The Second Cold War and the First War on Terror
Counter-terrorism analysis in the 1980s
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this article with the button below.
Secretary of State Alexander Haig and President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on 2 December 1981 (White House Photographic Collection, public domain).
In the 40 years since Christopher Andrew and David Dilks declared intelligence to be the missing dimension of international history, the trickle of books on the subject has become a flood, but one contribution to this year’s torrent which should not be missed is Daniela Richterova’s Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries.
The book has been very widely reviewed by among others Thomas Ricks, Luca Trenta (£) and Richard Dearlove (£), so rather than add another I thought I would set out some of the context that makes Richterova’s subject so intriguing.
The role of the Soviet Bloc in international terrorism was a particularly controversial issue during the early 1980s, as the relationship between the superpowers turned back towards cold war after the détente of the previous decade.
Within days of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration of President in 1981, his Secretary of State Alexander Haig had set the tone with a press conference accusing the Soviet Union of ‘training, funding and equipping' international terrorists.1
When challenged by the State Department’s own Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Haig cited a then unpublished book by Claire Sterling, an American journalist based in Italy.2 The Terror Network charged that the growth of international terrorism after 1968 was made possible thanks largely to guerrilla training, guidance, weapons, sanctuary, and the right introductions provided by Cuba or the Palestine Resistance’ acting as proxies for the Soviet Union.3
It was only after going public that Haig asked for an intelligence estimate on the question.
According to Robert Gates, who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Soviet Union until March 1981, ‘Everyone knew he wanted an answer that would support what he had said-after all, policymakers always want that from intelligence when they go too far out on a limb.’4
The first draft was prepared by the CIA’s Office of Soviet Affairs (SOVA) whose chief Melvin Goodman later wrote that ‘there was no credible empirical evidence of Soviet support for international terrorism in Western Europe and the Middle East. To the contrary, there was excellent evidence of Soviet efforts to persuade insurgent and radical groups, particularly the Palestine Liberation Organization, to forswear terrorism.’5
The CIA draft was rejected as a ‘lawyer’s plea’ by the agency’s director, Bill Casey, who was also influenced by Sterling, having read a precis of her book in the New York Times Magazine.6
He commissioned an alternative analysis from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which predictably proved more hawkish.7 One of Casey’s own confidants, John Bross, later wrote that elements of the intelligence community ‘were promoting the extreme right position represented by Claire Stirling.’8
A compromise was ultimately reached with yet another assessment, overseen by the Lincoln Gordon of the CIA’s Senior Review Panel.9
According to Bob Woodward, Gordon found that some of Sterling’s information on Soviet links to the Italian Red Brigades came from sources planted in a CIA propaganda operation.
Gordon found the sequence particularly telling: from CIA propaganda to Sterling’s book galleys, to Haig’s reading of the galleys, to Haig’s press conference, then Haig’s comments picked up in the New York Times article by Sterling, then finally in Sterling’s book. Even though Gordon felt that the CIA had finally sorted through all this to an essentially thoughtful position, that estimate was classified secret.10
Gates considered that the final estimate ‘wasn’t too bad.’
There was conclusive evidence that the Soviets directly or indirectly supported a large number of national insurgencies and some separatist-irridentist groups, many of which carried out terrorist activities as part of their larger program of revolutionary violence. The estimate went on to say that many groups that employed terrorism did not accept Soviet control and direction, though some did. With respect to the nihilistic, purely terrorist groups, the estimate said the evidence was thin and contradictory but noted that some individuals in such groups had been trained by Soviet friends and allies that also provided them with weapons and safe transit.11
Goodman was less happy:
Although the estimate on Moscow and terrorism went further than the intelligence allowed, Casey and Gates were never satisfied with a product that argued non-state actors could conduct terrorism on their own without superpower backing, and that there was no evidence that the Soviets directly fomented international terrorism. The estimate was so tendentious and polemical that it was quickly ignored and quietly shelved by the policy community that it was intended for.12
Battle would be rejoined a year later after Sterling published a Reader’s Digest article positing a ‘Bulgarian connection’ to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.13
As head of the CIA’s analytical arm in the mid-1980s, Gates commissioned an estimate on the attack after receiving ‘clandestine source information about the Bulgarian role, and the Soviets', that for the first time seemed to provide an evidentiary base for making a case against them.’ Tellingly, this was titled ‘Agca's Attempt to Kill the Pope: The Case for Soviet Involvement.’ In his memoir, however, Gates was non-committal, calling the assassination attempt ‘one of the great remaining secrets of the Cold War.’14 For his part, Goodman regarded the assessment as a ‘classic example of the political corruption of intelligence.’15
The relationship between Casey, Gates and Goodman makes for a striking vignette of the social dynamics of intelligence analysis, particularly given the duelling memoirs of the two analysts. Although they began their CIA careers together at the Office of Current Intelligence in the late 1960s, they came to represent opposing views of the relationship between intelligence and policy.16
Goodman recounts that ‘I came from the traditional school dominated by Professor Sherman Kent’, which ‘demanded a wall between the analyst and the policymaker so that policy views didn’t affect intelligence analysis.’17
Gates deviated from that approach early in his career when he joined the staff of the National Security Council during the turbulent tail-end of the Nixon presidency.
