The term Cold War refers to the strategic and political struggle that developed after World War II between the United States and its Western European allies, on one hand, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Communist countries, on the other.

The cold war initially centered on the use of USSR military forces to install Communist governments in Eastern Europe. These Soviet actions ran counter to the U.S. government's insistence upon the right of self-determination for the peoples of Eastern Europe and raised fears that the USSR, after gaining control of Eastern Europe, would try to communize Western Europe. The USSR had suffered enormous losses in the war against Nazi Germany and looked upon Eastern Europe as a bulwark against another invasion from the West. The Soviet leaders considered U.S. objections to Soviet actions in Poland, Hungary, and Romania a betrayal of wartime understandings about spheres of influence in Europe. Thus they placed Eastern Europe behind a military and political barrier known in the West as the Iron Curtain.

Political differences were exacerbated by ideological conflict. The Marxist-Leninist Soviet leaders believed that capitalism would inevitably seek the destruction of the Soviet system. In the United States, a long-standing suspicion and dislike of communism strengthened the view that the USSR was intent on expansion and world conquest.

The Struggle over Germany
Meanwhile, competition began for control of Germany and other strategic points such as the Dardanelles, the straits linking the Black Sea with the Aegean and the Mediterranean. Soviet pressures on Greece and Turkey led President Harry Truman to declare in March 1947 that the United States would give economic and military aid to those countries and would also "support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures".

The announcement in June 1947 of the U.S. Marshall Plan to restore the faltering economies of Western Europe - including that of West Germany - prompted a series of ripostes from the Kremlin.

In February 1948 the democratic government of Czechoslovakia was overturned by a Communist coup; in May 1948 Soviet authorities severed all Western land-access routes to Berlin. Only the success of air cargo planes in supplying West Berlin, isolated within the Soviet zone of occupation that later became East Germany, permitted the United States to resist the Soviet pressure.

In 1949 the Western powers entered into a military agreement that led to the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), designed to establish a military counterweight to the Soviet forces in Europe. Meanwhile, in China, a long civil war ended with the victory of Communist forces under Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) in 1949.

War in Korea
The first phase of the cold war culminated in the North Korean invasion of South Korea on June 26, 1950, resulting in U.S. involvement in a land war in Asia.

The initial reverses of the Western forces, the subsequent introduction of Chinese troops into the conflict on the side of North Korea, and the inability of the Truman administration to bring the war to an end froze American public opinion in a state of hostility that made normal relations with any Communist government impossible.

Competing Strategies
To meet these challenges, each side fashioned a strategy. The U.S. strategy was called "containment", a term first used by the U.S. diplomat and Soviet expert George F. Kennan in arguing that Soviet expansionism might be contained by a strategy of responding to Soviet pressures and probes wherever they occurred. Kennan's thesis was strongly supported by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who called for increased military power for NATO. This policy appeared to the USSR as one more Western effort to isolate and undermine the Soviet system. The Kremlin adopted a strategy of retaliation against U.S. containment.

During the 1950s, Washington's policy was shaped by the more militant John Foster Dulles. The United States sought to anticipate and prevent further Communist gains by maintaining overwhelming military superiority, by forming new alliances in Asia (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization) and in the Middle East (the Central Treaty Organization), and by extending economic and military assistance to any country thought to be in danger of attack or subversion by Communist forces.

Relations between the two powers improved somewhat following Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. The wars in Korea and French Indochina were brought to an end, and the first postwar summit meeting of Soviet and Western leaders was held in Geneva in July 1955. But no more than a surface thaw was achieved. After Nikita Khrushchev's consolidation of power in 1956, the USSR embarked on two new strategies. The first involved economic and military competition with the United States for influence with Arab and Third-World countries such as Ghana, Egypt, India, and Indonesia. This strategy evolved into Soviet support for colonial revolutions, or "wars of national liberation", and for left-wing governments in Guatemala and Cuba. The second strategy, based upon Soviet development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, was to divide the Western powers by renewing Soviet pressure to eject the West from Berlin. In 1955 the Warsaw Treaty Organization was established as a response to the rearming of West Germany. A new round of Soviet-American confrontations ensued, all the riskier because now both sides possessed nuclear weapons. The risks were underscored by the Berlin crisis of 1961 and by the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Détente
The Limited Test Ban Treaty of Aug. 5, 1963, was a turning point in the cold war. The treaty was accorded considerable symbolic significance on both sides and seemed to signify that U.S. and Soviet leaders wanted to end a costly and risky struggle that increased the danger of a real war. The inauguration (Aug. 30, 1963) of a "hot line" for emergency communications between Washington and Moscow was a further reassurance.

