Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  That this major financial process in favor of the Soviets enjoyed acceptance in important spheres of influence was made clear by William Verity, among other high-level spokesmen. Verity was one of the founders in 1973 of the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Commission (USTEC), and he chaired that Commission from 1978 to 1984. “The U.S.,” Verity declared in 1987, “is going to have to get used to the idea that the Soviets are good trading partners.”

  Whatever about their worth as a trading partner, the Soviets did prove themselves to be masters at the game of diplomatic connivance. Even before what came to be called Gorbachevism was felt by the general public, the Soviets had been provided with $16 billion in credits and unsecured loans by Western European and Japanese trade and financial deals.

  By 1988, with Gorbachev at the helm, total Soviet debt to the West came to $179 billion in low-interest, unsecured loans and was rising at the rate of $2 billion a month. Moreover, financial experts in East and West alike were in agreement that the Soviet regime would need $100 billion more in Western capital over the next five years.

  How much Gorbachev may have contributed to the early stages of the Soviet end of diplomatic connivance for the economic salvation of the Soviet Union, and how much it was the brainstorm of KGB head and later General Secretary Andropov and others, may never be known. What is certain for Pope John Paul, however, is that whether Mikhail Gorbachev was the master planner or not, once he reached the pinnacle of power, Gorbachev showed himself to be the aptest genius of all at the process of diplomatic connivance.

  With Gorbachev on the scene, a new energy began to heighten the action in the sphere of international affairs claimed by the capitalist nations as their own. During the years between 1985 and 1988, the General Secretary’s openness and candor, so stunning to most in the West, was exactly what the financial doctors ordered. Apparently flying in the face of traditional Soviet secrecy in such matters, Gorbachev readily talked about his budget deficits. He publicly deplored the condition of the Soviet infrastructure. He complained about the folly of Soviet efforts to restrain inflation with price controls, which only aggravated the already disastrous shortage of food and consumer goods of every kind.

  His experts in the financial field soon joined their ebullient General Secretary in a kind of Greek chorus of Soviet helplessness. The USSR was portrayed to the West in the starkest terms by Soviet economist Victor Belken as “a cannibalistic economy feeding on itself.” Not only that, chimed in Belken’s fellow economist Vladimir Tekhonov; the Government’s ability to print money in the circumstances was “like putting an alcoholic in charge of a liquor shop.” Yet a third leading Soviet economist sounded the note that no Internationalist or Transnationalist wanted to hear. There was a real danger of a “rightward swing” in the Soviet Union, warned Leonid Abalkin, unless some rapid economic progress is registered “within two years.”

  On still another front, arms control and disarmament matters were the subject matter of more connivance, even before the Soviet president reached Washington in December of 1987. Soviet pre-event planning and the seeding of minds among U.S. authorities was admirable. It was done so well that today, in the light of recent occurrences at the opening of 1990, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the demilitarization of Europe—East and West—was already planned by Gorbachev in conjunction with the unification of the two Germanys, three years before Gorbachev would call those shots, numbing U.S. authorities with relief.

  Already, in April 1987, ten retired U.S. flag and general officers sat down with eight of their Soviet counterparts, under the sponsorship of the Center for Defense Information. Up for discussion: Arms reduction on both sides. The Soviet proposal: The U.S. and the USSR should remove all troops from foreign countries. The Americans’ question: Wouldn’t that mean the Communist governments of Eastern European satellite countries would fall? The Soviet reaction: So what? The next question: Doesn’t this revive the whole question of the two Germanys—and the Berlin Wall and … and … and …? The Soviet reaction: Yes.

  The meetings were continued in Washington, Moscow and Warsaw. The net effect was a dissipation of the basic reason for the enormous expense and trouble the U.S. had shouldered for forty-five years—a defensive European shield against those Soviet troops garrisoned all over Eastern Europe. That basic reason was fear. Hence, NATO. Hence, a minimum annual U.S. expense of $150 billion.

