Site icon Fitzpatrick Informer

Soviet-Israeli cell wrote Reagan’s long-term strategy

UNITED STATES – NOVEMBER 01, 1985: President Ronald Reagan with Medal of Freedom winners Arms Negotiator Paul Nitze (C) and author Roberta Wohlstetter with husband economist Albert Wohlstetter (L). (Photo by Diana Walker/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images)

By Jeffrey Steinberg 
June 3, 1988 Anno Domini
EIR Feature

A tightly organized cell of suspected Soviet moles wrote the Reagan administra­tion’s “semi-official” long-term strategy for dealing with the U.S.S.R. and also played a major hand in drafting the disastrous Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty that a deluded President Reagan now hopes will earn him and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachov the Nobel Peace Prize .

As shocking as this may sound, Dr. Albert Wohlstetter and Dr. Fred Ikle, the two principal authors of the presidential report, Discriminate Deterrence, have been identified to this news service by highly reliable U.S. intelligence sources as prime suspects in a Soviet-Israeli “false flag” spy ring first exposed with the November 1985 arrest of Jonathan Jay Pollard and the December 1987 arrest of Shabtai Kalmanowitch.

On Feb. 19, 1988, Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward published a front-page story detailing the Pentagon and CIA’s futile search for “Mr. X,” the designation for a high-level intelligence community mole who was believed to be providing Pollard with top secret code numbers of classified military documents that Pollard, a counterterrorist analyst at a Naval Investigative Service facility in Suitland, Md., would then pilfer and pass on to Israeli and Soviet intelligence. Shabtai Kalmanowitch, a Russian-born Israeli multi-millionaire, soon to be tried in Israel as a KGB spy, is widely believed to have been one of the Israel-Soviet “back channels” through which the “Mr. X” loot was shared with Moscow.

Ronald Reagan at Claremont Synagogue (Photo by Tony Korody/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)

According to one Pentagon source, the elusive “Mr. X” is actually known to be an entire cell of shared Soviet-Israeli agents, rather than just one well-placed individual. While Woodward’s headline-grabbing revelations about “Mr. x” were aimed at blocking the Department of Justice from shutting down its Pollard inves­tigation altogether, under reported strong pressure from State Department chief counsel Abraham Sofaer and Secretary of State George Shultz himself, Pentagon and CIA officials have been reportedly aware that they are dealing with an “X Committee”, buried deep inside the American national security establishment.

One version of the “X Committee” list, reportedly passed from the office of the general counsel to the Secretary of Defense and on to the FBI early this year, contained such prominent Reagan administration figures as: Ikle, Richard Perle, Steven Bryen, Douglas Feith, Andy Mar­shall, Henry Rowen, and Frank Gaffney, Jr. All were, up until very recently, senior officials at the Pentagon, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimates Board.

For the past month, a team of EIR investigators has con­ducted an extensive background cross-check of these named individuals and others closely associated with them, such as Michael Ledeen, Roy Godson, and Neil Livingstone. This preliminary special report summarizes the findings to date.

Albert Wohlstetter recruits a net
Decades before there was Pollard and Kalmanowitch, Dr. Albert Wohlstetter had already established himself as one of America’s pre-eminent “nuclear strategists”—certainly one of the figures upon whom the early 1960s character “Dr.Strangelove” was based. First at the Rand Corporation and the University of Chicago, and later at his own consulting firm, Pan-Heuristics , Wohlstetter groomed literally scores of proteges for future sensitive government posts.

Using the Senate offices of the late Henry Jackson (D­-Wash.) and Clifford Case (R-N.J.) as stepping stones for placing his epigones into the Washington, D.C. policymak­ing circuit, Wohlstetter had succeeded, by the time the Rea­gan administration entered office, in placing his assets in sensitive and powerful positions at the Pentagon. Dr. Fred Ikle, a Wohlstetter protege from their days together at Rand, became the deputy secretary of defense. Richard Perle, who had come under Wohlstetter’s wing while still a student at Hollywood High School, and who survived a 1970 near­ arrest, reportedly for passing secrets to the Mossad while on Scoop Jackson’s staff, became President Reagan’s most trusted arms control advisor up until his departure from the Pentagon late last year. Perle was the actual author of the disastrous INF treaty proposal jumped on by Soviet boss Gorbachov at Reykjavik. The INF treaty, signed at last De­cember’s Washington summit, has done more in the short term to hasten the decoupling of Western Europe from the United States than any action ever taken by the Russians.

