Keys of This Blood (65 page)

The first mechanism was a rescheduling of Soviet debts to the West. In practice, this mechanism meant that the Soviets were not required to
pay down the principal they already owed. And it meant that interest payments could be finessed by postponement; or financed by new loans rolled from one banking consortium to another, and not listed in the information conveyed to stockholders. Involved here were such major United States banks as First Chicago, Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, Chemical Bank, Bankers Trust, Marine Midland and the Bank of America.

Surely it was understood that this mechanism would place a heavy economic burden on the West itself. In the United States, for example, the losses sustained by the banks in this operation were deducted as far as law allowed from tax payments. The American taxpayer was thus loaded with about half of the losses.

Nonetheless, for policymakers the gamble of increased public debt was apparently worth taking. No doubt it seemed literally to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to extend at least the first two legs of the capitalist tripod—trade and finance—into the Soviet Union itself. If that much could be accomplished, who could doubt that the third leg of the tripod—the physical security of all nations—would be greatly strengthened?

The second mechanism for easing the economic burdens crushing the Soviet system was convertibility. The Russian ruble was and still is not convertible on world currency markets, nor is it directly convertible even between the Warsaw Pact nations of the East. A new convertibility mechanism was, therefore, devised to facilitate the ruble. An agreement was reached between West German and Japanese banks to support a limited amount of rubles on the market at a pre-agreed level. By this means, the Soviets became eligible for membership in all the international money organizations that function as conduits for American capital.

That this major financial process in favor of the Soviets enjoyed acceptance in important spheres of influence was made clear by William Verity, among other high-level spokesmen. Verity was one of the founders in 1973 of the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Commission (USTEC), and he chaired that Commission from 1978 to 1984. “The U.S.,” Verity declared in 1987, “is going to have to get used to the idea that the Soviets are good trading partners.”

Whatever about their worth as a trading partner, the Soviets did prove themselves to be masters at the game of diplomatic connivance. Even before what came to be called Gorbachevism was felt by the general public, the Soviets had been provided with $16 billion in credits and unsecured loans by Western European and Japanese trade and financial deals.

By 1988, with Gorbachev at the helm, total Soviet debt to the West came to $179 billion in low-interest, unsecured loans and was rising at
the rate of $2 billion a month. Moreover, financial experts in East and West alike were in agreement that the Soviet regime would need $100 billion more in Western capital over the next five years.

How much Gorbachev may have contributed to the early stages of the Soviet end of diplomatic connivance for the economic salvation of the Soviet Union, and how much it was the brainstorm of KGB head and later General Secretary Andropov and others, may never be known. What is certain for Pope John Paul, however, is that whether Mikhail Gorbachev was the master planner or not, once he reached the pinnacle of power, Gorbachev showed himself to be the aptest genius of all at the process of diplomatic connivance.

With Gorbachev on the scene, a new energy began to heighten the action in the sphere of international affairs claimed by the capitalist nations as their own. During the years between 1985 and 1988, the General Secretary's openness and candor, so stunning to most in the West, was exactly what the financial doctors ordered. Apparently flying in the face of traditional Soviet secrecy in such matters, Gorbachev readily talked about his budget deficits. He publicly deplored the condition of the Soviet infrastructure. He complained about the folly of Soviet efforts to restrain inflation with price controls, which only aggravated the already disastrous shortage of food and consumer goods of every kind.

His experts in the financial field soon joined their ebullient General Secretary in a kind of Greek chorus of Soviet helplessness. The USSR was portrayed to the West in the starkest terms by Soviet economist Victor Belken as “a cannibalistic economy feeding on itself.” Not only that, chimed in Belken's fellow economist Vladimir Tekhonov; the Government's ability to print money in the circumstances was “like putting an alcoholic in charge of a liquor shop.” Yet a third leading Soviet economist sounded the note that no Internationalist or Transnationalist wanted to hear. There was a real danger of a “rightward swing” in the Soviet Union, warned Leonid Abalkin, unless some rapid economic progress is registered “within two years.”

On still another front, arms control and disarmament matters were the subject matter of more connivance, even before the Soviet president reached Washington in December of 1987. Soviet pre-event planning and the seeding of minds among U.S. authorities was admirable. It was done so well that today, in the light of recent occurrences at the opening of 1990, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the demilitarization of Europe—East and West—was already planned by Gorbachev in conjunction with the unification of the two Germanys, three years before Gorbachev would call those shots, numbing U.S. authorities with relief.

Already, in April 1987, ten retired U.S. flag and general officers sat
down with eight of their Soviet counterparts, under the sponsorship of the Center for Defense Information. Up for discussion: Arms reduction on both sides. The Soviet proposal: The U.S. and the USSR should remove all troops from foreign countries. The Americans' question: Wouldn't that mean the Communist governments of Eastern European satellite countries would fall? The Soviet reaction: So what? The next question: Doesn't this revive the whole question of the two Germanys—and the Berlin Wall and … and … and …? The Soviet reaction: Yes.

The meetings were continued in Washington, Moscow and Warsaw. The net effect was a dissipation of the basic reason for the enormous expense and trouble the U.S. had shouldered for forty-five years—a defensive European shield against those Soviet troops garrisoned all over Eastern Europe. That basic reason was fear. Hence, NATO. Hence, a minimum annual U.S. expense of $150 billion.

By the time Gorbachev reached Washington in December 1987, Washington was ready to receive him, ready to go forward with diplomatic connivance. “Everyone feels just cozy,” remarked one prime television news commentator. The best example of just how cozy everyone had become with everyone else, and of just how quickly everything was moving along a very straight track, was provided when Mikhail Gorbachev set foot at last on the pavements of Washington, D.C., that December. His greatest achievement during that visit was not at the White House, or among the excited crowds of Americans who pressed in to shake his hand when he jumped from his motorcade. His chief triumph was at the Soviet Embassy, where he participated in a meeting, organized by USTEC, with the most prominent advocates of easy-credit trade between the USSR and the United States. Among those present at the meeting were Armand Hammer, grain mogul Dwayne Andrews and USTEC President James H. Giffen.

