“The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defense. Through this we can build, we must build, a defense against repetition.” —Simon Wiesenthal
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Though to everyone involved, taking in the view of an interminable hellscape must have felt—in different ways—like the End of Days, it was only May 1945. An empire meant to last “a thousand years” had ended in twelve, and to the civilians of this empire—who had once felt on top of the world, but were now hungry, cold, afraid, and surrounded by rubble—the world they had once felt on top of, it seemed, was now pouring in from every side seeking to extinguish what last heaving breath of their empire remained. Every young male soldier, woman of the BDM, and Hitler Youth, who all could be seen in propaganda films like Triumph Of The Will grinning from ear-to-ear, were now running for their lives, burning their uniforms, and giving fake names to their captors. Detonation cord was being wrapped around the eagle atop the Reichstag where, just nine months before, conspirators against Hitler were sentenced to death in a ridiculous show trial. The end had come. The war was over. All the promises made by the Nazi generals and yes-men about beating back the Allies—at Normandy, at Bastogne, in Kiev, in Warsaw—were all a fruitless exercise in denial that didn’t stop, incredibly, even as American soldiers crossed the Rhine just over a month before. In what must have been a combination of horror and bewilderment, civilians of the Third Reich’s capital watched, as they hid, a Soviet soldier hang the red flag over their city. It would become one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
Interesting accounts, verified and unverified, exist about the odd behavior of the Germans in the moments before and after the surrender. One is of a large group of SS officers and their wives, approximately 20 in all, barricading themselves in a castle as the sound of shelling draws nearer and nearer. They eat a large feast, dance naked to swing music, and have orgies before ultimately committing mass suicide. This scene would later loosely be replicated in the 2017 film The Captain, the 2013 series Generation War (derided by the Times Of Israel as “Just Following Orders: The Movie”), and, less explicitly, in the 2004 film Downfall, where Eva Braun herself continues dancing on a tabletop (fully clothed) despite the ballroom being rattled by falling bombs. Regardless of its basis in fact, the imagery of the “last German hoorah” provides a glimpse into how a population being able to track the progress of their own invasion—almost in real time—for the first time, allowed for a strange euphoria that both admitted and dismissed surrounding doom. Whereas in the past, news of an invading force came suddenly and produced only panic and despair, the radio and the telephone gave rise to a hedonistic response to invasion steeped in a kind of “nihilistic inevitable”.
With the fall of Berlin fell any hope of a turn in German fortune, and as May turned to June, the only question left was who among the Allied powers would get to control the city. Would it only be Russia? To the victor go the ruins? Not quite. In July, the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union reached an agreement to occupy the capital city together; setting the stage for a Cold War that would span five decades. The conventional explanation given by mainstream historians for why the Cold War began between Western democracies and the Soviet Union, was that almost immediately after the end of World War II, the Soviet Union began installing puppet regimes in the Eastern European countries (beginning in 1947 with Poland), signaling to Truman and Churchill that the Kremlin had aims to take over the world just like Hitler.
The problem with this explanation for the Cold War’s beginning is that it’s total nonsense. Soviet installation of puppet states in Eastern Europe had been part of a prior agreement with Britain and the United States as a way of preventing Germany from resurging in 20 years. The Russians—as well as the English for a time—feared another Versailles scenario, where a Germany and East Europe left alone would lead to a Third World War just as the First had led to the Second.¹ This was not a completely irrational concern when one considered German resentment, given that the nation had dreamt of retaliation after the First World War when it still had its infrastructure and government intact. How much worse would the dream of retaliation be now, after the Second, when the country had been all but completely vanquished? Therefore, Communist expansion in Eastern Europe could not—at first—have been perceived by the other Allied powers as evidence of a desire for world domination. They had approved of it, before the war was even officially over, as a means of containing Germany.
And yet, the attitude of the United States and England toward the Soviet Union did sour for some reason, and a Cold War did obviously occur, so… why? I suspect that one of the main motivations for continuing to promulgate this falsehood that the takeover of Eastern Europe caused the Cold War, is because the real reason an emergent world power and its smaller allies engaged in a 44-year-long silent conflict that cost an untold number of lives would be too embarrassing—too shameful even—to publicly acknowledge: that the U.S. Army first, and the CIA second, believed a series of lies about Soviet intentions that were fed to them by a captured high-ranking German intelligence officer trying to escape prosecution. An officer whose reputation during the war struck terror into the hearts of his enemies, and who was referred to by those enemies in hushed tones as “the man without a face”.