Nevertheless, ideological rivalry, competition for influence, and the arms race continued between the two superpowers. U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, was at its height during the late 1960s. East and West were able, however, to negotiate in a spirit of détente. U.S. rapprochement with China occurred in the 1970s, and the arms race was slowed by the Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT) agreements of 1972 and 1974.

Estrangement and Reconciliation
Relations between the United States and the USSR deteriorated during the administration (1977-81) of U.S. president Jimmy Carter, especially after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This revival of the cold war continued in the early years of the Ronald Reagan administration, fueled by Soviet support for the Sandinista government of Nicaragua and by America's declared intention to develop an antinuclear Strategic Defense Initiative. With the rise to power of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, however, the situation began to change dramatically. Gorbachev's policies of domestic reform and reconciliation with the West led to self-determination for the satellite countries of Eastern Europe and, in 1991 - however inadvertently - the end of the Soviet system itself, which finally brought the cold war to an end.

The world emerged from a new nightmare, in the same way that it had emerged from the Nazi nightmare. This now lasted a little more. The myth that was born with the Bolshevist Revolution of 1917 persisted for almost 75 years. It was the myth of a true democracy starting from a proletarian explosion, but what really happened was the murder of a government democratically elected by an authoritarian and fanatic minority.

The Marxist-Leninist empire, maybe the most hated and fearsome of any other regime in the world, was totally dissolved, in ruins, and the world is still today, somehow, joining and reorganizing the pieces.

It can be said that the distance today between the State that was intended to be 'communist' and the countries self-denominated 'democracies', 'capitalists', or 'liberals' is smaller - that all of the western countries are becoming more communists, ruled by great multinational companies, and maybe they are becoming less democratic. It is difficult to argue, however, that Russia, Cuba, or North Korea are becoming more democratic...

