WHO DROPPED THE SWORD OF STALINGRAD?

This article describes a US initiative to provide intelligence to Iran in 1979, as radical Islamists were becoming increasingly powerful there and tensions were escalating with the United States. This initiative began in May 1979, when Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and other Iranian officials asked US embassy personnel for information on ethnically based uprisings that threatened the new Islamic regime. It culminated when a CIA officer gave two briefings in mid-October warning Iran's leaders that Iraq was making preparations for a possible invasion of Iran. It ended abruptly in November 1979, when radical Islamist students seized the US embassy in Tehran. Iran's leaders did not heed the US warning and were entirely unprepared for the Iraqi invasion of September 1980, which had a devastating impact. In mid-October 1979, a CIA officer gave two briefings in Tehran to top officials in the government of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan. The main themes of these briefings were that Iraq was making preparations for a possible invasion of Iran and that Iran could use a US-built electronic surveillance system to monitor and counter these preparations. These briefings were the culmination of months of discussion between the two governments about sharing intelligence on matters of mutual interest. This nascent intelligence exchange was cut short by the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran by radical Islamist students on November 4, 1979, which severely disrupted US-Iran relations and led Bazargan to resign. The Bazargan government did not inform its successor of the US warning. Iraq did, indeed, invade Iran in September 1980, starting an eight-year war that devastated both countries and transformed the region. This article explains the events that led up to these briefings and the details of the briefings themselves - topics that have not been covered adequately in the many published accounts of US-Iran relations in this period.1 It is based mainly on classified US documents published by the students who seized the US embassy and discussions with key US and Iranian officials, including all four participants in the October briefings. Although a few details remain murky, a clear enough picture emerges to permit us to draw important conclusions about US-Iran relations and Iranian domestic politics in this crucial period. This article also clarifies the circumstances surrounding the arrest of Abbas Amir Entezam, Iran's most prominent political prisoner in recent decades, who was a key participant in these events. US-IRAN RELATIONS IN EARLY 1979 After Islamic revolutionaries seized power in February 1979, Iran remained chaotic and unstable. The revolution's preeminent leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, appointed Bazargan to lead a provisional government pending the enactment of a new constitution and nationwide elections. Bazargan was a professor at Tehran University and head of the Islamic modernist Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI) party. He appointed a cabinet of like-minded moderates, who sought to restore order and resume essential government services. The revolution had unleashed a variety of radical Islamist and radical leftist factions, which were now heavily armed, brimming with revolutionary fervor, and determined to implement their own ideological agendas. These various radicals continually challenged and attacked Bazargan and his colleagues. Indeed, radical Islamists assassinated armed forces commander Valiollah Qarani and circulated hit lists naming Entezam, who was Bazargan's deputy, and Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi as targets for assassination.2 Khomeini respected Bazargan but wanted to move more rapidly to implement his vision of an Islamic regime, putting him squarely in the radical Islamist camp. Bazargan and his colleagues were increasingly marginalized during 1979, unable to implement their moderate agenda or stop the chaos and radicalization that were engulfing the country. Iran also faced growing threats from abroad. …

Each country has its own version of history. The differing views of the relationship between the United States and Iran made negotiating a long and complex agreement even more difficult. Iran remembers that the CIA support for the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953 and American support for Iraq in a war cost over a million Iranian lives. For Americans, the takeover of the embassy in Tehran and the holding of its staff for 444 days are the most memorable events. The negotiations were also made difficult by the fact that the negotiating partners of the United States—China, France, Russia, Great Britain and Germany—all had their own priorities, and Israel also felt it had vital interests at stake.

The Road to Baghdad: The United States and the Persian Gulf

ABSTRACTDuring the 2015 election campaign, the opposition Liberal party pledged that if elected, it would re-establish diplomatic relations with Iran, which had been suspended in 2012 by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The Liberals won a majority, and subsequently tried to act on that promise. In June 2018, however, they suspended these efforts. Four factors explain this outcome: the legacy of hard-line Conservative policies against Iran, especially the Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act; the complex politics of consular cases; growing opposition within the Liberal party; and the reality that the issue was not a priority for either Canada or Iran. This outcome is costly: not having an embassy in Tehran prevents Ottawa from achieving some interests in the Middle East. This article, based on more than 20 interviews with officials involved in Iran policy between 2006 and 2018, explains how this outcome came about, and with what consequences.

