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 intervention in Lebanon. 430. TASS commentary (TASS 23 May 84) 431. As a result of these [Soviet] measures, the security of the United States has diminished, of course. However, the Reagan Administration's spokesmen, who at one time deceived the U.S. people in the question of the correlation of the military power of the USSR and the USA with a view to stepping up the arms race without hindrance, are now misleading their own population by belittling the importance of Soviet military countermeasures--so as to conceal the dangerous consequences of the deployment of U.S. missiles in West Europe. . . . 432. The Pentagon spokesmen nevertheless note that the travel time of the missiles on new Soviet submarines to targets in the United States has decreased from 20-25 minutes to 5-7 minutes. This alone already means that Reagan's calculations to make the Russians go to sleep with a thought that the United States will deliver a nuclear strike against them, have failed. Such plans of Washington are unrealistic. Retaliation for an aggression is inevitable. ## 433. Burlatskiy (Literaturnaya Gazeta, 23 May 84) 434. During my recent trip to the United States, I gained the impression that the political pendulum, which for four years now has been pushing the country's present leadership solely in the direction of militarism and adventurism, has reached its culmination point. The United States has undertaken open, armed interference in Lebanon, mined the ports in Nicaragua, and begun implementing the "Star Wars" program. 435. All this has frightened Americans. Not only the public, but Congress as well, seem to have realized clearly for the first time that the President really is capable of involving the United States in a war--a "small one" to start with, like the one in Vietnam, and then, by way of escalation, possibly even a large one. . . . 436. The President has spent billions of dollars on consolidating U.S. security. As a result of this, however, the country's security has weakened while the threat of war has increased. He has repeatedly resorted to military force in different parts of the globe. And he has suffered one defeat after another, as was clearly evidenced by events in Lebanon. The intoxication of the "victory" over tiny Grenada failed to capture the imagination of serious and thinking people in the United States. The President proclaimed the resumption of the arms limitation talks process. But he wrecked Geneva and has turned out to be the only U.S. leader whose term in office did not contain the conclusion of a single agreement in this
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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.