I realized quickly that CIA knew how foreign policy was made in every country in the world except one-our own. Analysts and their supervisors were oblivious to how information reached the President… …The battle for timeliness and relevance of intelligence would be one I would fight for the next twenty years.18
Despite his policy-oriented approach, Gates was regarded with suspicion by some Reagan supporters. The conservative Washington Times described him as a ‘cautious bureaucrat’ when he was nominated in 1987 to become director of the CIA, a post he did not attain until 1991.19 He ultimately achieved apotheosis in the ranks of the policymakers as Secretary of Defence under George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
By then, one might have expected the dispute over Eastern Bloc involvement in terrorism to have been long resolved given the opening of archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Gates reports that ‘After the communist governments in Eastern Europe collapsed, we found out that the East Europeans (especially the East Germans) indeed not only had provided sanctuary for West European "nihilist" terrorists, but had trained, armed, and funded many of them.’20
Conversely, Goodman concludes: ‘As the security archives of various East European government have opened, we have seen additional evidence of the limits of Soviet Bloc support for groups that engaged in the use of terrorism.’21
Watching the Jackals is of profound significance for this debate as a comprehensive analysis of the most fully available Eastern Bloc intelligence archive, that of the Czechoslovak state security service, the StB.
Richterova concludes that ‘the Cold War terrorist underworld was a far cry from what Claire Sterling called The Terror Network.’22 The Eastern Bloc states supported the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its dominant Fatah faction, favouring its evolution towards diplomacy and away from the terrorist tactics associated with Fatah’s Black September offshoot.
Prague was nevertheless suspicious of Yasser Arafat’s flirtations with the West, a concern that was well-founded given Fatah’s extensive contacts with the CIA throughout this period.
Czechoslovak diplomats recognized that they had greater ideological affinity with Marxist PLO factions like the PFLP and DFLP, but distrusted their adventurism. As Gates claimed, the East German Stasi was more daring in its associations, but the the StB was wary of truly nihilistic players like Carlos the Jackal and Abu Nidal. Their occasional contacts with these groups were often aimed at keeping them out of Czechoslovak territory.
Richterova suggests that this last approach was similar to ‘unwritten nonaggression pacts’ quietly pursued by several West European countries around the same time.
This artificial divide into those [states] that “support” terrorism and those that “fight it” (the “good guys” and the “bad guys”) ignores what constituted an important emerging trend-namely, an inherent clash between old-fashioned security states and nebulous foreign nonstate actors.23
Armed with this wisdom of hindsight one might conclude that the US intelligence community landed in roughly the right place when it forged an ugly consensus in the face of political pressure in 1981. Yet that secret analysis remained at variance with the public position marked out by Haig. Pressure to subordinate counter-terrorism to geopolitical propaganda outlasted the Cold War itself and it told in the end.
In December 2001 Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had met Iraqi intelligence in Prague, a claim that was later dismissed by the CIA and FBI.24 Although claims of a link between Iraq and 9/11 remained amorphous they had a powerful impact on public opinion in the run-up to the US invasion of the country in 2003.25
The Trump administration represents a very different strand of the Republican Party, one that has repudiated the Iraq War and is willing to characterise the US intelligence community as part of a ‘deep state.’ Yet it seems old habits die hard.
On 17 April, the Washington Post reported:
The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determined in a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United States by the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.26
The Council reports to Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a long-standing critic of the Iraq War. In a response to the Post, the ODNI rejected the leak as the work of ‘deep state actors’, a charge Gabbard repeated herself on social media.27
That begs the question whether the analysts who rejected the Bulgarian connection in 1982 or the Prague connection in 2003 were also deep state actors. An alternative conclusion is that the best candidate for an American deep state, then as now, might not be a career bureaucracy obstructing the President’s mandate, but a political machine seeking to extend executive power beyond constitutional limits.
Philip Taubman, U.S. TRIES TO BACK UP HAIG ON TERRORISM, New York Times, 3 May 1981.
Bob Woodward, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Simon & Schuster, 1987, p.93.
Claire Sterling, The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism, Holt, Rinehart and Winston/Reader's Digest Press, 1981, p.292.
Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, Simon & Schuster 1996, Touchstone ed. 1997, p.204.
Melvin Goodman, Whistleblower at the CIA: A Path of Dissent, City Lights Books, 2017, pp.119-120.
‘A Lawyer’s plea’, Gates, p.204. ‘Influenced by Sterling’, Woodward, p.124.
Woodward, p.126.
John A. Bross to Gregory F. Treverton, 2 December 1987. Archived at CIA.
Woodward, p.129.
Gates, p.205.
Goodman, p.122.
Claire Sterling, The Plot to Murder the Pope, Reader’s Digest, September 1982. Archived at CIA.
Gates p.355.
Goodman, p.123.
Goodman, p.44.
Goodman, p.278.
Gates, p.56.
Bill Gertz, Critics fear Gates will stifle Agency, Washington Times, 16 February 1987. Archived at CIA.
Gates, p.206.
Goodman, p.120.
Daniela Richterova, Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Georgetown University Press, 2025, Conclusion.
Daniela Richterova, Watching the Jackals: Prague's Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries, Georgetown University Press, 2025, Ch.15.
Dana Priest and Glenn Kessler, Iraq, 9/11 Still Linked Cheney, Washington Post, 29 September 2023.
Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley, A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq, Pew Research Center, 14 March 2023.
John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel, U.S. intelligence contradicts Trump’s justification for mass deportations, Washington Post, 17 April 2025.
"An alternative conclusion is that the best candidate for an American deep state, then as now, might not be a career bureaucracy obstructing the President’s mandate, but a political machine seeking to extend executive power beyond constitutional limits."
What an ominous and thought-provoking conclusion, Tom!