At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War

At the Abyss is an insider's dramatic account of the dark decades of the Cold War, from its beginnings in the 1950s through to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It tells how calm and steady hands on both sides of the Atlantic walked back from the edge of nuclear warfare, revealing how perilously close the U.S and Soviet Union came to nuclear war, time and time again. October 1962 was a month of anxiety, tension and fear in both the United States and Russia, as the leaders of the world's two great powers Thomas C Reed was Secretary of the Air Force, a CIA insider and an advisor to President Regan, and had unprecedented access to the key people, places, and events during the Cold War years. With an introduction by former President George H. W. Bush Fascinating insight into U.S./Soviet relations in the last half of the 20th century

Chapter 1

Communist Takeovers and Makeovers

Why was there a Cold War? Fear. Fear of what “they” would do to “us” if they took over.

Citizens of the Western democracies watched in horror as one ancien régime after another fell to Marxist ideology, fearing the slaughter and suffocation that inevitably followed those takeovers. They did not want such horrors visited on themselves or their children. To the east, in the fact-free Soviet empire, the government generated a fear of capitalist imperialism. It invoked the horrors of World War II, horrors that we westerners can never comprehend. On a personal level, Soviet citizens came to fear the obligations and risks that logically follow individual freedom.

To me, there was the immediate fear of the war in Korea. In 1951, I was about to graduate from high school, so events there began to get my attention. A war started on the Korean peninsula during the previous summer; President Truman had threatened to use the A-bomb to protect American forces there. By the spring of 1951 that war had stagnated into a mindless meat grinder. No one was winning, but it was clear to us high school seniors, primary draft bait, that we could be the big losers. Our silent generation reacted to that war differently than did our children when faced with Vietnam, but the underlying feelings were the same: something was terribly wrong, our government did not know what it was doing, and we were being set up to pay the price. In the shadows stood some greater conflict, a fundamental struggle between good and evil only dimly perceived.

In a speech to the U.S. Congress that spring, on the occasion of his recall from command of the UN forces in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur spoke words that resonated with the righteous weariness of the Old Testament. He praised the men he had left behind in Korea, then spoke of the challenges ahead: “Once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end. War’s very objective is victory, not prolonged indecision.” He was speaking of Korea, but he just as well could have been laying out the markers for the forty years to come.

Whittaker Chambers Explains It to the Free World

In the spring of 1952, Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness was published.* It was the defining work for many of my generation, certainly for the cold warriors then taking up arms. In a preface to its republication in 1987, columnist Robert Novak describes how, as a twenty-two-year-old Army lieutenant, it changed his worldview, and how, over the ensuing thirty-four years, he found a large fraternity of like-minded leaders whose lives were similarly impacted.

Witness is an unforgettable book in part because Chambers was a talented writer. In 1928, as a freelancer, Chambers came to national literary attention with his translation of Bambi, by the Austrian novelist Felix Salten, into beautiful English. That book became a best-seller, then a Disney movie, and created a demand for his talents. In due course Chambers went to work for Time magazine, starting out as a book reviewer in 1939. He was an immediate success, and by 1944 was

*Whittaker Chambers. Witness. Random House, republished by Regnery Gateway, 1987.

in charge of the foreign news department. From that vantage point he

illuminated the foolishness of Yalta and the disintegration of China. He explained the meaning of “Iron Curtain” and “Cold War,” terms new to the American lexicon in the late 1940s. Henry Luce, publisher of Time, described Chambers as, “the best writer Time ever employed.” My acquaintances there agree.

In addition to its beautiful literary form, however, Witness is a book of immense historical substance. It documents Chambers’s life as a student at Columbia University in the early 1920s, as a recruit to communism in 1925, his selection in 1929 for “Special Tasks” by the Soviet intelligence service, and his promotion to management of the Ware espionage group in the United States in 1934. The book then tracks his disenchantment with communism as Stalin began to kill off competitors in the purges of 1937-38. The denouement was Chambers’s defection and flight into hiding on April 15, 1938.