This man was General Reinhard Gehlen.
Just as there are stories that abound about the German people generally at the end of World War II, there’s a kind of mythology that surrounds Reinhard Gehlen specifically as being “the spy’s spy”. This myth-making isn’t abnormal with individuals who devote themselves to the mastery of espionage. You could spend literally weeks reading about the ballsy exploits of “Wild Bill” Donovan, or the dirty deeds of J. Edgar Hoover, or the seductive wiles of Mata Hari. But in Gehlen’s case, the rumors and stories circulated about his life blur truth and fiction to the extent that he emerges in history as a sort of larger-than-life Bond villain:
A courier for Gehlen, suspected of being a double agent for the Russians, mysteriously “falls” out of a train to his death, and every file on him vanishes from state police records the next day. Nothing more comes of the investigation.
Another suspected mole in Gehlen’s organization is found hanging in his jail cell, and the doctor who testifies that it was a suicide is none other than Gehlen’s half-brother.
An agent visits the general’s estate one evening to discuss an upcoming operation and finds a note by his plate that reads, “You can speak freely. The butler will be shot after dinner.”²
While there is no way of knowing whether the above gossip (and much more) is accurate, along with its implications, what we absolutely know to be true about this enigmatic German general is just as fascinating as any legend concocted.
In 1942, Hitler gave Gehlen command of Foreign Armies East; a department that, since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, had gained a reputation for being ineffective at gathering reliable intelligence on the Soviets. To turn this perception around, the general began his tenure by successfully embedding German and dissident Russian infiltrators within the upper echelons of the Soviet military and government within the first six months; even in Moscow, where the NKVD kept close watch over all foreign arrivals. More impressive, Gehlen managed to convince the defector Russian General Audry Vlasov to recruit 200,000 fellow POWs into a rebel army ready to overthrow Stalin. It is unknown how many among these 200,000 volunteers were genuine anti-Stalinists, however, as one of Gehlen’s war crimes was his authorization of torture and starvation if Soviet prisoners didn’t cooperate with interrogators. Nevertheless, such a civil war, had it been allowed to proceed, very well could have given Hitler victory in Russia. But Hitler was having none of it, reportedly shouting to a nearby secretary “I’ll never build up a Russian army! It is a specter of the first order!”³
The tension between the general and his fuhrer would continue over the Battle of Stalingrad. Before the battle, Gehlen clashed with Hitler after the leader told him that the Russians would evacuate the city and essentially hand it to the German forces. Gehlen rightly predicted that a fight in Stalingrad would be inch-for-inch, though we do not know what his alternative advice to Hitler was on the matter (it’s possible he preferred to simply surround the city and starve it out). But whatever advice Gehlen offered, it was ignored, and the general would again argue with Hitler in December of 1942, warning that the German Army was getting bogged down trying to hold Stalingrad, giving the Soviets enough time to amass a devastating counterattack that could turn the tide of the entire Eastern conflict. Again, Gehlen was ignored and additionally chastised for being unpatriotic. A few of his colleagues even pulled him aside after the tense exchange and warned that if he valued his career and his life, he would give Hitler only good news coming out of Russia, not “defeatist rumormongering”.⁴
As the German war effort continued to deteriorate, Gehlen gradually began to realize that his skills were not being put to the best use, and that—essentially—he was too good for Hitler. Fairly early on in 1945, around late February to early March, he begins thinking about life after the war. Surrender to the invading Russians would have meant nothing short of torture and execution, but American capture carried with it the possibility of trial. In order to avoid such a fate, Gehlen knew he needed a bargaining chip. After Hitler’s suicide in April, Gehlen gathered up every document he could find in his office containing intelligence on the Russians and put them in 40 steel cases, which he subsequently buried in different spots along the German countryside as he fled into the Bavarian Alps. A month later, on May 22nd, an American infantry platoon would find him sitting at a table eating breakfast on a farm, appearing to be in no duress but simply waiting.
