1/7/1994
FREE AGENT: The Unseen War 1941-1991. Buy Brian Crozier. Harper Collins. 314 pages. $30. By Arnold Beichman As he toured the United States in the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled that whenever something important needed to be done ordinary Americans got together and did it without, as in France or Britain, depending on government or the nobility to do it for them. One of the best illustrations of this do-it-yourself propensity in the democracies was the long war against communism successfully conducted by non-governmental groups like the American Federation of Labor's Free Trade Union Committee to frustrate Moscow's constant campaign of labor subversion. In Britain, the best argument for Tocqueville's observation is Brian Crozier, who demonstrated the possibilities of "privatization" of intelligence activity without involving the taxpayer. The minimal costs of Mr. Crozier's counter-intelligence activities were met by men like Sir James Goldsmith, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Scaife and others like them who understood what the Cold War was all about. In fact when Mr. Crozier's political enemies like Richard Barnet of the Institute for Policy Studies tried to bankrupt him by costly libel suits it was Sir James's financial support which saved him. I've known Mr. Crozier as a British journalist for some four decades and have long admired his writings especially in this magazine as successor to James Burnham. However, it's obvious I really didn't know Mr. Crozier or the breath-taking range of his anti-communist exercises. His memoirs reveal his involvements (but never entanglements; he remained always his own man) during the cold war with Western intelligence agencies, particularly those of Britain and the U.S. There seems to be no question as to the authenticity of most of his revelations. There's an old saying in the intelligence game, "Those who know, don't talk and those who talk, don't know." Now there's a third category: Mr. Crozier knows and does talk. Obviously Mr. Crozier felt that with the fall of the Soviet empire, he could, without endangering the safety of the realm or the permanent interests of the state, talk about his activities as a "free agent," this term meaning that he sometimes had to oppose the pro-Soviet appeasement policies of his own and other governments. In a sense what Mr. Crozier had introduced the concept of "competitive analysis" into intelligence with the official agencies like the CIA and MI6, a concept which later during the Ford Administration inspired the Team B project chaired by Professor Richard Pipes. The running theme of Mr. Crozier's memoirs of his war against Moscow is that the intelligence agencies of the U.S. and Britain at best weren't up to the job and at worst were colonized either by Soviet sympathizers or else by left liberals who regarded the Cold War as an undemocratic aberration. He is particularly caustic about Admiral Stansfield Turner, CIA director under President Carter, who, he says, in 1977 fired some 400 Soviet experts, "a catastrophic decision [which] completed the self-emasculation of American intelligence." In fact, Turner's action was in keeping with what Mr. Crozier calls "the liberal ethos within the Agency," perhaps even better exemplified by the frequently puzzling activities of a CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and the sensational emasculating exposes of the CIA by one of its own top executives, Thomas Braden. Whether as a result of "liberal ethos" or idiotic opportunism on the part of the State Department, Mr. Crozier accuses the department of seeking to conceal evidence of "the key role of the Soviet Union and its satellites in the recruiting, training and financing of terrorist gangs." The two heroes in Mr. Crozier's intriguing memoir are President Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, especially the latter with whom he enjoyed innumerable colloquies during crises involving Soviet imperialism. Mr. Crozier makes us realize that were it not for the miraculous Reagan-Thatcher conjuncture in the 1980s, the intensification of the Soviet crisis and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union might never have happened. There is enough proof in Mr. Crozier's highly informative report to support this "what-if" scenario: Quite likely there would still be a Soviet Union had Jimmy Carter been re-elected in 1980 and a Labourite Neil Kinnock chosen as British Prime Minister. Supported by a pro-Soviet German Ostpolitik and a French socialist President (whose first Cabinet included two Communists), Mikhail Gorbachev could well have engineered a bailout funded by the West to salvage his decomposing economy. Anti-anti-communism rode high during the Carter years (let it not be forgotten that then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance once said that "Leonid Brezhnev is a man who shares our dreams and aspirations"). It was left to the "happy few" to fight the enemy, people like Brian Crozier who knew the skill of organization as well as the art of polemic. When I referred earlier to "the authenticity of most of his revelations," I was mindful of a statement made by Mr. Crozier about a man we both know, Herbert E. Meyer, formerly vice-chairman of the CIA National Intelligence Council. Mr. Crozier describes a 1984 analytical paper prepared and sent by the "hawkish" (to use Mr. Crozier's adjective) Mr. Meyer to CIA Director William E. Casey arguing that the former Soviet Union was in a terminal phase of decay. Mr. Crozier says that Mr. Meyer's paper recommended that "the U.S. should do nothing to try to weaken the regime still further, still less to bring it down." I never saw this paper, Mr. Crozier did. I phoned Mr. Meyer, now a businessman in the state of Washington, and asked him whether he had made such a do-nothing recommendation. Absolutely not, he said. He was an analyst not a policy-maker and nothing in his still classified paper suggested let alone recommended, said Mr. Meyer, that the Reagan administration ought to do nothing to hasten the fall of the Soviet empire. Here we have a troubling contradiction about the contents of a CIA paper. None of this is crucial to the thrust of Mr. Crozier's narrative. In years to come the story of this free agent will be read as an integral part of the real history of what happened in the Cold War years not the fictional accounts by the left-liberal revisionists who, posing as historians, are telling us that America lost the Cold War. Mr. Crozier is the living, documented refutation of such unsavory myth-making. --end-- Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution Research Fellow and a Washington Times columnist, is the author of "Anti-American Myths: Their Causes and Consequences." (Transaction.) -------------------------------------------------- The Vance quote is from Natl Review, XLIV:3, 2/17/92, p. 45.