Family and friends who have known me most of my life would recognize the change in political philosophy necessary for me to write the headline for this post. In my younger days, I was liberal to the core and despised Ronald Reagan as the "amiable dunce" the left painted him as.
My opinion about Reagan changed, as did my politics, with time and maturity. Churchill is attributed with saying, "Any man who is not a socialist by the time he is 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head." I suspect that statement is true, and so, my changed opinion of Ronald Reagan.
This piece explains the "economic war" Reagan waged against the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Recall the hand-wringing of liberals during that time period that we were going to be hit by Soviet nukes all because Reagan called the U.S.S.R. what it was: an evil empire. Liberals were sure we were going to be incinerated by the Soviets because Reagan refused to pretend we were all friends. Aside from the war of words, Reagan also waged an economic war.
The Reagan administration suspected that Soviet intelligence was stealing critical technology from the West. Not until 1981, however, was an organized Soviet program discovered, when French intelligence obtained the services of a 53-year-old defector named Colonel Vladimir Vetrov. Vetrov became known as "Farewell"...
(NSA staffer Gus) Weiss learned that the KGB had created a unit called Directorate T, tasked to plumb the R&D of Western nations. Directorate T’s operating arm was named Line X. Through this apparatus, said Weiss, "a master plan" was developed to acquire American high-tech products and know-how.
The material Weiss read confirmed his worst nightmares: Line X had been so successful, said Weiss, “that the Soviet military and civil sectors were in large measure running their research on that of the West, particularly the United States.” Radar, machine tools, semiconductors—much of which went into Soviet defense.
Colonel Vetrov spilled the beans on Directorate T, divulging the names of over 200 Line X officers stationed throughout the West and more than 100 leads on Line X activities.
Weiss planned an ingenious response: Thanks to Farewell, Reagan’s NSC was in possession of a Line X shopping list of Soviet-needed technology. Weiss offered a suggestion: U.S. counter-intelligence could supply some of these technologies, but with a fatal catch: the products would appear genuine but would prove defective...
By mid-1982, shipments of defective products were arriving in the USSR—contrived computer chips that found their way into Soviet military hardware, flawed turbines, faulty plans for chemical plants, and more. The results were at times literally explosive:
In one dramatic example only recently shared by NSC staffer Tom Reed to Washington Post reporter David Hoffman, in the summer of 1982 rigged software triggered a huge explosion in the gigantic Siberian gas pipeline—an extremely expensive project designed to provide the USSR with essential hard currency. The software was designed to pass Soviet quality-acceptance tests, to work temporarily, and then to malfunction. The software that ran the pumps, turbines, and valves in the pipeline was programmed to produce pressures beyond the capacity of the pipeline’s joints.
According to Reed, U.S. satellites picked up the explosion, which was so enormous that NORAD feared a small nuclear device had been detonated.
Ironically, Reagan had spent two years trying to get Western European leaders to join him in blocking construction of the pipeline; they refused. Alas, he found a device.
It is interesting that the "amiable dunce" never forgot who our enemies were or that our only choice was to defeat them. I hope the current American president remembers that.
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