Over the course of the following months, the officer would gain a reputation for being a nuisance of a prisoner. Arrogant in his view of himself and level of importance, indignant toward the guards who refused to address him as “General”, and disappointed that his captors were expressing no interest in hidden treasure, Gehlen discovered that it would take some work to convince the Americans and the English that their tripartite ally would become a threat in the future, much less a threat they would need him to help fight. At the time, most American officers held favorable opinions of Russian soldiers and of the Soviet Union generally; the Red Scare would not reach its peak intensity for another 10 years. As Dwight Eisenhower put it at the time, “The Russians are generous, they like to give presents and parties, as almost every American who’s served with them can testify. In his generous instincts, in his love of laughter, in his devotion to a comrade, and in his healthy direct outlook on the affairs of workaday life, the ordinary Russian seems to bear a marked similarity to what we call an ‘average American.’”
In his 1972 autobiography (translated into English by the infamous holocaust denier David Irving), Gehlen practically chafes at this chummy handholding when he writes:
“I had to convince the skeptical Americans that, apart from my document files—which the natural process of obsolescence would render valueless in time—I could offer them other intelligence of a topical and worthwhile nature, which would be all the more impressive in a Germany torn by chaos, her communications constricted by internal frontiers, and with millions of her citizens forced to migrate aimlessly the length and breadth of the nation. Second, the passage of time would make it harder with every week that passed to recruit the nucleus of workers I needed. Once they had been discharged from captivity and swallowed up into civilian life, I would probably never manage to find these experts again, given the prevailing conditions of catastrophe.”⁶
To those keeping Gehlen detained, this was the typical entitlement: “Let me go, give me what I want, and quick!” Between the months of May and August of 1945, it appeared the former general would not be convincing anyone of anything anytime soon. Especially the need for another conflict against a current friend.
It is here where I should clarify, then, exactly what I mean when I describe Gehlen as “The Ex-Nazi Who Created The Cold War”. The claim here is not that Reinhard Gehlen orchestrated division and enmity between Russia and the other Allied powers where division and enmity otherwise would not have existed. As you have seen, he was oddly incapable of doing such, though in the end he would pull off something much worse. No, in fact, a continental standoff was inevitably going to take place between democratic powers and Russia for other reasons. One reason, that I’ll give very briefly, was Churchill’s insistence shortly after the war’s end that the only way “Christian civilization” and the “fraternal association of English-speaking peoples” could survive, was by denying Stalin influence in European economic revival via the Marshall Plan.⁵ The claim on my part, then, about Gehlen, is that he “created the Cold War” by exaggerating Russian capability to the point where the United States and Great Britain began to (inaccurately) perceive the Soviet Union as an equal and formidable competitor on the global stage, not just in Europe. Like a man willing to scorch a forest so he won’t be caught with cigarettes, Gehlen’s magnification of the threat the “red menace” posed—as part of an effort to prove himself an asset and save himself from prosecution for war crimes—led to a worldwide domino effect that wouldn’t end until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 12 years after his death.
Yet in order for Gehlen to convince Western powers that the USSR posed an existential threat to their existence, the stars had to align, and align they did. While Eisenhower and a majority of Army officers held favorable opinions about their Russian comrades, General George Patton loathed the Soviet soldiers, Stalin, and the USSR generally for perpetuating and allowing inhumane treatment of German civilians during the invasion. Though the reason Patton felt such strong sympathy for the Germans is unknown, my personal opinion is that Winston Churchill’s sentiments of “Christian civilization” and a “fraternal association of English-speaking peoples” were widely shared among the upperclass in England and the United States, both within the upper ranks of their respective militaries and outside of the military; thus, American and British forces essentially overlooking the rape and torture of Germans by Russians was perceived as a “regrettable betrayal” of an Anglo-Saxon kin in favor of a barbarian ally strange and savage.
Whatever the cause of Patton’s motivation, however, he managed to convince Eisenhower that the Russians were not “average Americans” but in fact were a formidable potential foe, and the subsequent about-face by Eisenhower suddenly put prisoner Gehlen in high demand. In the first week of August, just over two months after his capture, Eisenhower’s chief of staff transported Gehlen on his personal plane to Washington D.C., where the former general would be asked about Soviet intent and capability by top Army Counterintelligence brass. In exchange for being shielded from scrutiny and prosecution, Gehlen gave the location of his buried steel containers, assured the United States that he could procure much more intelligence on the Russians for many more years, and was soon flown back to West Germany in order to build a spy organization capable of doing just that.