In 1939, Chambers began his work for Time, hoping the visibility of that job also would give him protection from kidnapping or assassination. But this also was a time of sudden national interest in communist activity. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August and the subsequent bilateral invasions of Poland made the Communist party an instrumentality of a potential enemy. On September 2, 1939, Chambers told a part of his tale to Adolph Berle, a U.S. government official.

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government lost interest in communist underground activity. Overnight, the Soviet Union had become an ally, but from the minarets of Time, Chambers kept calling attention to that nation’s dubious geopolitical aims and its moral rot.

With the breakdown of the end-of-war Yalta accords, the new Republican Congress of 1946 decided to take a serious look into the matter of communist influence on U.S. policy during the Truman administration. In August 1948 the House Committee on Un-American Activities called Whittaker Chambers as a witness, based on his reve- lations to Adolph Berle almost a decade earlier. At those hearings, Chambers revealed his prewar membership in the Communist party, his break with communism, and the identities of individuals prominent in the U.S. government who were still active in the Communist party. State Department official Alger Hiss was the name of greatest interest to the committee, and he was called to testify. Hiss denied ever having transmitted government documents to Whittaker Chambers, and denied even meeting with Chambers after January 1, 1937.

At first only one young congressman, Richard Nixon, believed Chambers, but within eighteen months Nixon’s persistence led to Hiss’s January 20, 1950, conviction on two counts of perjury. Hiss served a forty-four month term in federal prison. The Venona transcripts,* released in 1997 and identifying Hiss via his code name Ales, and the postwar testimony of defecting Soviet code clerk Igor Gouzenko, remove any doubt about Hiss’s guilt.

In the spring of 1950, after Hiss’s conviction and sentencing, Chambers wrote two chapters of what was to become Witness. The book was published in May 1952, becoming the ninth best-selling book of the year. His twenty page foreword, in the form of a letter to his children, describes the seductive appeal of communist theory and the horrifying consequences of its reality. In those pages, Chambers tries to answer the questions: What is communism? Why do men become communists, why do they continue to be communists? Why do some break with it and some go on? He identifies communism as a call to change the world, to dispense with God and to enthrone man as the supreme being.

My definition is more prosaic. To me, communism is a nice theory on how to meet noble human goals, but in reality it relies on terror to make it work, and even with the full application of terror, the system does not deliver. Communist states always have dictators because the concentration of economic power means the concentration of all power. Such power corrupts; the dictatorship of the proletariat never withers away. The people lose their freedoms because communism denies the existence of a soul, of a conscience able to judge right from wrong, or of any authority higher than the state.

Chambers explained what communism gave to its adherents: “A reason to live and a reason to die.” Then he tells why, despite all its appeal, people cease to be communists. He used the words of a young girl who explained, with some embarrassment in the 1930s, why her father, a staunch Communist party member, had become an implacable anticommunist. “One night, in Moscow, he heard screams.”

*Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner (eds.). Venona. Central Intelligence Agency—Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1996. These are the transcripts of Soviet messages from the U.S. embassy and consulates back to Moscow during and immediately after World War II. The Soviet codes were broken in the late 1940s, leading to the arrest of their nuclear spies in the U.S., among others.

Chambers went on to write:

What communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubyanka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women, and children, the enemies of the communist state, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the communist state. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-Arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them—parents they will never see again.

Of course, not all Communist party members heard those screams. Nor did many of the Soviet rank and file hear them, for their government was very good at muffling those screams, at jamming the internal systems of communication, leaving the Soviet word as the only word. For that reason, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) held onto power for over seventy years, and for a while it seemed that power might envelop us all.

Witness left a lasting impression on me not only because of the quality of its writing and the description of the screams. Chambers’s most compelling observation was that “in this century [it] will be decided for generations [to come] whether all mankind is to become communist, or whether the whole world is to become free . . . It is our fate to live upon that turning point in history.”

It was my fate to participate in that transformation, to watch and help as the hinges of fate swung shut on the communist horror. Forty years later, when the Cold War was over, I had a chance to talk to some of those who had screamed.

