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.
“The Pentagon”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Document 2 of 2 AGAL Concatenated Database is not a very optimistic prospect. I would very much like to be wrong but I can draw no other conclusion at present. 272. Fedor Burlatskiy, LITERATURNAYA GAZETA political observer and CPSU Central Committee official (LITERATURNAYA GAZETA, 4 Jan 84) 273. It is impossible to deny that a serious turnabout occurred in U.S. geopolitics on the threshold of the eighties, or that the United States has completely rejected the very idea of detente and has embarked on the path of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. . . 274. It is well known that this shift is basically linked with the arrival of President Reagan in the White House, a man with extremely reactionary views representing the interests of the "iron triangle"-the military business, the Pentagon, and the militarist wing in the U.S. Congress. . . . 275. [Whether the present militarist course in the United States is irreversible] is a very complicated question. Much depends on whether R. Reagan manages to win the forthcoming U.S. election in the fall of 1984. Much also depends on the correlation of forces within the framework of the U.S. economic and political elite and on public opinion in that country. 276. R. Reagan is hastening to consolidate the basic foundations of militarism for the future. He is inflating the military budget and planning programs for new types of weapons. Nonetheless, political forces in the United States and the U.S. people still have not had their final say. I am convinced that ordinary people in the United States fear thermonuclear war no less than other people in the world. 277. TASS report on President Reagan's State of the Union Address (TASS, 26 Jan 84) 278. President Ronald Reagan made a traditional "State of the Union" address to a joint meeting of the two houses of Congress. His statement, made in a spirit of electioneering, was an attempt to picture in a favorable light the results of his three-year rule and justify his policy, marked by extreme aggressiveness in the international field and total disregard for the needs of the common people in the home policy field. 279. 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
Not linked to a story yet.
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.