“Oh this would go real well,” you’re probably thinking if you’re familiar with just how many Nazis escaped justice, and your instincts would be spot on. Gehlen’s list of 100 ideal recruits to be anti-communist spies for the United States were essentially a Who’s Who of Third Reich war criminals: Karl Josef Silberbauer, the Gestapo chief who arrested Anne Frank and her family; Klaus Barbie, another Gestapo chief nicknamed the “Butcher of Lyon” for his brutality toward French Jews and resistance fighters; and Emil Augsburg, an SS major who planned the mass executions of Jews in Poland (a 1952 CIA file on Augsburg commends his “unprejudiced mind” as well as his “fine taste in good food and wine”). Himmler’s daughter Gudrun Burwitz also worked for Gehlen’s organization from 1961 to 1963, though it is unclear how much direct involvement Gehlen himself had in her recruitment.⁷
Once fully established in West Germany, of course, Gehlen and his agents knew they would have to continue offering up bigger and bigger lies about the danger of the Soviet Union if they wanted to stay in the Americans’ good graces. The first and most absurd of these, was an agent’s claim that as he was interviewing a German POW returning from a Russian gulag, a “radioactive rock” just fell out of the man’s pocket, and the prisoner revealed that he had acquired the rock beside an atomic testing facility. This outlandish account—intended to stoke fears that the Russians were easily keeping pace with U.S. nuclear capability—was almost certainly a fabrication. For one, if German POWs conducted their labor anywhere near a top secret Soviet nuclear site, there would be no reason they wouldn’t be executed shortly thereafter. Two, even if such prisoners weren’t executed, this was still 12 years after the death of Marie Curie. The lethality of overexposure to radiation was well-known, and the odds of Soviet guards not fully inspecting POW laborers returning from a nuclear site are slim-to-none. This is all without mentioning that grown men generally have little use for carrying rocks around in their pockets. Three, questions abound about what transpired after the alleged incident between the POW and the agent. Was the rock kept in a safe spot until the Army could verify that it contained radioactive properties? Apparently not. Had the former POW been detained in isolation, so the Army could ask him more questions from a distance? No. Did the former POW die or become ill from radiation poisoning? No record of such. Did he reveal the approximate location, or surrounding environment, of the nuclear facility that could be of assistance to aerial reconnaissance? No again. We just took Gehlen’s word for all of it. This isn’t to say the Soviets didn’t have nuclear development ambitions; they certainly did, and developed their first atomic bomb on August 29th, 1949. Every nation tries to match the defense capabilities of their rivals and even allies. The impression given by Gehlen’s lie, however, was that the Soviet nuclear program was much farther along than it actually was, which undoubtedly led to tensions escalating.
In September 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act into law, authorizing the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Their mission, according to Truman, was to fix the problem of a “lack of coordinated intelligence coming in Washington”, and therefore one of the agency’s top priorities was replacing the Army as overseers of Gehlen’s organization in West Germany. Just over a year later, Gehlen would take the opportunity to impress his new bosses by claiming that his spies had gathered intel indicating that the Russian MIG-15 would become a serious rival to the U.S.’s F-86; and that the rapid production of MIG-15s was proof that the USSR was planning for a future major conflict. Yet there were only 15,000 MIG-15s produced in total over a span of six years, most of which were built in China and smaller communist states, not in the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet economy—still in recovery after the war—was simply not capable of producing enough fuel for fighter jets, let alone mass-produce the jets themselves. A declassified January 1950 CIA report titled The USSR Petroleum Industry concluded—in direct contradiction of their man in West Germany—that “High-octane combat aviation gasoline is in short supply, and the amount of jet fuel required is relatively small, indicating that the program for jet plane production has only been partly developed.”⁸
At this point, American military on the ground in West Germany and American intelligence agencies had dumped all expressions of warm sentiment toward the Russians (just as all love affairs are bound to end), yet Gehlen’s assertion that the Soviet Union intended to become a world superpower that rivaled the United States still remained to be seen. But in June 1950, when Stalin was pressured by Mao to support North Korea’s invasion of the South, Gehlen’s narrative of the Soviet Union desiring global domination, to the CIA, appeared to be confirmed, despite their own reports indicating the contrary and despite the USSR only being able to provide marginal material support to their North Korean counterparts (supplying only 20 doctors to give medical aid to wounded troops; less than half of all planes in the North’s fledgling air force, which was rendered entirely ineffective after 1952; and 15 ace pilots to fly the planes donated, who frequently encountered friendly fire because of the language barrier between them, the Chinese, and the North Koreans).⁹ The domino effect was now fully in play. There would be no backing out of what would become a 44-year-long Cold War.
