just the Navy, other units
didn't participate either.
KOPPEL: By Wednesday it was becoming clear that the
coup was crumbling. Even troops that had been guarding the
Russian Federation building, with Boris Yeltsin inside, felt that
the danger of attack had diminished sufficiently that they could
begin pulling out.
At almost precisely the same hour, late Wednesday
afternoon, a delegation of coup leaders boarded a plane in Moscow
bound for the Crimea, where they sought an audience with Gorba-
chev.
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PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: When it became clear that Russia's
leadership and the republics and people and the Army didn't
budget, that they all took up this irreconcilable position, they
started looking for a way out in panic. And I was told that a
group of plotters had arrived in the Crimea aboard the presiden-
tial aircraft in order to talk with the President and bring him
hack to Moscow.
When they arrived, I said, "Well, put them in the house,
put them under guard, and tell them my demands. I will not speak
with any of them until official communications are reestab-
lished."
KOPPEL: The coup had been a brief, if terrifying,
I asked Alexander Yakovlev what had gone wrong.
Why do you think they lost?
YAKOVLEV: The first, they are fools. Yes.
The second, because they are fools, they did not know
the level of the resistance of people. They considered that all
people, you know, are unhappy, in a bad mood, against the
government, President, and against the situation, and are ready
to go, and so on and so on, to fight against that government.
On the contrary. On everything they make very stupid
The third reason, they thought that the Army, soldiers,
officers, would fight against people.
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KOPPEL: You think they're all fools. There wasn't a
smart man in the group?
YAKOVLEV: No. No.
KOPPEL: If they're such fools, why did your friend
Gorbachev hire them all?
YAKOVLEV: It is a problem for thinking for me, too.
The same question I would like to ask you. What do you think
about this?
KOPPEL: I think he was trying to be all things to all
people.
YAKOVLEV: [Laughter]
KOPPEL: You know, one day to the left, one day to the
right.
YAKOVLEV: Yeah.
KOPPEL: Maybe he thought he could handle those people
well, perhaps because maybe you're right, maybe they are fools.
YAKOVLEV: Maybe you're right. Maybe. The situation
was very complicated. He tried to find people who could do
something. It is his mistake to take these people.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: This was a lesson for myself. And
in particular, I see that the Congress was quite correct when it
did not vote for the Vice President on the first round. But I
insisted on that and I succeeded in that. That's my error, and
not my only one. I see that now.
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I'll tell you just as frankly, because I really have
nothing to hide here, I believed especially Yazov and Kryuchkov.
KOPPEL: Yazov, the Defense Minister; Kryuchkov, the man
who headed the KGB.
Gorbachev is back at the helm of the Soviet government,
but some of the most powerful men in the country who governed at
his side only last week are today under arrest.
Nothing is quite the way it was. Reaction in Moscow
today? That part of the story when we come back.
KOPPEL: Thursday morning. An near-perfect sunrise
punctucated the end of the coup. Moving out from behind the
barricades, where they had established a thin line of armor
protecting Boris Yeltsin, tanks garlanded with flowers withdrew,
to the appreciative honking of some early-morning motorists.
Almost bloodless, this revolution has not been without
its victims, ten death throughout the country. The three shown
on Moscow shown on Soviet television today for the first time.
And somewhat obliquely today, Mikhail Gorbachev indicated that
his wife, Raisa, has not come out of this coup unscathed.
PRESIDENT GORBACHEV: Raisa Maximova had a very bad
spell. You know, difficult.
KOPPEL: Diane Sawyer got a more explicit version from
Russian Prime Minister Silayev, who flew to the Crimea yesterday
to bring Gorbachev home
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PRIME MINISTER SILAYEV: She had a nervous breakdown and
some loss of speech and paralysis of the arm.
KOPPEL: When she returned to Moscow, Raisa seemed to
have largely recovered.
For the most part throughout Moscow today, the mood was
one of jubilation. The unambiguous man of the hour, hero of the
coup, Boris Yeltsin.
In the past, Gorbachev has vacillated between placating
the hard-liners and the reformers. The hard-liners these past
few days have suffered a crushing setback. Symbolic of that
setback, this scene. Late today in front of KGB Headquarters, a
statue was torn off its pedestal. Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of
the first Communist secret police, hung briefly from a crane
before being carted off to an uncertain fate.
There are a few empty pedestals in Moscow today. The
KGB itself is without a leader. And the man who will appoint the
next leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, now carries several fresh
obligations. What he does from here on in, the men and women he
appoints to fill the high offices that now stand empty, will need
the approval, if not the consent, of the reformers led by Boris
Yeltsin.
When we come back an artistic footnote from editorial
cartoonist Ranone Lurie (?).
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KOPPEL: Earlier in this broadcast you heard an inter-
view that I did today with Alexander Yakovlev. Yakovlev was not
only the chief architect of perestroika, he was at one time
perhaps Mikhail Gorbachev's closest aide. But if you thought you
heard a critical tone in Yakovlev's voice toward Mikhail Gorba-
chev, his old friend, you are right. Not only have the two men
drifted apart, Gorbachev's stature is considerably diminished,
even though he is now back in power. Meanwhile, the stature of
Boris Yeltsin, the man who only a few months ago was still being
depicted as something of a buffoon in the Soviet press, his
stature has grown enormously.
Ranone Lurie, our editorial cartoonist, now gives his
version and his perception of those events.
[Cartoon of large Yeltsin and small Gorbachev embracing]
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