THE U.S. PRESS AND LEBANON William A. Dormán and Mansour Farhang H I ot all of the battles following Israel's June 6 invasion of Lebanon were fought in Beirut. A heated skirmish waged with words broke out in the United States over American press coverage of Israeli actions, and the often acrimonious debate shows no sign of abating now that the dispersal of the Palestine Liberation Organization has become fact. For instance, former U.S. senator James Abourezk, a founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League, writing a week or so after the invasion began, asserted that "the American media, with few exceptions, have joined in an Israeli propaganda effort that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud."1 His angry view was echoed by Alexander Cockburn in theJune 22 Village Voice, who wrote ofa "heartlessness" in U.S. print coverage that surpassed anything he could remember "since the early days of the Vietnam war."2 The highly regardedjournalist, Seymour Hersh, had a two1 . James Abourezk, "The Double Standard on Lebanon," a Pacific News Service dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1982. 2.Alexander Cockburn, "Press Clips," Village Voice, June 22, 1982. William A. Dormán is professor of journalism at California State University, Sacramento. Mansour Farhang teaches in the Department of Politics at Princeton University and is a visiting fellow at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies. Mr. Farhang was Iranian ambassador to the United Nations from December 1979 to May 1980, where he established the commission of inquiry to investigate the taking of the American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Dormán and Farhang have written extensively on the press and the Middle East for such publications as the Columbia Journalüm Review and The Nation. They are presently working on a book dealing with American press coverage of the Iranian revolution. 65 66 SAIS REVIEW word assessment of early invasion coverage, which he felt was particularly uncritical of Israel: "It's garbage."3 An altogether different assessment came from Moshe Arens, Israeli ambassador to the United States, who in a mid-July press conference accused the American media of providing a distorted picture of dissent within Israel over Prime Minister Menachem Begin's war policies, and spoke of a U.S. "campaign of vituperation and slander of unprecedented proportions" against Israel.4 The August cover story in the New Republic by its editor, Martin Peretz, was similarly blunt: "Much of what you have read in the newspapers and news magazines and seen and heard on television about the war in Lebanon is simply not true. . . . Reportorial fare has been wrenched out of context, exaggerated and distorted."5 In a September article for Encounter, entitled "The Journalists' War against Israel," Professor Edward Alexander spoke of the media's "scandalous disregard for truth" and of a "deplorable lack of self-critical professionalism, once the hallmark of good foreign correspondents ."6 How well did the American news media do with the Lebanon story? How is it that partisans on both sides could be so furious with the press? How did coverage compare to the media's treatment of past Arab-Israeli confrontations in general and the Palestinian question in particular? Perhaps most important, if there was a change in press performance, what caused it? A textual analysis of the first month and a half of mainstream press coverage following the June 6 invasion, taken together with observations based on a longer-range study of the American news media's treatment of the Middle East, suggest that, at least in the case of Lebanon, critics from both sides of the issue miss the mark. Except for the first week of coverage, when the media seemed to accord Israel its usual "most-favored-nation" status, the American press—based on our sampling of clippings from the prestige press, wire services, and news magazines—presented a fairly balanced picture of the agony of Lebanon. Indeed, for the first time in several decades, the press portrayed a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as something other than a morality play pitting the righteous forces of Israel against the terror of the plo. Given the historical record, Abourezk...

 Autobiographical subjects are products of their experiential histories, memories, agency and the discourses of their time lived and time of textual production. This article explores the religious and political discursive economy in which Abel Muzorewa (former Prime Minister of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia) narrates the story of his life and how this discursive context constructs his autobiographical subjectivity. The article examines how Muzorewa’s religious beliefs – com­bined with his experiential history of being a colonial subject – are deployed as a strategy of constructing his subjectivity. I argue that the discursive contexts of mass nationalism and his Christian religious beliefs grounded in Latin American liberation theology construct both Mu­zorewa as the subject of Rise up and walk and the narrative discourse. The article posits that the narrative tropes derived from Christian texts that Muzorewa deploys mediate his identity, and that his selfhood emerges with the unfolding of the narrative. What he claims to be politi­cal pragmatism on his part is also inspired by the practical theology which he subscribes to. I argue that his subjectivity is complexly realised through the contradictory relationship between missionary theology and liberation theology.