  By the time Gorbachev reached Washington in December 1987, Washington was ready to receive him, ready to go forward with diplomatic connivance. “Everyone feels just cozy,” remarked one prime television news commentator. The best example of just how cozy everyone had become with everyone else, and of just how quickly everything was moving along a very straight track, was provided when Mikhail Gorbachev set foot at last on the pavements of Washington, D.C., that December. His greatest achievement during that visit was not at the White House, or among the excited crowds of Americans who pressed in to shake his hand when he jumped from his motorcade. His chief triumph was at the Soviet Embassy, where he participated in a meeting, organized by USTEC, with the most prominent advocates of easy-credit trade between the USSR and the United States. Among those present at the meeting were Armand Hammer, grain mogul Dwayne Andrews and USTEC President James H. Giffen.

  In the best traditions of diplomatic connivance, Giffen was explicit in an interview with NBC about USTEC intentions. “The level of [non-agricultural] trade,” he said, “could go from a billion dollars … up to four or five billion per year, and maybe even higher, into the ten-to-fifteen-billion range.” In response to the implications of such a scenario, Giffen was asked, “Do you really want to make the USSR an economic superpower?”

  The reply was to the point. “I think we do.”

  Subsequent developments confirmed what John Paul already understood to be the case. Giffen was speaking for a broad range of important interests in America and elsewhere in the West.

  As early as the following spring, in April 1988, USTEC held its twelfth annual meeting in Moscow. Led by William Verity—not in his role as USTEC founder now but as United States secretary of commerce—five hundred American businessmen set about an unprecedented deal-making process with a corresponding number of Soviet businessmen. In late 1988, another flurry of business deals involved West Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy in the extension of a fresh credit line of $11 billion to the Soviet Union.

  On March 30, 1989, the American Trade Consortium, consisting of six major United States corporations—RJR Nabisco, Mercator, Eastman Kodak, Chevron, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Johnson & Johnson—signed a major trade agreement that is expected eventually to inject $10 billion into the Soviet economy. By the second quarter of 1989, close to two hundred companies from Western Europe and the United States had formed joint ventures with Soviet counterparts; and in May of that year, five European banks and three Soviet banks announced the first joint banking venture in Soviet history: the International Bank of Moscow.

  On top of all that, through bond sales, security firms, insurance companies and corporations, the Soviets were granted access to Western financial markets, free of all oversight. That is, they were not required to divulge basic economic data.

  From Pope John Paul’s point of view, it made little difference at the practical level how much of all this was prearranged theater—diplomatic connivance, in other words—and how much each side was maneuvering in a dead-earnest competition for advantage in its own globalist agenda. Most striking for the Pope were three things. First, the level and the extent of the aid extended to Gorbachev by the West were being consistently heightened. Second, East and West seemed to be most compatible as newlyweds—or anyway, as bedfellows. And third, the truly uncommon geopolitical mind-set, vision and ability of the Soviet General Secretary were evident in every move he made.

  There was Mikhail Gorbachev, being courted by the Western suitors until he caught them, finally consenting in blushing innocence to accept Western money, Western credit
and Western trade.

  And there was the West, consenting to Gorbachev’s conditions. Consenting, for one thing, to the disturbing role of the KGB in all business deals. True, the West did require a little prenuptial counseling in that matter. Paul Konney, vice-president of Tambrands—one of the participants in the March 30, 1989, deal—asserted that “there is a very aggressive, hostile intelligent presence in all our deals.” However, Gorbachev’s early nurturing at the breast of the KGB during his Andropov years seemed to present no serious problem. “People need to get used to it” was Konney’s opinion. “There will be a KGB representative in the organization of everyone’s joint venture.”

