Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST):
CIA-RDP90-00806R000200950004-1
Body:
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200950004-1
STAT
0wric:?~ i.:'Y.L.~:s-J
J1 0s PACS_
uring the past dec-
ade-while the
United States has
felt guilty about
Vietnam, shied away
from sending troops' into An-
gola, refused to protect a dic-
tatorial regime in: N a-
and generally tried to be moral
and decent in itsforeign policy
-what .have those sneaky
Russians been up to?
The snort answer, given by a
growing number of cxrva-
tive foreign policy thinkers
with influence in the Reagan
admbtiatration, is that the
Soviets have been up to no
good. The argument gear like
this:
While sof -minded liberals
in Washington and the capi-
tals of Western Europe were
seeking friendship and trade
with the Soviet Union, the
Soviets conspired thvoughout
the 1970s with terrorism of
every stripe to disrupt and dis-
turb the governments of Great
Britain, Spain, West Germany,.
Italy, Turkey, Japan and se-
lected countries. in - Latin
America and Africa. Examples
abound.
he beloved Etigliah war
hero, Earl. Mountbatten of
Burma, was murdered in 1979
on his fishing boat by a Provi-
sional IRA terroist who
learned his bomb-making craft
in Libya under Soviet supervi-
sion.
/- Aldo Moro, the Italian
Christian Democrat states-
man, was kidnapped and
killed in 1978 by terrorists of
the Red Brigades, the radical
left underground organization
THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZIN
15 March 1981
whose leaders trained in'
Soviet KGB camps in Czecho-
slovakia and Soviet-supported
terrorist camps in South
-Yemen.
Th
l
i
d
t
t
e
egen
ary
error
s
"Carlos the Jackal," who
helped organise the massacre
of Israeli athletes at the 1972
Olympics ~ in Munich _ and in
1975 led_a kidnapping squad
that seized 11 Arab oil minis-
ters in Vienna, learned how to
ply his bloody trade in three
special training, camps in the
U.S.S.R
There you have it. a conspir-
acy. Carlos the cold-eyed killer
drinks vodka with the KGB.
The Provisional IRA slaugh-
ters, helpless school girls with
Soviet-made Kalashnikov' as-
sault rifles. The violence-
crazed Baader-Meinhof Gang
blows up West German banks
for the furtherance of Soviet
world domination. The con-
spiracy theory of terrorism,
with the Russians as the bad
guys, has an intoxicating polit_
ical appeal in this city where
Ronald Reagan reigns. Reagan
irsneelf claim the Soviets re-
serve the right "to commit any
crime, to lie, to cheat". to fur-
ther their goal of world domi-
nation:
Secretary of State Alexan-
der Haig, the soldier turned
diplomat, accuses the Soviets
of "training, finding and
equipping" the forces of
worldwide terrorism. The
blue-eyed. former general has
his own oersonal reasons for
glum
escap
temp'
ists V
hole
sedaz
miss,
consi+
Haig'
hums
tiona
conce
Th
seem
newly powerful tiepubiican
hard-liners that Democrats
who used to run U.S. foreign
policy (and who now stand ac-
cused of ignoring Soviet in-
volvement in terrorism) ques-
tion whether the "Russians
did it"' theory is based on
genuine intelligence informa-
tion or on anti-Communist
conservatism that's welded to
a keen sense of what the elec
torate wants to hear.
"I have a feeling there is a
lot of loose-talk going around
with very little support," says
former United- Nations Am-
bassador Donald F. McHenry.
"It. has the pungent . smell of
politics."
Whatever its - motivation,
the Reagan administration's
finger-pointing has provoked
the Soviet Union into one of
its more hyperbolic, self-right-
eous rejoinders since the Cold
War. Soviet Defense Minister
Dmitri Ustiaov said last
month the U.S. accusations
were an "evil-minded decep-
tion" to cover up Western sub-
version in Poland and other
Communist countries. .-"Ter-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/06/24: CIA-RDP90-00806R000200950004-1