The World Was Going Our Way by Christopher Andrew Read Free Book Online

from the shift in the balance of power at the United Nations during the 1960s. With the rapid increase in newly independent states, the West lost its previous majority in the General Assembly. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) tended increasingly to vote with the Soviet bloc rather than the West, some of whose leading states were tainted by their imperial past. At the NAM conference which met at Belgrade in July 1969, the final communiqué pledged ‘support for the heroic people of Vietnam’ who were resisting American aggression, but made no significant mention of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in the previous year. 36 For the remainder of the Cold War, the KGB saw the Non-Aligned Movement as ‘our natural allies’. ‘The essential trend of their activities’, declared the head of the First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate (FCD), Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kryuchkov, in 1984, ‘is anti-imperialist.’ 37
     
     
    The United States’ defeat in Vietnam reinforced the Centre’s confidence in its Third World strategy. The unprecedented TV coverage from Vietnam brought the horrors of war into the living rooms of Middle America and much of the world. It also gave dramatic global publicity to the anti-war movement in the United States, whose daily refrain, ‘Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?’, helped to persuade President Lyndon B. Johnson not to run for re-election in 1968. Both Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, believed - wrongly - that an international Communist conspiracy lay behind American anti-war protest, particularly on university campuses. Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), later testified that, ‘President Johnson was after this all the time.’ So was Nixon. Though sceptical about the White House’s conspiracy theories, Helms began operation CHAOS to discover the real extent of foreign influence on domestic dissent. In the course of the operation, the Agency began to spy illegally on American campus radicals. As Helms acknowledged: ‘Should anyone learn of [CHAOS’s] existence, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.’ Though the negative findings of CHAOS failed to convince either Johnson or Nixon, it did lasting damage to the reputation of the CIA when the operation was revealed in the mid-1970s and provided further ammunition for KGB ‘active measures’. 38
     
     
    Only a fortnight before the final American withdrawal from Saigon on 30 April 1975, Andropov still found it difficult to credit that the United States had really been defeated. He told a specially convened meeting on Vietnam in the FCD’s Yasenevo headquarters: Do you remember the Korean War and the course of its development? Then too the North Korean troops had occupied almost the whole territory of South Korea . . . Then the Americans organized a major landing operation in the rear of the North Koreans, cutting off and devastating the main section of the North Korean army. In a matter of days the course of the war had changed. Now an extremely similar situation is taking shape. All the forces of North Vietnam have been sent to the south, to help the patriots. To all intents and purposes North Vietnam is defenceless. If the Americans undertake something similar to the Korean manoeuvre, then things may take a bad turn . . . To all intents and purposes the road to [Hanoi] is open.
     
     
     
    Not till Andropov saw the extraordinary TV pictures a fortnight later of Americans and some of their South Vietnamese allies being hurriedly rescued by helicopter from the roof of the US embassy as the Communist Vietcong made a triumphal entry into Saigon did he accept that the United States had really been defeated. 39
     
     
    The unprecedented humiliation of the United States at the end of a war which had divided its society as no other conflict had done since the Civil War seemed to demonstrate the ability of a Third World national liberation movement, inspired by