  Listening to such advice, and glancing perhaps, if one got that chance, at the bronze medal of the Kremlin that rested on the desk of Mercator Corporation’s James Giffen, one could not help but see something more than the old predominant desire to turn a profit. There was a new element that did not exist in the international mix before Gorbachev’s arrival on the world scene. There was a blithe and trusting spirit filtering down from high places to comfort many who might otherwise have been nervous. And that is the central idea and purpose of the whole process of diplomatic connivance.

  By the time the way was clear for Italy’s Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita to call, as he did in 1989, for a “Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union,” it was beyond any doubting that the most serious process of diplomatic connivance in fifty years was already well along the way.

  Within scant months of Mikhail Gorbachev’s election in March of 1985 to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he and President Reagan met at their first summit, in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 19–20, 1985. With that meeting, the first signal was raised for the general public that a profound change in the arrangements among nations was under way.

  When President Reagan returned from that summit, he gave a low-key report to the Congress and the American nation. “It was,” the President said summarily, “a constructive meeting.”

  Constructive was hardly an ample description. The depth of agreement reached in that meeting was better gauged by scanning just one of its products.

  The General Agreement on Contacts, Exchanges and Scientific Technical Education and Other Fields—the General Agreement, some Vatican analysts called it for convenience—was drawn up by Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev at the summit. The canvas covered in its provisions ranged over the entire cultural life of the United States and the Soviet Union. All phases of education and all branches of the arts were dealt with. It authorized mutual exchange programs, the homogenization of curricula, the sharing of facilities and the mutual indoctrination of the two peoples involved.

  One portion of the General Agreement—Article II, Section 3—provided that both nations were to encourage “cooperation in the fields of science and technology, of humanities and social studies.”

  The basic idea of “cooperation,” according to Article IV, Section 1.d., seemed to be “to conduct joint studies on textbooks between appropriate organizations of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Cooperation would cover all computer-based instruction, instructional hardware and curriculum design for all grades of primary and secondary education, as well as college and university studies.

  The obvious goal was a total homogenization not only of the methods of teaching and learning, but of what was to be taught and learned. Ideally, the content of all curricula would become identical. One day soon, one assumes, schoolchildren in Gorbachev’s birthplace of Privolnoye and schoolchildren in Reagan’s birthplace of Tampico, Illinois, will all learn the same materials.

  This may have seemed to the Transnationalists a giant preparatory step toward their long-held dream of unbiased, uniform global education. To Pope John Paul, it was a giant step taken into the near future with closed eyes and obliterated memory.

  Cooperation, for instance, in the “social sciences” turned a blind eye to the official prostitution of psychiatry and psychology by the Soviet Union as clinical tools for inflicting mental and physical torture as political punishment and for disposing of dissidents. The USSR had been effectively banned from the World Psychiatric Association in 1983 for just such practices. It had not been readmitted at the time of the signing of the General Agreement; and in fact, a delegation of American experts reported after their 1989 visit to the Soviet Union that nothing substantial had changed in the field. Diplomatic connivance seemed not to be strained by this factor, however.

  Or take cooperation in the humanities. As taught in the Soviet Union, all humanities are marinated in Leninist Marxism as a matter of course. And as a matter of course, history is distorted by a thoroughgoing Marxization of ideas, by the systematic suppression of facts, and by downright lies. One might wonder, therefore, what common curricula might be drawn up between the USSR and the United States, or any other country of the West. Presumably, the same blithe and trusting spirit that reigned in trade and finance assumed that such problems would take care of themselves.

  Cooperation in science and technology presented interesting problems of its own, meanwhile. John Paul was hardly alone in seeing all the advantage flowing to the Soviets in these areas. He saw nothing but a greater hemorrhaging than had already taken place of vital American technology in favor of the USSR.

  Without the 1985 General Agreement, the Soviets went to great lengths to obtain such technology, chiefly by the subterfuge of espionage, and by the adulterous actions of third-party governments and entrepreneurs. Just how far the General Agreement would go in making such irregular activities unnecessary for the Soviets became a fascinating subject of discussion among some in the Vatican.