According to one former associate, Wohlstetter carefully avoided ever accepting a formal government post that would have cast him in the spotlight and subjected him to more rigorous security checks. Rather, he cut the seemingly con­tradictory figure of a big spender, purchasing lavish mansions in Los Angeles and Chicago, and hosting dinners with $200 bottles of wine at the most expensive restaurants for prospec­tive proteges.

Donald Trump’s handlers modelled his presidential campaign on Ronald Reagan’s, right down to the “Make America Great Again” meme.

All the while, Wohlstetter apparently went to great lengths to distance himself from his years of activity as a figure in the American communist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. According to several Wohlstetter contemporaries inter­viewed by EIR, while at City College, Wohlstetter was ac­tively linked to the Communist Left Opposition. That oppo­sition sprang up around the figure of Leon Trotsky following Trotsky’s ouster by Stalin, at the point that Stalin moved to decimate the “Trust” apparatus of “cosmopolitan commu­nists” whom he believed were too anxious to cut a deal with Western financier interests.

By 1983, Wohlstetter and his network had so penetrated the national security apparatus of the Reagan administration that the “father of America’s MAD strategy,” as Wohlstetter was known, was formally appointed—at the same time as Henry Kissinger—to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a post he retains today. While not exactly an operational assignment, membership on PFIAB entitles Wohlstetter to access some of America’s most important and operational intelligence secrets.

When the Reagan administration set out to define a long­-term strategy for confronting the Soviet threat going into the early decades of the 21st century, a “private” blue ribbon commission was empaneled by Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. The co-chairmen of the panel were Wohlstetter and lkle.

The final product of the Wohlstetter-Ikle Commission, once one grasps the implications of the “X Committee” authorship, was predictable. Released at a Pentagon press con­ference on Jan. 12 of this year, Discriminate Deterrence, a Report from the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strat­egy, made two particular policy pronouncements that were tantamount to treason.

First, the report stated categorically that the United States should formally remove its nuclear umbrella from its Euro­pean NATO allies, thus virtually assuring the Soviets of an unchallenged conventional military takeover of Western Eu­rope at any moment they might choose.

Reagan being presented with menorah by rabbinic reps. of American Friends of Chabad Lubavitch. (Photo by Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images)

Second, the report called for the abandonment of the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative by refocusing on the more narrow objective of a point defense of America’ s land­ based nuclear arsenal. By abandoning the overall doctrinal shift to Mutually Assured Survival based on a broad defense against all Soviet nuclear weapons, the report called for kill­ing the whole program while at the same time abandoning the postwar doctrine of deterrence by massive retaliation.

As if to remove any doubt as to the intention of the report, co-author Wohlstetter told an EIR journalist at the Pentagon press briefing, ”The SOl will eventually die of embarrass­ment [because] the notion that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear attack against the population of the United States is absurd.” Emphasizing that Soviet expansionist goals were “narrowly” focused on the Eurasian landmass, Wohlstetter went to the very heart of the Discriminate Deterrence policy by asking EIR, “Why should the U.S. risk self-annihilation for the sake of defending foreign soil?”

The consequences of the Wohlstetter report were pre­dictably devastating. Read as an abandonment of the entire postwar Western Alliance and a turning toward a go-it-alone Fortress America, the document triggered instant and violent reactions from among America’s staunchest European allies. Reagan administration efforts to distance itself from the re­port fell on deaf ears, as one European government after another began preparing to make its peace with a ravenous Moscow. If internal problems in the Warsaw Pact itself get in the way of Moscow’s long-term ambition to consolidate a ”Third Rome” empire, it will certainly not be through lack of effort by Wohlstetter and other suspected “X Committee” members who have delivered to Moscow all assistance pos­sible.

Exit mobile version