Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency report, dated 3 February 1984, reviews how Soviet leaders, well-connected commentators and routine media treated President Reagan from November 1980 onward. It finds that Moscow twice softened its line: once after the 1980 election and again when Andropov came to power. After the Korean airliner was shot down, Soviet treatment of Reagan became the most abusive in years. Attached excerpts include a Yakovlev article claiming Reagan believes in flying saucers.
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## UNCLASSIFIED FOUO Document 2 of 2 AGAL Concatenated Database position indicates one thing: The United States does not want to look for a mutually acceptable accord with the Soviet Union and thereby deliberately dooms the Geneva talks to failure. . . . 96. We have believed and still believe that summit meetings have special significance to resolving complicated problems. This determines our serious approach to them. 97. For us this is not a matter of a political or a propaganda game. A meeting between the leaders of the USSR and the United States aimed at finding mutually acceptable solutions to urgent problems and at developing relations between our countries, would be useful both to the Soviet Union and to the United States of America, to Europe, and to the whole world. 98. But when the U.S. President makes the meeting conditional on the Soviet Union's consent to the patently unacceptable solution to the problem of nuclear armaments in Europe, proposed by him, this by no means testifies to the seriousness of the American leadership's approach to the whole of this issue. This can only be regretted. 99. Andropov, PRAVDA interview (PRAVDA, 27 Mar 83) 100. The President pretends that almost a thousand medium-range nuclear systems of the United States and its NATO allies do not ostensibly exist in the zone of Europe, and that it is unknown to him that NATO has a 1.5-1 advantage over the USSR in the aggregate number of nuclear warheads on those systems. 101. The President not only keeps silent about all that. He tells a deliberate untruth [on govorit zavedomuyu nepravdu], asserting that the Soviet Union does not observe its own unilateral moratorium on the deployment of medium-range missiles. . . . 102. The incumbent U.S. Administration continues to tread an extremely perilous path. The issues of war and peace must not be treated so flippantly. All attempts at achieving military superiority over the USSR are futile. . . . It is time they stopped devising one option after another in search of the best ways of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it. Engaging in this is not just irresponsible, it is insane. 103. Andropov, speech to CPSU Central Committee plenum (PRAVDA, 16 Jun 83) 104. This period is marked by a confrontation, unprecedented in the entire post-war period by its intensity and sharpness, of two diametrically opposite world outlooks, two political courses--socialism and imperialism. A struggle is going on for the
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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. 36 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.