Interdoc Reconfigures: The 1970s and Détente

Abstract

In October 1974 Cees van den Heuvel went to Moscow. It was to be the first of several trips to capitals in Eastern Europe, each time involving visits to institutes of international affairs, foreign policy think tanks, and foreign ministries. Through the decade he established strong links in Poland and the Soviet Union in particular. He travelled alone and arranged all the details himself. These were fact-finding missions, to learn more about communist perceptions of the West in a period when the diplomatic and security negotiations of detente were in full swing. East and West were jousting for position at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Helsinki, the Mutual Balanced Force Reductions negotiations in Vienna, and the Washington-Moscow Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. Having spent the previous decade or more warning and instructing others via SOEV, the OWI, and Interdoc on the intricacies of East-West contacts, Van den Heuvel now wanted to see for himself. Geyer would no doubt have approved. The Dutchman’s trips east lay at the centre of an Interdoc that was changing with the times — but equally determined to fulfil its mission. “What is the use of our military and diplomatic assumptions if we don’t understand the Soviet perception of strategic and political reality?” he had written in 1967: “This is first of all a psychological question.”2 Recent research has begun to focus more on the role of private groups in the detente process, particularly the way they pursued a human rights agenda before Western governments officially took up this cause.3