The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In duplicity, there is complicity. It is so simple. Spies understand spies. Wanna know a thief? Become a thief. That's the story in one of the great secrets coming out of the Reagan years, with Washington and Moscow playing games Ñ never revealing to the poor dumb public what they were up to. It comes out Ñ with Canada involved Ñ in a new book, At The Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. By one Thomas C. Reed, who happens to be coming to Toronto next week to flog his book. (And visit the land where his grandfather left, in 1860, for America where grandson became a White House figure.) In publishing a book, as every author knows, timing is everything Ñ as in sex and politics. Reed has had the "luck" of the lionization of Reagan after his death. His tome, since William Safire revealed the secret in the New York Times in February, has gone into its fifth printing. The secret? On July 19, 1981, Ronald Reagan Ñ trying to fight off Henry Kissinger's plea for "dtente" with the bad guys Ñ met with Francois Mitterand of France at an economic summit meeting in Ottawa. The wily European told the Hollywood cowboy that the Soviet Union was stealing Western technology. So far behind the Americans in the new computer world, the Soviets (found out by French intelligence) had penetrated U.S and other Western laboratories, factories and government agencies. It was clear the Russkies had been running their Research & Development programs on the back of the West for years. Given the massive transfer of technology in radar, computers, machine tools and semiconductors from the U.S. to the USSR, Reed writes, "the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself." Some smart guys in the White House came up with an idea. (One of the smart guys being Tom Reed, the youngest-ever U.S. Secretary of the Air Force and then Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy.) Instead of blowing the Soviet cover and advertising to the world the massive thievery, let's do something else. "Why not help the Soviets with their shopping?" Now that the Americans knew what they wanted, why not help them get it. The bad guys desperately needed computer chips. A new trans-Siberian pipeline was to deliver natural gas all the way to Eastern Europe, into the hard currency markets of the West. They needed sophisticated control systems to automate operation of valves, compressors, all such. See 'Trojan' P.# Con't from P.# A KGB operative apparently penetrated a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed codes. Tipped off, Washington sent off the needed software, after "improving" it. The whole new pipeline system got a Trojan horse. At the appropriate time, far off in the Siberian wilderness, the pumps, turbines and valves went skyward. Reed claims it was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. At the White House, he writes, "we received warning from our infra-red satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere." That's not the important point. The important point is that the Russkies, knowing they had been snookered, never said a word about it, never complained. Just as the Yanks had never revealed that they had caught the baddies when they were doing bad. All fascinating. As Tom Reed will undoubtedly explain when he flogs his book at the 101-year-old Empire Club in Toronto on June 24. He's an interesting old cat, graduated first in his engineering class and worked with Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb. Your scribbler happened to meet him two years ago at the famed Bohemian Grove, a summer retreat in the giant redwoods outside San Francisco, dubbed "the largest stag party in the world," 2,000 men in their pyjamas peeing up against the trees. It has been attended by every Republican president since Herbert Hoover and, one morning at breakfast, the star speakers were the senior George Bush (who wrote the forewood for this book), Henry Kissinger (who danced in the floor show), David Rockefeller and who else. Nancy Reagan, now a saint? Reed writes that Ronnie had no ambition, she did. She was the "Queen of Hearts"coming from Alice-in Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts said, "Off with their heads!" Reed says he was one of her husband's buddies she called "the White House Slobs Ñ overweight and under-dressed." You gotta like a guy who describes himself so well.6/21/2004
