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Intel - History
Cold War

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• Ten Points Declaration
• Nehru's Speech to Bandung is the essence of Non-Alignment Principles
• Sukarno's Speech to Bandung

• Ten Points Declaration
• Nehru's Speech to Bandung is the essence of Non-Alignment Principles
• Sukarno's Speech to Bandung

• The 1960 U-2 incident occurred during the Cold War on May 1, 1960 when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union.
• At first, the United States government denied the plane's purpose and mission, but was forced to admit its role as a covert surveillance aircraft when the Soviet government produced its remains (largely intact) and surviving pilot, Gary Powers.

• Flexible response was a defense strategy implemented by John F. Kennedy in 1961 to address the Kennedy administration's skepticism of Dwight Eisenhower's New Look and its policy of Massive Retaliation.

• Flexible response calls for mutual deterrence at strategic, tactical, and conventional levels, giving the United States the capability to respond to aggression across the spectrum of warfare, not limited only to nuclear arms. 

•  The transcripts of secret conversations that may have changed history are being published by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. They show that from the time of his first secret trip to China in 1971, through his period as Secretary of State for the Nixon and Ford administrations, Sir Henry Kissinger had offered Mao Zedong's China that the U.S. would provide satellite data on Soviet nuclear deployments, telling the Chinese leadership that the Soviets were trying to get the U.S. to join with them in knocking out China's emergent nuclear technology and otherwise destroy their country.
• "We would be prepared, at your request, through whatever sources you wish, to give you whatever information we have about the disposition of Soviet forces," Kissinger old Huang Hua, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations in 1971. This reference was to Soviet forces deployed during the war that year between India and Pakistan, where Kissinger had risked a military confrontation with the Soviets, while offering the Soviets India as part of their sphere of influence, at the same time that he was opening the door to China to pit it against the Soviet Union in a geopolitical game of thermonuclear brinksmanship.
• Kissinger further offered a web of intelligence sharing in meetings with Chinese leaders, including Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Chou En-lai, in November 1973. "There are no secrets with [you about] the Soviet Union," Kissinger told the two Chinese leaders. "There is nothing we are doing with the Soviet Union that you do not know."
• Briefing Chou on the Soviets on Nov. 10, 1973, Kissinger said it was in the interests of the United States to prevent a Soviet nuclear attack on China, according to a transcript of the conversation: "They want us to accept the desirability of destroying China's nuclear capability."

• And, three days later, Kissinger told the premier, according to the transcript: "Any help we would give you in our mutual interest should be in a form that is not easily recognizable. With respect to missile launches, we have a very good system of satellites, which give us early warning.
• "The problem is to get that to you rapidly. We would be prepared to establish a hot line between our satellites and Beijing by which we could transmit information to you in a matter of minutes."
• Kissinger explained that the information would go first to Washington, then to Beijing, through means that "would not attract attention."
• However, while playing this geopolitical triangular game between Russia, China, and the U.S. to keep Eurasia at Hobbe, Kissinger was making outrageous assessments about those other nation's leaders whom he thought he was diddling with his combined "China card" and "detente" policies (including his 1972 SALT and ABM Treaty negotiations). He told British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan in 1974: "As everyone knows, the Soviet leaders belong to the most unpleasant group one can deal with.
• Their capacity to lie on matters of common knowledge is stupendous." And, a document from 1976 quotes Kissinger as saying to President Ford about the Chinese leadership: "They are cold, pragmatic bastards." Perhaps he meant both comments as a sort of back-handed praise.
• UPI, "Kissinger Offered China Satellite Data"
• AP, "Kissinger Offered China Help"
• Washington Times, "Kissinger Offered Chinese Tips on Soviet Nukes in '71,"
• Washington Post, "Kissinger Offered China Satellite Data in 1973, Papers Show," Jan. 10, 1999.

• "An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries." — Zbigniew Brzezinski
• In the long run there may even be targets of opportunity for the West created by ferment within the crescent. Islam is undoubtedly compatible with socialism, but it is inimical to atheistic Communism. The Soviet Union is already the world's fifth largest Muslim nation. By the year 2000, the huge Islamic populations in the border republics may outnumber Russia's now dominant Slavs. From Islamic democracies on Russia's southern tier, a zealous Koranic evangelism might sweep across the border into these politically repressed Soviet states, creating problems for the Kremlin.

• Whatever the solution, there is a clear need for the U.S. to recapture what Kissinger calls "the geopolitical momentum." That more than anything else will help maintain order in the crescent of crisis.
• Time Magazine, January 15, 1979