scholarly journals The soviet school system in Central Intelligence Agency estimates at the initial stage of the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 192-197
Author(s):  
Zaur Imalverdi oglu Mamedov
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
School System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Soviet School ◽  
Initial Stage ◽  
Comprehensive Knowledge ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The paper is devoted to the analysis by the Central Intelligence Agency of the USSR school system. The US was in dire need of information about its new adversary. The situation was aggravated by the closed nature of the Soviet state and the absence of a long continuous tradition of intelligence activities of American intelligence. The president and other government bodies wanted to have comprehensive knowledge of any processes and phenomena in the world. US intelligence should have been able to solve this problem. In this regard, the first stage of the Cold War for the CIA was largely due to an analysis of official and semi-official sources, as well as the development of various strategies. In order to find out about various areas of the life in the USSR, analysts extracted information from Soviet scientific literature, press, radio, legislation and interrogations of former German prisoners. The National Assessment Bureau, led by William Langer and Sherman Kent, compiled reports on Soviet military capabilities, industry, agriculture, the political system, etc. The Soviet school system was considered by American intelligence specialists in the framework of the military and economic potential of the enemy, as well as the strategy of psychological warfare. The paper analyzes the reports concerning the educational system in the USSR in the aspect of school education, its strengths and weaknesses. The results allow us to conclude that the information about the Soviet school system contributed to the formation of the foreign policy and domestic policy of the United States.

Cinema and the Cultural Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
American Hegemony ◽  
East And Southeast Asia ◽  
Institutional Linkages ◽  
The Cold War

This book explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. The book adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. The book reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. The book elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. The book demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. This book reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.

From the Cold War to the Cruelty of Violence: Jean Franco's Critical Trajectory from The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City to Cruel Modernity

PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-710
Author(s):  
Arturo Arias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Lettered City ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cuban Revolution Generated a New Communist Paranoia in the United States. Interest in Latin America Grew Dramatically after Castro's rise to power in 1959 and was partly responsible for the explosive growth in the number of scholars specializing in hemispheric issues during the 1960s. Latin Americans, in turn, saw this phase of the Cold War as a furthering of imperial aggression by the United States. The Eisenhower administration's authoritarian diplomatic maneuvers to isolate Guatemala by accusing the country's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz (1950-54), of being a communist and by pressuring members of the Organization of American States to do likewise had already alarmed intellectuals and artists in Latin America five years before. On 17 June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas and a band of a few hundred mercenaries invaded the country from Honduras with logistical support from the Central Intelligence Agency in an operation code-named PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. By 1 July 1954 the so-called Movement of National Liberation had taken over Guatemala. Angela Fillingim's research evidences how the United States officially viewed Guatemala as “Pre-Western,” according to “pre-established criteria,” because the Latin American country had failed to eliminate its indigenous population (5-6). Implicitly, the model was that of the nineteenth-century American West. As a solution, the State Department proposed “finishing the Conquest.”

The Cultural Cold War

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Iber
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cultural Cold War ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each sought to portray their way of organizing society—liberal democracy or Communism, respectively—as materially and morally superior. In their bids for global leadership, each sponsored “front” groups that defended their priorities and values to audiences around the world. These campaigns frequently enrolled artists and intellectuals, whose lives, works, and prestige could be built up, torn down, exploited, or enhanced through their participation in these groups. Alongside overt diplomatic efforts, the United States funded a number of organizations secretly through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These efforts are often described as belonging to the “Cultural Cold War,” although the programs in fact supported overlapping networks that did anti-Communist work among labor unions, students, and others in addition to artists and intellectuals. The major CIA-sponsored group of intellectuals was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, established in 1950, and the “freedom” in its name was the major concept deployed by United States–aligned propagandists, to emphasize their differences from totalitarianism. The Cultural Cold War, as a program of psychological warfare conducted by the US government, grew out of the intersecting experiences of the left in the 1930s and the security apparatus of the United States at the dawn of the Cold War. The covert nature of the programs allowed them to evade scrutiny from the US Congress, and therefore to engage in activities that might otherwise have been stopped: working with people with radical political biographies or who still identified as “socialists,” or sponsoring avant-garde art, such as abstract expressionist painting. The programs spanned the globe, and grew in scope and ambition until their exposure in 1967. Subsequently, the United States has developed other mechanisms, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, to promote organizations within civil society that support its interests.

