If anything could be described as a psychological warfare operation come unhinged, it was the Team B experiment. Team B effectively exposed the CIA's own process of rational analysis to an exercise of personalized, politicized, ethnic and faith-based psychological warfare. And it succeeded.
By 1979, the Team B and its acolytes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and the Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad had so managed to overlay their alternate reality onto the mind of American government that when the invasion of Afghanistan took place that December their imaginary, foreordained crisis had become as real as it was intended to be.
But it was in the reliance of World War II-style imagery where the hyperbole strove to achieve the glow of Hollywood's golden era. Richard Pipes made it clear in that January 2, 1980 broadcast that Afghanistan was "a superb springboard from which to launch offensives both into the Indian subcontinent and into Iran and the Iranian Gulf"." And then invoked the magic of World War II by stating that never before had the Soviets "felt bold enough" to engage in a direct blitzkrieg. So if they get away with it in Afghanistan, there'll not only be great danger for our whole Middle eastern position but we will have encouraged them to engage in actions of this sort in other parts of the world, including, for example, Southeastern Europe or possibly even Western Europe."
This had been Team B's siren call from the start. America had weakened itself through de'tente and negotiation while the Soviets had been secretly preparing a "direct blitzkrieg" aimed at the Middle East, India, Southeastern and even Western Europe, and now here it was. Just like the phantom threat posed by Saddam Hussein in 2003 and brought forward by the very same group of ideologues, the idea that the Soviets might cut off a vital oil supply was all that was needed to capture public opinion. That spring CBS News anchor Dan Rather followed up with a coast to coast broadcast reinforcing that sentimental Rick's Cafe 1940s Hollywood line: the American people were asleep to Soviet designs and had better start supporting the Mujahideen "freedom fighters" before it was too late.
The major media had been setting the public up for months prior to the invasion citing Brzezinski and the importance of the "arc of crisis," and predicting that the Soviet Union would be driven toward the Persian Gulf within the decade due to intelligence reports that it was "running short of the oil it needs to fuel an expanding economy." Never mind that the Soviet economy was actually contracting at that point and the CIA's secret 14-page memo titled "The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis," was pure hokum.
Brzezinski and his Team B allies wanted the Soviets in Afghanistan as part of a long standing plan for the conquest of Eurasia and the psychological warfare campaign to convince Americans of the Soviets' malevolent desires for world domination was already gearing up to make it reality.
The International Rescue Committee's Chairman Leo Cherne was well practiced in the methods necessary to provoke the desired reaction from the public. According to its annual reports for 1978, the year of the Marxist coup in Afghanistan, the IRC was already actively engaged in bringing Afghan refugees to Europe and the United States following "The takeover of Afghanistan by dictatorial forces sympathetic to the Soviet Union-- The report that year featured a photograph of Cherne's old prote'ge' at the Research Institute of America, board member William J. Casey while conducting a tour of Southeast Asia. Casey would serve as Chairman of the Executive Committee the next year before running Ronald Reagan's 1980 election campaign and shortly thereafter becoming his CIA director.
The IRC in cooperation with the CIA had virtually created the elaborate psychological warfare mechanism that sold the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam to the American public. In 1975 their campaign ended in failure but in faraway Afghanistan, those mistakes would be forgotten. We got a personal look at the inside agenda and what would be done to keep it a secret in December of 1981 when Theodore Eliot, former U.S. Ambassador and Bilderberg General Secretary showed up at a private preview of our documentary Afghanistan Between Three Worlds and demanded our silence .
How did they get away with it? How could the American public be so caught up in the media theatrics to support the funding of Islamic fanaticism in Afghanistan they'd completely miss out on the largest CIA operation in American history?
Join us next time when we explain how Americans of all stripes had been lulled into accepting a British Imperial agenda as their own long before the Soviets crossed the border in our next installment of Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.
Copyright - 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Part I--Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
Part II--Psychological Warfare and the American Mind
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gouldare the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
2