The Coming of the Gulags

In 1917 the communists took power in St. Petersburg by intrigue and mob rule, not by popular vote nor the consent of the people. There was not, and never has been, any legitimizing event leading up to their seizure of power. A civil war ensued that took four years to put down. Assassinations of political competitors was one tool of the Red Terror, but the most long-lasting and terrible instrumentality of the mob was the Glavnoe Upravlenie Legerei (Main Camp Administration), soon to be known by its acronym, the Gulag. These concentration camps were built, according to Anne Applebaum, to safeguard the Soviet Republic from class enemies by means of isolation. In the process, they extracted free labor from the healthy while killing off the undesirables.

Construction of the Gulag started in 1919; by 1920, eighty-four camps, holding 50,000 prisoners, were up and running. Their commandants were pioneers in horror. They developed a system of food allocation that disposed of the unproductive. They optimized their tortures and perfected procedures for the murder of the uncooperative. By 1922, when Lenin successfully imposed his will on a new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, there were over three hundred such camps in operation, “home” to nearly a quarter million prisoners, known as “zeks.”

Lenin died in 1924, and in the ensuing four years Joseph Stalin seized and consolidated his power as General Secretary of the CPSU. In the process, Gulags metastasized throughout the new Soviet Union. Close to five hundred Gulags processed over eighteen million souls through their portals during Stalin’s thirty years in power. Millions more never made it to the camps, dying in railroad cars and ships’ holds en route to their fate. Another six million offending citizens were simply exiled from their homes in the cities to the forests and deserts of Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Famine in the Ukraine: Ten Million Dead

One of Stalin’s targets in his consolidation of power was Russia’s neighbor and sometimes possession, Ukraine, a country not interested in the Bolshevik revolution. The peasants there wanted to keep running their farms as they had for generations, making Ukraine and the Caucasus the breadbasket of Europe. Such activity was not compatible with communist theory, so in 1930, Stalin imposed collectivization on those Ukrainian farms. The peasants would not cooperate. They fought back with guns, axes, and knives. They slaughtered their cattle rather than turn them over to the state. Stalin decided to starve the peasants out, imposing grain production quotas that the peasants could not possibly meet. For two years he decreed the confiscation of all food and the destruction of all crops.

Elena Yakimenko lived in Armanir, in the northern Caucasus. She reported that to effect this famine, the Komsomol, or communist youth, made twice daily calls on every farm and farmer. They would walk in teams through the maize crop, knocking it over as they went. They would prod soft spots in the ground with metal rods, looking for hidden food. In the afternoon, after the farmers had raised up the bruised crop, the Komsomol teams would come back to trample it again. Any food found in homes was confiscated. She confirmed that by 1933 most of the men were dead or had disappeared, transported to the Gulags. Their families were being wiped out where they lived. By 1933 the authorities were removing an average of 250 corpses per day from the Kharkov train station alone, lost souls trying to escape the horrors of the government-imposed famine.

Elena’s neighbors to the east had lost both parents and four of their six children to the famine. The two surviving children sold their farmhouse to a well-connected apparatchik at the mill for a sack of flour. Then they disappeared. To the west lived a mother with three children. One evening she produced four potatoes from a secret stash, boiling them for dinner. One child stepped away from the table for a moment and another reached for the unguarded potato. The mother responded with a tap on the offender’s forehead with a wooden spoon. The child was so weak that he fell over, dead. Without missing a beat, the surviving two children asked that he not be buried but that his remains be cooked.

Recent post-Soviet literature now estimates the death toll among the Ukrainian and northern Caucasus peasantry during these Stalin- directed famine years to be around ten million, one-fourth of the people living there. Today the terror is gone, but the legacy of incompetence remains. The government still owns the land. Ukraine is a net importer of food.

Stalin’s Ghosts: Twenty Million Dead

The struggle in Russia itself was far worse. At every turn “counterrevolutionaries” and “saboteurs” were identified and tortured until they “confessed” and implicated others—who were then sucked into the same maw of Soviet terror. There was a voracious need for slave labor to build the canals and dams of the new Soviet Union. Slaves built the nuclear facilities that fueled the Soviet military machine while slowly killing those who operated them. There was an unquenchable need for labor in Siberia, people to dig mines, denude forests, and suck oil from the bowels of the earth. On top of all that, there were arbitrary “execution quotas,” assigned to local officials for no reason other than to keep the people in l...