“The World Was Not Turning in Their Direction”: The United States and the Decolonization of Angola

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Tiago Moreira de Sá
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
National Union ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Internal Context

In the mid-1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union decided to export the Cold War to Angola at levels that were unprecedented on the African continent. In the case of the United States, this led to immense support for local allies—the National Liberation Front of Angola and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola—in the form of many tons of heavy weaponry, millions of dollars, and the use of mercenaries and even paramilitary operatives of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. This article explains U.S. actions in Angola from 1974 to 1976 against the backdrop of the Cold War, highlighting the decision-making process in Washington, the international context, the internal context, and the actions of both superpowers.

Tibet's Cold War: The CIA and the Chushi Gangdrug Resistance, 1956–1974

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 102-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carole McGranahan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Anthropological Literature ◽  
Resistance Forces ◽  
Guerrilla Movement

This article analyzes the Chushi Gangdrug Tibetan resistance as narrated primarily by Tibetan veterans. The article recounts the origins of the Tibetan resistance forces, their relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, their eventual laying down of arms in 1974, and their legacy in the present-day exile community. Analyses of the Tibetan resistance and the guerrilla war must take account of cultural as well as political and historical factors. The war, pitting a voluntary Tibetan guerrilla movement against the Chinese Communist army, had implications well beyond Tibet and China. India, Nepal, and the United States all became involved. In addition to presenting the perspectives of the soldiers alongside those of the relevant states, the article situates its discussion within the latest anthropological literature on international relations and the Cold War.

An unfinished battle: George C. Marshall and intelligence in the early Cold War

2021 ◽  
pp. 096834452110179
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ramos
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Truman Administration ◽  
Intelligence Community ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
Covert Action ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

This article deals with the influence of Gen. George C. Marshall on the foundation of the US intelligence community after the Second World War. It argues that his uneven achievements demonstrate how the ceaseless wrangling within the Truman administration undermined the crafting of a coherent intelligence policy. Despite his bureaucratic skills and prominent positions, Marshall struggled to achieve his ends on matters like signals intelligence, covert action, or relations between the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. Yet he crafted an enduring vision of how intelligence should supplement US national security policy that remained potent throughout the Cold War and beyond.

Labor’s Cold Warriors: The American Federation of Labor and “Free Trade Unionism” in Cold War Japan

2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 207-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Gerteis
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
United States Government ◽  
American Federation Of Labor ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
American Federation

AbstractDuring the 1950s, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) led a global covert attempt to suppress left-led labor movements in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, West Africa, Central and South America, and East Asia. American union leaders argued that to survive the Cold War, they had to demonstrate to the United States government that organized labor was not part-and-parcel with Soviet communism. The AFL’s global mission was placed in care of Jay Lovestone, a founding member of the American Communist Party in 1921 and survivor of decades of splits and internecine battles over allegiance to one faction or another in Soviet politics before turning anti-Communist and developing a secret relation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) after World War II. Lovestone’s idea was that the AFL could prove its loyalty by helping to root out Communists from what he perceived to be a global labor movement dominated by the Soviet Union. He was the CIA’s favorite Communist turned anti-Communist.