This chapter re-examines the Korean War, offering fresh insights into its origins, the meticulous preparations for the invasion, and the early concerns in Pyongyang about potential US intervention. It reveals that Kim Il-sung played a key role in orchestrating the invasion, requiring considerable persuasion to secure approval from the Soviet embassy and, ultimately, Joseph Stalin. For the first time, this chapter presents the Korean War from the perspective of Pyongyang’s leadership, showing how quickly doubts began to emerge about their chances of victory. It also sheds light on Mao Zedong’s initial reluctance to join the conflict, offering a more nuanced view of the war’s broader dynamics and reinforcing the book’s central theme—that North Korea’s fate could have unfolded very differently.

Let me tell you a story, begins the fairy tale. It is early September 1945, a hot Ottawa day, the start of a steamy late summer weekend. At the Soviet embassy, at the top of Charlotte Street, a bulky, sweating figure emerges, like many others from Ottawa's office buildings, and heads for home. Igor Gouzenko is a cypher clerk at the embassy; his duties, among other things, involve encoding espionage reports from Soviet agents in Canada.The year was a busy one in Gouzenko's business. The war ended, in stages: indeed the last stage, the war against Japan, had just been completed with the surrender of the Japanese empire after an American atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was a subject about which Moscow had some curiosity, and, since Canada was involved, in a minor way, in the development of the American secret weapon, fragmentary reports on atomic research featured in the traffic back to Russia, along with information on the movements of allied armies in Europe, descriptions of Canadian military research projects, and other moderately interesting data.All routine stuff, except for the fact that Gouzenko the cypher clerk had stuffed the lot into his briefcase. For Gouzenko had been recalled to Moscow with his family, and he did not want to go. Instead he hoped that by handing over the Soviet espionage files he would be able to interest the Canadian government and secure asylum for himself and his family in Canada.The sequel is well known. The bewildered Gouzenko, used to a government in which the secret police never slept and knew no rest breaks, found that the Canadian government was taking a collective siesta in the first weekend of peace since 1939. Successively the minister of justice, the police, and then finally the free press told Gouzenko that they did not want to hear from him, at least not until after the weekend. With the clock ticking, and detection certain, this might have been a death sentence. And indeed in his desperation Gouzenko threatened to commit suicide rather than go back to the embassy. Meanwhile, glancing out their apartment window, the Gouzenkos noticed that they were being watched.Fortunately for Gouzenko things were not quite what they seemed. The government, in its roundabout way, had taken note of the Russian's story. Prime Minister Mackenzie King was seized of the problem. The people watching the Gouzenko apartment were Canadian police agents. Yet, anxious to avoid an incident, and fearful of thrusting Canada forward into an international scandal, Mackenzie King had grasped the most hopeful element of this whole puzzling incident. It would be most convenient, the prime minister mused, if Gouzenko did indeed commit suicide. Then the police could seize his documents and scan them, all the while professing ignorance and innocence to the Soviet Union. All in all, the perfect solution -- the Canadian way, to adapt the title of a recent book.Finally, Gouzenko was rescued, with his family, and spilled the beans, such as they were, to Canadian intelligence, such as it was, and to the British and by extension to the Americans. Six months later the news broke, and, just as Mackenzie King anticipated, it was a major scandal and served as a milestone in the deterioration of relations between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies.Later historians, myself included, have appreciated both the dramatic qualities and the symbolic value of the Gouzenko affair. Its timing was almost perfect, both in the discovery and in the disclosure, its coincidences many and gratifying, its encapsulation of the nature of the Soviet government -- and incidentally some of the weaknesses of the Soviet system -- nearly flawless.Yet the standard accounts of the Gouzenko affair have another side. Dramatic and convenient as they have been, they also have a tendency to mislead even as they illuminate. One is almost tempted to say that the affair casts a false light over the development of Canadian policy in the early years of the cold war -- not because anything in the standard story is untrue, although details and interpretations may be disputed -- but because we have been concentrating on some of the wrong details and drawing some tangential conclusions. …

