Cold War
========

The Cold War was the U.S.,Soviet confrontation that shaped the CIA John Kiriakou joined in its final days, and, in his telling, a mindset that never actually ended.

Real, but desired

Asked whether the memorandum that kicked off the Cold War exaggerated Stalin's buildup, Kiriakou agrees the confrontation was real "but also at a certain level perhaps desired": historically, the United States has always needed an ism to be opposed to, anarchism in the 19-teens, then communism, then terrorism. The era's operating logic, as he describes the State Department and intelligence community of the time, was a zero-sum game: any means at your disposal were fair so the Soviets didn't capture the influence. He also credits Zbigniew Brzezinski with deliberately making the Cold War less ideological, downplaying capitalism-versus-communism in favor of finding proxies inside the communist world. The Cold War's dark side, he says, was that it was about cold, hard power, not freedom and democracy, and its worst nightmare was the U.S. invasion of Vietnam.

It never ended

Kiriakou's blunter judgment: "The Cold War never ended... The Russians thought that the Cold War was over, but no one told the US." He sees people who agree with him on everything else falling for "Cold War 2.0" over the proxy war in Ukraine, and argues the original threat was itself inflated, the danger of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was exaggerated then, exactly as the Russian threat is exaggerated now.

Tradecraft legacy

One Cold War lesson Kiriakou repeats constantly: read the era's memoirs and you find the CIA's best recruits were walk-ins. You will never spot and develop the unknown KGB colonel, but one day he walks into an embassy and says, "I'm a KGB colonel and I want to give you everything I have, and I want a million dollars."

The succession of isms

Put to him in 2022 that the terrorist enemy of his own career had been the replacement for communism and was in turn being replaced by Russia, Kiriakou agreed and generalised it into a sequence.

> "We always seem to need an ism in this country to rally against, whether it was anarchism or socialism or for a very long time communism. It was fascism for a little while during the Second World War. Then it was Islamism. And, you know, it's like we just can't seem to function unless we have an enemy."

He traces the beginning of his own doubts about the current instance to his time still inside the agency, and to an opening with Moscow that he says was available and was not taken.

See also

- Soviet Union
- Walk-in
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
- Russia-Ukraine war origins