In the best traditions of diplomatic connivance, Giffen was explicit in an interview with NBC about USTEC intentions. “The level of [non-agricultural] trade,” he said, “could go from a billion dollars … up to four or five billion per year, and maybe even higher, into the ten-to-fifteen-billion range.” In response to the implications of such a scenario, Giffen was asked, “Do you really want to make the USSR an economic superpower?”

The reply was to the point. “I think we do.”

Subsequent developments confirmed what John Paul already understood to be the case. Giffen was speaking for a broad range of important interests in America and elsewhere in the West.

As early as the following spring, in April 1988, USTEC held its twelfth annual meeting in Moscow. Led by William Verity—not in his role as USTEC founder now but as United States secretary of commerce—five hundred American businessmen set about an unprecedented deal-making process with a corresponding number of Soviet businessmen. In late 1988, another flurry of business deals involved West Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy in the extension of a fresh credit line of $11 billion to the Soviet Union.

On March 30, 1989, the American Trade Consortium, consisting of six major United States corporations—RJR Nabisco, Mercator, Eastman Kodak, Chevron, Archer-Daniels-Midland and Johnson & Johnson—signed a major trade agreement that is expected eventually to inject $10 billion into the Soviet economy. By the second quarter of 1989, close to two hundred companies from Western Europe and the United States had formed joint ventures with Soviet counterparts; and in May of that year, five European banks and three Soviet banks announced the first joint banking venture in Soviet history: the International Bank of Moscow.

On top of all that, through bond sales, security firms, insurance companies and corporations, the Soviets were granted access to Western financial markets, free of all oversight. That is, they were not required to divulge basic economic data.

From Pope John Paul's point of view, it made little difference at the practical level how much of all this was prearranged theater—diplomatic connivance, in other words—and how much each side was maneuvering in a dead-earnest competition for advantage in its own globalist agenda. Most striking for the Pope were three things. First, the level and the extent of the aid extended to Gorbachev by the West were being consistently heightened. Second, East and West seemed to be most compatible as newlyweds—or anyway, as bedfellows. And third, the truly uncommon geopolitical mind-set, vision and ability of the Soviet General Secretary were evident in every move he made.

There was Mikhail Gorbachev, being courted by the Western suitors until he caught them, finally consenting in blushing innocence to accept Western money, Western credit and Western trade.

And there was the West, consenting to Gorbachev's conditions. Consenting, for one thing, to the disturbing role of the KGB in all business deals. True, the West did require a little prenuptial counseling in that matter. Paul Konney, vice-president of Tambrands—one of the participants in the March 30, 1989, deal—asserted that “there is a very aggressive, hostile intelligent presence in all our deals.” However, Gorbachev's
early nurturing at the breast of the KGB during his Andropov years seemed to present no serious problem. “People need to get used to it” was Konney's opinion. “There will be a KGB representative in the organization of everyone's joint venture.”

Listening to such advice, and glancing perhaps, if one got that chance, at the bronze medal of the Kremlin that rested on the desk of Mercator Corporation's James Giffen, one could not help but see something more than the old predominant desire to turn a profit. There was a new element that did not exist in the international mix before Gorbachev's arrival on the world scene. There was a blithe and trusting spirit filtering down from high places to comfort many who might otherwise have been nervous. And that is the central idea and purpose of the whole process of diplomatic connivance.

By the time the way was clear for Italy's Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita to call, as he did in 1989, for a “Marshall Plan for the Soviet Union,” it was beyond any doubting that the most serious process of diplomatic connivance in fifty years was already well along the way.

Within scant months of Mikhail Gorbachev's election in March of 1985 to the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, he and President Reagan met at their first summit, in Geneva, Switzerland, on November 19–20, 1985. With that meeting, the first signal was raised for the general public that a profound change in the arrangements among nations was under way.

When President Reagan returned from that summit, he gave a low-key report to the Congress and the American nation. “It was,” the President said summarily, “a constructive meeting.”

Constructive was hardly an ample description. The depth of agreement reached in that meeting was better gauged by scanning just one of its products.

The
General Agreement on Contacts, Exchanges and Scientific Technical Education and Other Fields—the General Agreement
, some Vatican analysts called it for convenience—was drawn up by Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and was signed by Reagan and Gorbachev at the summit. The canvas covered in its provisions ranged over the entire cultural life of the United States and the Soviet Union. All phases of education and all branches of the arts were dealt with. It authorized mutual exchange programs, the homogenization of curricula, the sharing of facilities and the mutual indoctrination of the two peoples involved.

One portion of the
General Agreement
—Article II, Section 3—provided that both nations were to encourage “cooperation in the fields of science and technology, of humanities and social studies.”

The basic idea of “cooperation,” according to Article IV, Section 1.d., seemed to be “to conduct joint studies on textbooks between appropriate organizations of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Cooperation would cover all computer-based instruction, instructional hardware and curriculum design for all grades of primary and secondary education, as well as college and university studies.

The obvious goal was a total homogenization not only of the methods of teaching and learning, but of what was to be taught and learned. Ideally, the content of all curricula would become identical. One day soon, one assumes, schoolchildren in Gorbachev's birthplace of Privolnoye and schoolchildren in Reagan's birthplace of Tampico, Illinois, will all learn the same materials.

This may have seemed to the Transnationalists a giant preparatory step toward their long-held dream of unbiased, uniform global education. To Pope John Paul, it was a giant step taken into the near future with closed eyes and obliterated memory.