Reviewed by: Propaganda & Persuasion: The Cold War and The Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society by Jennifer Anderson Ryan M. Touhey Jennifer Anderson. Propaganda & Persuasion: The Cold War and The Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017. 260 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $27.95 sc. Propaganda & Persuasion is a welcome addition to the fields of Canadian Cold War history and Canadian international relations. Jennifer Anderson's study is the first to examine the Canadian-Soviet Friendship Society (CSFS), an unusual group founded in 1949 by Dyson Carter and former parliamentarian Dorise Nielsen to promote affinity for the Soviet Union as well as the "truth" about that country (77). Through public talks, sympathetic publications, the promotion of tours to the Soviet Union, and the dissemination of Soviet propaganda, the CSFS deployed cultural soft power to propagate an image to Canadians of the Soviet Union as "the epitome of an enlightened and egalitarian state" (9). Aspiring to achieve that goal, the CSFS "used propaganda and persuasion in Cold War Canada" in the hopes of positioning the Soviet Union as a successful alternative to western society (9). Organized thematically, seven chapters explore the key players involved in the CSFS, the history of bilateral Soviet friendship from 1917-1949, the dissemination of CSFS literature and media, progressive ethnic groups and the CSFS, women and the CSFS, and finally Soviet public diplomacy overtures in Canada. Anderson's book begins prior to the founding of the CSFS, revealing that groups labelling themselves as friends of the Soviet Union appeared in Canada soon after the Russian Revolution. The heyday for Canada-Soviet amity occurred during the Second World War with both nations allied against Nazi Germany. Anderson observes that during the war, the National Council for Canadian-Soviet Friendship enjoyed "widespread support" and prominent individuals, such as Prime Minister Mackenzie King, attended functions emphasizing bilateral friendship between Canadians and the peoples of the Soviet Union (5). Igor Gouzenko's defection from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa to the West in 1945 and his revelations that the Soviets spied on Canada during the war created widespread antipathy for Moscow, and communism in general. As the Cold War became entrenched in 1946, open support or sympathy for Moscow evaporated. Progressives were demoralized with Gouzenko's evidence; others were wary of becoming entangled with Canada's security apparatus. [End Page 167] Still, as Anderson demonstrates, Soviet sympathizers continued to believe that the USSR remained a model for Canada and the newly constituted CSFS set out to prove that to Canadians. Were members of the CSFS also members of the Canadian Communist Party (CCP)? Not all, according to Anderson, but the CSFS was associated with the CCP (9). Certainly the RCMP considered the CSFS "as a communist front organization" supported by the CCP, and Anderson is sympathetic as to why the RCMP monitored the society (11, 171). To be active in the CSFS required both dedication to the Soviet cause and some mental gymnastics. A case in point was Dyson Carter, author of the biography, Stalin's Life: At Last the True Story, published in 1943. Moscow endorsed Dyson's leadership, considering him a skilful propagandist. Dyson served as president of the CSFS from 1949 to 1960 (when it rebranded as the Canada-USSR Association), edited the CSFS newsletter from 1950 to 1956, and published the pro-Soviet magazine Northern Neighbours from 1956 to 1989. He also claimed to invest in Bay Street Stocks and purchased real estate (79). Whenever a new ideological line emanated from Moscow—be it the denunciation of Stalin after previous sycophantic portrayals of the dictator in his writings, adopting a sympathetic viewpoint of the Soviet mauling of the Hungarian revolution, downplaying the events at Chernobyl or embracing Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Glasnost—Dyson's writings embraced the shift from Moscow without question (90). Still, Carter's media talents and drive, along with support from the CPC and the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS) "made the...CSFS a much more pernicious group in the eyes of the RCMP" than any of its predecessors (52). Publications also commonly depicted Soviet society as egalitarian in terms of gender and race in...

At 8 p.m. on 5 September 1945 Igor Gouzenko, principal cipher clerk to Colonel Nikolai Zabotin, the military attaché at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada, defected. Over the previous few weeks he had removed from the embassy a number of documents marked ‘Top secret. Burn after reading.’ In total there were more than a hundred carefully selected secret documents detailing a vast Soviet network operating in the United States and Canada, among them a member of the British high commissioner's staff, Kathleen Wilsher, codenamed ‘Ellie’. The British high commissioner, Malcolm MacDonald, was informed of the case and it was decided that Ellie should be placed under observation. MacDonald then agreed to serve on a small informal committee made up of Canadian intelligence officers, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, and the Canadian Permanent Secretary for External Affairs, Norman Robertson, to investigate the extent of Soviet espionage in Canada. MacDonald's membership of this committee was regarded as essential, since Mackenzie King ‘wished to share all the secrets with his colleagues in London’.

