Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency report, dated 1 June 1984 and marked unclassified for official use only, reviews how Soviet leaders and media treated President Reagan from November 1980 through May 1984. It finds that Moscow twice moderated its rhetoric to test prospects for better relations, and that attacks became the most abusive in two decades after the South Korean airliner shootdown. The report compiles authoritative Soviet statements and midlevel and routine media commentary as a baseline for analysts.
“The Pentagon”4 pages
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## UNCLASSIFIED FOUO Document 1 of 2 AGAL Concatenated Database Page 48 374. The foreign policy section of the President's State of the Union address was notable for demagogy and hypocrisy. The President was trying to justify his militaristic policy by claiming that "the United States is safer . . . and more secure in 1984 than before", albeit, in real fact, the threat to general security, including to the security of the United States itself, has increased. And the leaders of the United States bear all responsibility for such a turn of events. 375. Yuriy Kornilov, TASS commentator (TASS, 30 Jan 84) 376. The U.S. Administration speaks a great deal about "the need of a dialogue." Yet, it deadlocks, disrupts, and blocks all the talks on the problems of curbing the arms race. . . . 377. Our hands are clean, and we have never been aggressors, U.S. President R. Reagan pointed out recently at the Congress in the State of the Union message. This is an obvious lie. In the past six years alone the U.S. Administration resorted to armed actions or the threat of force against other states 38 times. . . . 378. The thing is that from whatever point of view we assess the situation, it is more than obvious: The allegedly "peacemaking" tricks of Reagan and his team, brought about by the purely time-serving considerations, have nothing to do with the real foreign policy pursued by Washington, which is based today, the same as before, on the desire to make history reverse its course, to reshape the political map of the world. 379. Eduard Mnatsakanov, Soviet television political observer (Soviet television, 29 Feb 84) 380. It looks as though Reagan's people are working on preparations for . . . a stunning finale [to the election campaign], but the plans for this are stunningly primitive: simply turn things upside down, call black white and vice versa. And so much chauvinist demagogy is being poured over millions of Americans that it makes one recall the times of German history at the beginning of the thirties. 381. Bovin (Czechoslovak domestic radio, 2 Mar 84) 382. During his entire three and a half years in the White House Reagan spoiled practically everything he could. But now something rather peculiar is beginning to happen. Today Reagan is preparing himself for a new election and has realized the necessity of altering his image. No longer does he want to be seen as a warmonger. The fact is that the words now being delivered by the U.S. President do not correspond to his actions. My own impression, however, is that the Americans are not ready for such a dialogue and that so
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 56 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.