Word: soviet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...enough, but it only added to the council's bleak agenda, which was headed by the announcement, received in Tokyo the night before, that the U.S.S.R. had abruptly and unexpectedly declared war on Japan. Already, on the morning of Aug. 9, some of an estimated 1.6 million Soviet troops had attacked Japanese-held Manchuria...
With a little prodding, Milt Bearden will talk about the exploding camel. It was back in the late 1980s, when Bearden was the CIA field commander in Islamabad, Pakistan, training Afghan guerrillas in their anti-Soviet insurgency. Bearden, now retired, says he was a conscientious teacher, imparting military instruction but simultaneously making sure that his students knew the difference between acts of war and acts of terrorism or human-rights violations. He expressly prohibited indiscriminate "wide area" attacks. "I said, 'Never, never, never do car bombs,'" he recalls. Rueful pause. "I never said, 'Don't do a camel bomb.'" That...
Afghan hand Bearden, who later ran the CIA's Soviet branch and was censured for his role in the Aldrich Ames fiasco, insists that the agency must be willing to deal with shady characters and accept that they occasionally go bad. "You have to make it clear-cut that you have moral standards, and you yourself have to be unswerving in them," he says, citing his own refusal to allow government contacts in Sudan to engage in torture, even when it might have helped foil plots on his own life. But, he says, it is harder for CIA officers...
...Japanese did indeed drive the Westerners out of Asia and the Pacific. They had planned the grand strategy to establish self-sufficiency in the face of what they perceived as a Soviet threat. And they had carried out the blueprint. In 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt's Chief of Staff, Admiral William Leahy, was privately worried that Japan might "succeed in combining most of the Asiatic peoples against the whites." Such paranoia led to the internment of 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps; the fbi also kept close surveillance on alleged Japanese attempts to turn black Americans against...
...words provided no clear direction for his government. Though officials were eager for peace, few were willing to sue for it, certainly not with the U.S. Military factions were ready to stage assassinations or a coup if bureaucrats tried such a move. Japanese diplomats approached the Soviet Union, then neutral in the Pacific, seeking mediation and proffering an alliance. That intelligence caused concern in the U.S., already worried about the Soviets, so utterly triumphant over Germany. Thus, as Japan's peace seekers meandered, America's leaders pondered the obstacles to--and expediencies of--victory...