This book, published in honor of the late Keith Neilson, tackles the issue of Britain’s world power status, and its decline, from a variety of interesting angles. Its scope is more ambitious than the dates in the title suggest, as both Otte’s chapter about the Foreign Office (fo) and Kathleen Burk’s about Britain’s economic networks in South America deal with the period since 1800. The geographical coverage extends beyond “the British world” to include Japan as well as Russian views of Britain. Some, although by no means all, of the twelve chapters engage directly with Neilson’s work. For example, John H. Maurer, in his assessment of the British response to Imperial Germany’s naval expansionism before 1914, concludes, “As Keith Neilson argued, Britain was no weary titan but a formidable Great Power, fully capable of competing in the international rivalries of that troubled age and beating back challengers, its leaders committed to playing the leading role on the world stage” (172).One of the volume’s strengths is the way in which the contributors negotiate the balance between recognizing the reality of Britain’s long-term relative decline and acknowledging the ways in which the country continued to exercise its muscle even as its options shrank. Douglas E. Delaney’s chapter about the Imperial General Staff and the Dominions in the interwar years is especially illuminating in this respect. This was an era of financial stringency when the Empire was also subject to forces that weakened Whitehall’s (already limited) control. Yet although Dominion politicians had little appetite to continue the burden sharing of World War I in time of peace, inexpensive and politically opportune techniques continued to facilitate coordination of the various armed forces, including the sharing of information, exchanges of officers, and intelligent use of Staff Colleges. Thus, “in spite of the near-breakneck demobilization that followed the First World War, widespread war-weariness, declining defence budgets, and growing dominion autonomy, the British general staff managed to keep some long-proven strands of military cooperation intact” (228). This situation was of value when war came again in 1939.Such an approach is useful because historians’ attention can often be monopolized by episodes of drama and crisis at the expense of the study of the workaday or routine behavior that underpinned the successful projection of power. Otte’s chapter about the fo, which is exemplary in this respect, deals with the fo’s internal procedures surrounding the accumulation of policy-relevant knowledge. On the one hand, it developed a reasonably efficient system for processing paper, but on the other, as business grew in both speed and volume, the organization was sometimes stretched to its breaking point. Enormous backlogs piled up. Moreover, as one civil servant sagaciously observed in 1891, “You cannot invent a machine into which documents can be put at one end and conclusions ground out at the other by turning a handle” (99).The same is true of the writing of history; happily, all the authors in the book succeed in applying common sense and wisdom to the fruits of their archival industry. They do not, however, engage in any methodological reflection or interdisciplinary inquiry. Because historians are prone to assume that the use of archives is well understood and without need of explicit justification, they sometimes undersell their own work. In her chapter, “Views of War, 1913 and 1949: Second Thoughts,” Zara Steiner (who died not long after this book was published), however, remarks about changing assumptions within the historical profession since she first approached the topic of attitudes about the outbreak of World Wars I and II in a seminar paper of 1972: “The original paper was critically received; many members of the seminar believed that historians should not deal with the issue of public opinion” (174). In this way, the book obliquely raises the interesting question of what aspects of current historical practice will look strangely antiquated in fifty years’ time.

Hoad, Maj.-Gen. Sir John Charles, (25 Jan. 1856–6 Oct. 1911), Chief of General Staff Commonwealth Military Forces from 1909; Chief of the Commonwealth Section, Imperial General Staff, 1909

Chiefs of the general staff and the Imperial General Staff (1904–2021)

Much of the ‘heavy-lifting’ to standardize the armies of the empire was completed during the relatively brief period 1904–14. Common military education and training were vital to the process, starting at the centre then extending to the disparate parts. The Imperial General Staff drew mostly from the list of staff college graduates and so did the dominions and India when it came to building their own general staff ‘sections’ and training their armies. But the dominions were only just starting to send their officers to imperial staff colleges and their permanent forces were tiny, so they required the services of staff-trained imperial officers to make up deficiencies and, more importantly, ensure that they were developing in ways that were compatible with the other armies of the empire. Chapter 2 analyses the people and policies that did much to standardize the armies of the empire during the decade that preceded the First World War

CHAPTER III - GREAT BRITAIN AND THE FRANCO-RUSSIAN ALLIANCE