  According to Dr. Stephen D. Bryen, who headed the Pentagon’s security program for the Reagan administration, in 1988 over half the technology that makes the weapons systems of the Soviet Union possible already came from the West. And the United States Department of Defense has stated on the basis of actual figures that trade and technology transfers to the Soviet Union have already saved the USSR billions of dollars, have reduced weapons-development time, and have amounted to a gain of $6.6-$13.3 billion in military technology.

  Apparently, however, there is no such thing as too much technology; and, apparently, the Soviets would rely only so far on the General Agreement to acquire it. In 1989, four years after the Geneva summit, the Soviets paid, to the Toshiba Company of Japan, a good chunk of that hard cash the West was providing. In return, and acting in violation of solemn agreements, Toshiba supplied the Soviets with the American machine-tool technology that enabled them to build nearly undetectable submarines. The case made headlines and met with public outrage. But it was hardly an isolated incident; and Japan was not the lone transgressor.

  In something of the same vein, the Soviets continued their aid to foreign surrogates, to the tune of some $127 billion in 1988—$1 billion to Nicaragua; $2 billion to Vietnam; $5 billion to Cuba; more billions to Central Europe, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola and Latin American surrogates such as the powerful Shining Path Marxist group so troublesome to Peru.

  Without a shadow of a doubt, the aim of the General Agreement—at least from the point of view of the Wise Men of the West—was “to transform the shape of the world,” to quote Internationalist George Ball, because “sooner or later we are going to have to face restructuring our institutions so that they are not confined merely to the nation-states. Start first on a regional [U.S.A.-USSR] basis, and ultimately you could move to a world basis.” In that quintessentially Internationalist view, the General Agreement is a blueprint for what is called a “comfortable merger” of the populations of the United States and the Soviet Union.

  Taking into consideration not only the sweeping scope of the General Agreement, but his own intimate knowledge of the Soviet Union and his equally intimate knowledge of the process of diplomatic connivance, Pope John Paul came to an inescapable conclusi
on. That Agreement was not drawn up specifically for approval at the November 1985 summit. It was not put together in a day, or even in the few months between March, when Gorbachev was elected to the top Soviet post, and November, when he met with Reagan.

  Rather, that Agreement came from already established drawing boards. It took time, effort and organization to produce that Agreement, just as it took time, effort and organization to effect the helter-skelter eastward rush of banking and trading interests.

  Without question, the policies visible in both areas reflected the sweeping ambit of Gorbachevism, as well as the equally sweeping intentions of the Wise Men. For both parties intend to create nothing less than a new arrangement in all human affairs—a “new world order,” to use a consecrated phrase both Gorbachev and the Wise Men employ.

  In John Paul’s assessment, however, the early advantage rested with Gorbachev. For those early policies also reflected that blithe and trusting acceptance by the Wise Men of basic Leninist thinking. An acceptance—a continuing connivance—that was becoming the hallmark, if not the battle cry, of the Wise Men, as they took the field with the leader who had been judged—and not by Yuri Andropov alone—as most likely to succeed in fulfilling Vladimir Lenin’s ultimate dream of Soviet messianism.

  21

  “Cold-Eyed, I Contemplate

  the World”

  Following Mikhail Gorbachev’s seminal speech at the United Nations in December 1988, spokesmen in Pope John Paul’s Holy See felt constrained to underline the positive promise the Soviet leader held out for world peace and development.

  John Paul himself, however, withheld any papal comments. On his ultimate analysis of what makes Mikhail Gorbachev tick, and of what gives Gorbachevism its momentum, depends a whole gamut of important papal decisions that bear directly on the welfare of his universal Church and the success of his papacy. Because the specific terrain for both men is the society of nations, the Pope must make that judgment of the Soviet leader in a geopolitical context that necessarily involves the vast world forces with which Gorbachev is either in collusion or in contention.