In April 1956, the CIA would officially transfer control of Gehlen’s organization to the West German government. It was around this time—with nations around the world failing to seriously pursue Nazi war criminals—that Holocaust survivors were beginning to get revenge themselves along with Israel’s Mossad. Former SS officers, regular foot soldiers, and collaborators were being found dead on roadsides from mysterious hit-and-runs. A former Waffen SS colonel living in rural eastern France was burned alive in his home after being capped in the knees. One former Gestapo officer visiting a hospital in South Africa for a minor operation was found dead on his bed with kerosene injected into his veins.¹⁰
Even 15-20 years after Gehlen’s rescue by the Americans, attacks on Nazi war criminals showed no signs of abating. Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “final solution”, was kidnapped in Argentina and brought to Israel in 1960 where eventually he was hanged. In 1965 Herbert Cukurs, the “Hangman of Riga” who fled to Brazil after being involved in the mass murder of Latvian Jews, had his head caved in and was stuffed inside of a wooden trunk along with documents that proved his guilt.
On one cold night in Munich in the winter of 1963, Gehlen would also come close to getting what he deserved, when he pulled up to his house and the windshield suddenly shattered in front of him. In a panic, he sprinted from the car, fumbled for the key to unlock his gate, and barricaded himself in his home. A forensics team the next day would find a bullet inside his vehicle. Even now it is unknown who sanctioned the attempted hit. Was it the Soviets? Avenging survivors? Even certain individuals in the West German government, who feared that the presence of Gehlen in their relatively new intelligence apparatus—if revealed—would be a stain on its reputation? We can only shrug. But regardless of who sanctioned the hit, there was no second attempt. This, however, didn’t stop a rattled Gehlen from purchasing a firearm and practicing his marksmanship at a range everyday for the rest of his life.¹¹
In the late-60s, the CIA began to catch on to the fact that their “spy general” was far from a dream asset; eventually deriding Gehlen’s organization as the “non-intelligence service” and openly doubting whether his agents had cultivated any informants at all beyond East Germany. But their realization came too late to undo the the ripple effect of Gehlen’s lies. Aside from the Korean War (which took the lives of 33,686 American soldiers), narrowly avoiding one major conflagration and becoming disastrously embroiled in another would be the cost that came with trusting a man who had everything to lose, claiming he was the secret weapon needed to fight the Soviet Union; a clandestine Nostradamus who could masterfully predict Russian weapons development and strategy, but somehow couldn’t predict the erection of the Berlin Wall right in front of him.
Exhibit A: The Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought humanity to the brink of total annihilation. As a result of believing Gehlen’s exaggeration of Soviet power and ambition, an outsized perception of the “red menace” led to an outsized American response.
Writing for Washington’s Courier-Herald last year, columnist Richard Elfers made this observation about the events which led up to those twelve tense days in 1962:
“In 1960, the U.S. had a substantial nuclear missile advantage over the USSR. It was also developing submarines capable of carrying nuclear missiles. The number and quality of B-52 bombers far exceeded the few Bear strategic bombers Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev possessed. By 1960, the U.S. could gather more satellite images of the USSR in a day than the entire U2 spy plane program produced. Theoretically, the U.S. could launch a first strike on Soviet missiles and destroy all or most of them. Khrushchev would be forced to surrender. Knowing this, Khrushchev decided to level the playing field by secretly placing medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba.
