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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
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In September 1978, the “Commentary” magazine published my article about the CIA, which was reprinted or outlined by more than 500 periodicals in the West. I was a member of the Advisory Board of the East Side Conservative Club, and Tom Bolan (its charming chairman) introduced me and my “Commentary” article in glowing terms to William Safire, invited to speak at the Club’s dinner. From Safire’s behavior, I concluded that either the New York Times would join those periodicals that had printed the article or that he would discuss it in his column. Neither happened, and here the New York Times printed 28 years later (on Dec. 3, 2006) an article titled “Open-Source Spying,” authored by Clive Thompson, and having as a print-out seventeen pages.
The success of my “Commentary” article was based on laughter. I argued that the CIA simply did not exist. There was a building in Langley, Va., in which officials copied Soviet periodicals, and their copy work was passed as espionage data to Congress, government, and whoever wished to see the CIA’s testimony in Congress. I studied these “espionage data” and ridiculed the CIA.
What was so tragicomic about the CIA?
Sun Tsu, an ancient Chinese strategist, said that strategy is based on deception. After 1945, Stalin realized that only post-nuclear super weapons would enable him to defeat the West (just as U.S. bombs made Japan surrender unconditionally in 1945). Stalin needed time to develop post-nuclear super weapons. Hence the Soviet propaganda that had originally been based on the “world class war” suddenly burst into roulades of peace, with Stalin called “the world’s foremost peace standard-bearer.”
The CIA was to learn what super weapons were being developed in Soviet Russia and how far their development had advanced. Instead, the CIA refused to recognize the fact of Soviet development of super weapons even after President Reagan met with me and announced publicly my “input” about this development.
The Soviet peace propaganda, passed by the CIA for its intelligence data, was laughable.
In the United States, espionage is as feasible as it was a hundred years ago in any constitutional country. A spy comes into the United States as one of 12 or 20 million illegal aliens. He rents his domicile where he can meet (in a pub, for example) those engaged in secret work nearby. The rest follows.
In Soviet Russia, an illegal alien was by definition a spy to be shot. Even alive, he could not rent or buy any dwelling, since he had to get the “residential permit” from the police, who would ask him for his “internal passport,” a copy of which was kept in the police, complete with the stamp, showing his “place of residence” and “his place of work.”
Right from its establishment, Soviet Russia was surrounded—no, not by a fence or a wall, but by a military line of fortifications. The CIA sent over it an aircraft that landed as a spy a former Russian who had deserted to the Nazis during WW2. But the Soviet KGB set up its posts on the ground all along the route of the aircraft, and the “illegal alien” was caught and shot.
At that time, I was in Moldavia, and going to Moscow. I was also arrested as a spy dropped from that aircraft. The KGB called Moscow, and all the data about me (including my father being a member of the Union of Soviet Writers, my mother a professor of neurology, and myself being a graduate of the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages) proved to be correct, whereupon I was released to go to Moscow.
The New York Times article “Open-Source Spying” of Dec. 3, 2006, means by “spying” not the attempts to expose in a foreign country a deception as part of its geostrategy, but the discussions of officials whom the New York Times article calls “spies” even if they have never left their armchairs during their lifelong “espionage.”
Dale Meyerrose, a retired Air Force official, told the author of the New York Times article (p. 4): “The 16 intelligence organizations of the U.S. are without peer. They are the best in the world.”
So why was the war in Iraq, a small Third-World country, launched under the false pretext supplied by the world’s best 16 “intelligence organizations,” with the help of (the world’s second best?) British Intelligence Service, and why this war is being lost after almost four years of fighting?
But forget that small Third-World country! Geostrategically: why did the world’s best 16 “intelligence organizations” ignore the advent of the epoch of post-nuclear superweapons until 1992, when Yeltsin opened their Soviet development for international inspection?
According to the New York Times article, the trouble is that though the world’s best, the 16 U.S. “intelligence organizations” are not sufficiently interlinked to have “open-source spying,” that is, joint arm-chair discussions of, for example, “how the Iraqi insurgency will evolve” (p. 11). True (p. 12), “the Chinese” [this is the only case when the reference to the “Chinese” is made in the article] may “listen in.” Says Meyerrose: “And sure they could. But we weren’t going to be discussing state secrets. And the benefits of openness [openness without state secrets] outweigh the risks [let us risk the Chinese interception of the discussion!].”
The article describes two prototypes for this wonderful arm-chair “open-source spying”: those blogs and Wikipedia to which everyone can contribute publicly his or her opinions. The “spying” must be a blog or a “wiki.” Says “an opens-source spying” theorist (p. 13): “The time is past for analysts to act like monastic scholars in a cave someplace laboring for weeks or months in isolation to produce a report.”
In my article of 1978, I ridiculed the CIA. In the New York Times article of the end of 2006, the CIA is even more ridiculous. But the New York Times and Clive Thompson are dead serious about the “open-source spying.” Well, in the 1920s and the 1930s, Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, glorified Stalin and his “socialism.” Can a newspaper be more serious than that?
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.