Word: sovietism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three times last week, the long black Cadillac limousine glided into the underground garage beneath the State Department; three times Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin slipped into a private elevator and rode up to the seventh-floor office of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. After each meeting, both diplomats avoided reporters' questions. There had already been far too much threatening and ill-considered rhetoric about the problem that confronted them: the controversial role of Soviet combat troops in Cuba...
Just a week earlier, Vance had publicly declared that the newly reported existence of a Soviet brigade in Cuba was "a very serious matter," and that he would "not be satisfied with maintenance of the status quo." After several days of silence, the Soviets produced an unyielding answer. Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party's official newspaper, declared that the Russian forces in Cuba were there solely for training purposes, had been training the Cuban army for 17 years, and had changed in neither size nor function during that entire period. Furthermore, said Pravda, the Soviet troops had "an inalienable...
Though Vance would disclose no details of his talks with Dobrynin, it was apparent that the Secretary of State was trying to be conciliatory. Even while the Senate continued to reverberate with demands for a Soviet withdrawal, State Department officials began suggesting that some face-saving accommodation could be found. Perhaps the Soviets could disperse their brigade, or simply pledge that it had no offensive purpose...
What was most perplexing about the whole affair was the number of questions that remained unanswered. Was there really a buildup of Soviet forces in Cuba? If so, since when, and by how much? What exactly was the Soviet brigade doing in Cuba? Was it merely training Cubans, or did it have a combat role? Did its presence represent a Soviet gesture to support Castro's maintenance of 40,000 Cuban soldiers in Africa? Was it guarding Soviet information-gathering installations that eavesdropped on the U.S.? And if U.S. intelligence did not know the answers...
...facts known for certain was that the Russian force, 2,600 to 2,800 strong, was on duty in Cuba. Years ago U.S. intelligence began to pick up references to the Soviet force as a brigade, but officials who received that information attached little importance to it. Last spring, worried about Cuban influence in Nicaragua and the Caribbean, Zbigniew Brzezinski's National Security Council asked U.S. intelligence agencies to re-evaluate the Soviet role in Cuba. As late as mid-July, Defense Secretary Harold Brown assured Senator Frank Church of the Foreign Relations Committee that this Soviet role...