[George] Friedman calls this plan ‘harebrained’ because it was premised on the belief that American intelligence could be kept in the dark until the missiles were fully operational. In actuality, U2s were photographing every square foot of Cuba on a regular basis... Kennedy portrayed the Cuban Missile Crisis as a contest between equals. In reality, the Russians were outgunned from the start, both in nuclear missile capability and strategic location, and they knew it. They tried to sneak the missiles into Cuba because they had a weak hand.”¹²
Exhibit B: The Vietnam War.
What began as a minor skirmish on the world stage between a growing native insurrectionist force and French colonizers, Cold Warriors in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations reframed the struggle as a communist powder keg in dire need of American intervention on the ground; believing that if Vietnam became an independent leftwing government, it would soon become a loyal ally of the USSR, and with that, so too would the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. An indication that such intervention—and the concern behind it—was unwarranted, was Ho Chi Minh’s absolute shock upon finding out the United States intended to oppose him in his push for Vietnamese independence. A shock present, because Minh had revealed to OSS officers stationed in Hanoi in 1945 that—though indeed he was a socialist in the French tradition (due to his education in Paris from 1919 to 1923)—he also was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson, and wanted to build a democratic government in Vietnam just like the United States.¹³ It was only after the United States moved against the North Vietnamese that Minh was forced to seek the help of communist China (by that time, a rival state to the Soviets). Of the nearly three million American soldiers deployed to Vietnam between 1965 and 1975, 58,220 young men would enter its jungles, villages, and rice fields and never leave. The average age of the American soldier in Vietnam was 19.
On June 8th, 1979, 11 years after his retirement from intelligence work, Reinhard Gehlen died peacefully at his home in Munich; the same home in which he had taken refuge from the assassination attempt 16 years before. In George Bailey’s beaming introduction to Gehlen’s autobiography, the obscure history enthusiast (of whom little is known, and who easily is confused with Sir George Bailey) writes that what makes the general worthy of reading is that he “survived the Nazi terror from within.” What a sentence. A rifle-toting enforcer for Jim Jones who downed a cup of weak Koolaid could equally claim to have “survived the terror of Guyana from within”, I suppose. Or a member of the Republican Guard in Saddam’s Iraq. And really, how else could the reputation of a goon acting on behalf of a totalitarian system be sanitized post-collapse? We’ve seen this approach attempted before, from the Manson girls to the misty-eyed misfits who joined ISIS and now want desperately to come home: “The perpetrators are victims too!” No. No they are not.
Sources
1. “The Genesis Of Soviet Threat Perceptions: Final Report to the National Council for Soviet & East European Research”, Michael McGwire, The Brookings Institution, July 1987; 2. Gehlen: Germany’s Master Spy, Foreword, pgs. vii-xiii, Charles Whiting, Ballantine Books, 1972; 3. Ibid., Chapter 4, pg. 40; 4. Ibid., Chapter 3, pg. 30; 5. “The Genesis Of Soviet Threat Perceptions: Final Report to the National Council for Soviet & East European Research”, Michael McGwire, The Brookings Institution, July 1987; 6. The Service: Memoirs Of General Reinhard Gehlen, Chapter 6, pg. 126, Reinhard Gehlen, Popular Library, 1972; 7. “Himmler’s Daughter Worked For Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Agency In 1960s, Officials Admit”, The Independent, June 29th 2018; 8. “The USSR Petroleum Industry”, Central Intelligence Agency, January 5th 1950, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000258834.pdf; 9. Historical Dictionary Of The Korean War, pg. 151, James Matray, Greenwood Press, 1991; A Revolutionary War: Korea & The Transformation Of The Postwar World, William J. Williams (editor), “Air Operations In Korea: The Soviet Side Of The Story”, pg. 154, Jon Halliday, Imprint Publications, 1993; 10. “Revenge”, Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, July 25th 2008; 11. The Service: Memoirs Of General Reinhard Gehlen, Chapter 6, pgs. 156-157, Reinhard Gehlen, Popular Library, 1972; 12. “Lies During The Cuban Missile Crisis”, Richard Elfers, Courier-Herald, March 6th 2019; “The Soviet Threat Was A Myth”, Andrew Alexander, The Guardian, April 18th 2002; 13. Ken Burns’ The Vietnam War, episode one, 21:30-26:10, PBS, 2017