The Soviet Factor in the US-China Military-Technical Cooperation during the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 12-47
Author(s):  
Yinan Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Technical Cooperation ◽  
Arms Sales ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

The development of the PRC’s armed forces included three phases when their modernization was carried out through an active introduction of foreign weapons and technologies. The first and the last of these phases (from 1949 to 1961, and from 1992 till present) received wide attention in both Chinese and Western academic literature, whereas the second one — from 1978 to 1989 —when the PRC actively purchased weapons and technologies from the Western countries remains somewhat understudied. This paper is intended to partially fill this gap. The author examines the logic of the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States in the context of complex interactions within the United States — the USSR — China strategic triangle in the last years of the Cold War. The first section covers early contacts between the PRC and the United States in the security field — from the visit of R. Nixon to China till the inauguration of R. Reagan. The author shows that during this period Washington clearly subordinated the US-Chinese cooperation to the development of the US-Soviet relations out of fear to damage the fragile process of detente. The second section focuses on the evolution of the R. Reagan administration’s approaches regarding arms sales to China in the context of a new round of the Cold War. The Soviet factor significantly influenced the development of the US-Chinese military-technical cooperation during that period, which for both parties acquired not only practical, but, most importantly, political importance. It was their mutual desire to undermine strategic positions of the USSR that allowed these two countries to overcome successfully tensions over the US arms sales to Taiwan. However, this dependence of the US-China military-technical cooperation on the Soviet factor had its downside. As the third section shows, with the Soviet threat fading away, the main incentives for the military-technical cooperation between the PRC and the United States also disappeared. As a result, after the Tiananmen Square protests, this cooperation completely ceased. Thus, the author concludes that the US arms sales to China from the very beginning were conditioned by the dynamics of the Soviet-American relations and Beijing’s willingness to play an active role in the policy of containment. In that regard, the very fact of the US arms sales to China was more important than its practical effect, i.e. this cooperation was of political nature, rather than military one.

Dr. Radan Angelov Sarafov and his sacrifice for democracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 229-247
Author(s):  
Ilko Drenkov
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
World War ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The People ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Public Audience ◽  
The Cold War

Dr. Radan Sarafov (1908-1968) lived actively but his life is still relatively unknown to the Bulgarian academic and public audience. He was a strong character with an ulti-mate and conscious commitment to democratic Bulgaria. Dr. Sarafov was chosen by IMRO (Inner Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) to represent the idea of coop-eration with Anglo-American politics prior to the Second World War. Dr. Sarafov studied medicine in France, specialized in the Sorbonne, and was recruited by Colonel Ross for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), remaining undisclosed after the with-drawal of the British legation in 1941. After World War II, he continued to work for foreign intelligence and expanded the spectrum of cooperation with both France and the United States. After WWII, Sarafov could not conform to the reign of the communist regime in Bulgaria. He made a connection with the Anglo-American intelligence ser-vices and was cooperating with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for more than a decade. Sarafov was caught in 1968 and convicted by the Committee for State Securi-ty (CSS) in Bulgaria. The detailed review of the past events and processes through personal drama and commitment reveals the disastrous core of the communist regime. The acknowledgment of the people who sacrificed their lives in the name of democrat-ic values is always beneficial for understanding the division and contradictions from the time of the Cold War.

The Clinton Administration and Africa: White House Involvement and the Foreign Affairs Bureaucracies

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-13
Author(s):  
John F. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Clinton Administration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
White House ◽  
Continuity And Change ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

Both continuity and change capture the evolving role of the Clinton White House in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Elements of continuity are reflected in a familiar pattern of relationships between the White House and the principal foreign policy bureaucracies, most notably the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense (Pentagon), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and more recently the U.S. Department of Commerce. As cogently argued in Peter J. Schraeder’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the Cold War era, the White House has tended to take charge of U.S. African policies only in those relatively rare situations perceived as crises by the president and his closest advisors. In other, more routine situations—the hallmark of the myriad of U.S. African relations—the main foreign policy bureaucracies have been at the forefront of policy formulation, and “bureaucratic dominance” of the policymaking process has prevailed. Much the same pattern is visible in the Clinton administration, with the exception of President Clinton’s trip to Africa in 1998. Until that time, events in Somalia in 1993 served as the only true African crisis of the administration that was capable of focusing the ongoing attention of President Clinton and his closest advisors. Given that the United States is now disengaged from most African crises, Africa has remained a “backwater” for the White House and the wider foreign policymaking establishment.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document