DOCUMENTARY CLAIMS THAT CUBA PAID TO MURDER KENNEDY
Wednesday January 4, 2006

BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) - A new documentary slated to run on German TV this Friday uncovers new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy on behalf of the regime of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. The film also claims that the KGB recommended Oswald to Havana as the man for the job. The documentary to air later this week on German public television provides what its producers believe is the strongest evidence yet linking the regime of Fidel Castro to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It also provides a motive - sources in the film claim that Cuban intelligence agents contracted Lee Harvey Oswald, a willing drifter, to kill the president in retaliation for several foiled assassination attempts plotted by JFK's brother, then-attorney general Robert Kennedy, against Castro. "For me, the essence of the assassination has been explained", German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann said after a preview in Berlin on Wednesday of his new documentary on Kennedy's murder, "Rendezvous With Death". His movie may not be the alpha and the omega of JFK scholarship, he says, but at least he can grasp the "political context" of Kennedy's sudden death. Award-winning filmmaker Huismann relies on newly declassified documents from the Mexican government as well as interviews with aging, colorful insiders from the Cuban intelligence service, G2, the FBI and a veteran American statesman.
Oscar Marino, a former Cuban secret agent who has broken with Castro, tells the camera that Havana wanted Kennedy dead because "he was an enemy of the Cuban Revolution" - a sworn and public enemy who had even sent a team of CIA-contracted militants to overthrow Castro in 1961. (That mission failed at the Bay of Pigs). "Why did we take Oswald?" he says. "There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get ... Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy". The film will air on the German public TV channel ARD on Friday and Huismann says there are currently no plans to distribute it in the United States. But if the sources are reliable, it would be a significant new corroboration of a story that has quietly made the circuit of JFK conspiracy theories ever since his assassination in 1963. General Alexander Haig, for example, thinks Kennedy's successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, "was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it to his grave". Haig served as a military adviser to Johnson and later as President Reagan's Secretary of State. He tells Huismann in the film about memos from 1963 that suggested Johnson's fear of letting the Castro-assassination story get out to the American public. Johnson's attitude, said Haig, was that "we cannot allow the American people to believe that Castro ... had killed Kennedy", because "there would be a right-wing uprising in America which would keep the Democratic Party out of power for two generations". He also may have averted World War III. Kennedy had faced down Soviet premier Nikita Krushchev over nuclear missiles in Cuba a year before, and if it turned out that Havana was behind the assassination of an American president - argued a former FBI agent named Laurence Keenan, who appears in the film and also attended the Berlin preview, most Republicans in America would have called for a "dangerous" invasion of Cuba during a delicate phase of the Cold War. "This was on their agenda", Keenan said, "ever since Castro came out of the mountains in 1959. He was a thorn in their side". Keenan, 81, is another source for Huismann. He was an FBI agent sent personally by J. Edgar Hoover to Mexico City in the days after Kennedy's assassination to investigate claims that Oswald had some connection with the Cuban embassy there. After three and a half days, he was recalled. "I was a messenger", he says in the film - intended to deliver the news to elements of the Cuban government that Washington wouldn't push the case. "It was clear I was being used. I felt ashamed", Keenan says in the film. "We missed a historical chance" to clear up the assassination. Huismann also talks to a retired surgeon in Madrid named Rolando Cubela, who became a rival of Castro's after helping him lead the 1959 revolution. In the documentary, Cubela claims the CIA contracted him to kill Castro with a poisonous fountain pen. This mission - meant to occur on Nov. 22, 1963, the very day Kennedy died - failed, and Castro is still in charge of Cuba almost 43 years later. "He bested us", says retired CIA officer Sam Helpern at the end of Huismann's film. "He came out on top. And we lost". Huismann is a German who has lived in Chile and made previous films about both Castro and Salvador Allende. He co-wrote "Rendezvous With Death" with Gus Russo, a journalist and Kennedy investigator who has studied the assassination - and Oswald's links to Cuba - for almost three decades. Russo wrote a 1993 documentary for American TV called "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?," and he published a book on Castro and Kennedy in 1998 called Live By the Sword. He says he helped Huismann find sources, but "the G2 figures were all Willi's ... It was due to his great talent and skill that they talked". Another new detail in the Russo-Huismann story is that Oswald came to Cuba's attention with Russian help. Oswald had visited Minsk, Russia in 1962, and Huismann argues that KGB agents recommended him to Havana in a telegram, found later in Soviet intelligence files. Oswald traveled to Mexico City just before the assassination, and, according to the documentary, it was there that the drifter received his orders and money from the Cubans. Members of Castro's intelligence agency, of course, deny this story as a fairy tale. General Fabian Escalante, a longtime head of Cuban state security and author of books on rival theories about the Kennedy assassination, swats back every accusation with an aggressive smile. "There are smart people who doubt the Americans really landed on the moon ... What is true", he says, "and what's a lie?"

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SOVIET UNION ORDERED POPE SHOOTING: ITALY COMMISSION
Thursday March 2, 2006

ROME, Italy (Reuters) - Leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981, an Italian parliamentary investigative commission said in a report. A final draft of the report, which is due to be presented to parliament later this month, was made available to Reuters on Thursday by the commission president, Senator Paolo Guzzanti. "This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul", the report said. "They relayed this decision to the military secret services for them to take on all necessary operations to commit a crime of unique gravity, without parallel in modern times", it said. The report also says "some elements" of the Bulgarian secret services were involved but that this was an attempt to divert attention away from the Soviet Union's alleged key role. Both Russia and Bulgaria condemned the report. A 36-page chapter on the assassination attempt was included in a wider report by parliament's Mitrokhin Commission, which probed the revelations of Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior Soviet archivist during the Cold War who defected to Britain in 1992. Pope John Paul was shot in St Peter's Square on May 13, 1981 by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca, who was arrested minutes later and convicted of attempted murder. At the time of the shooting, events in the Pope's Polish homeland were starting a domino effect which was eventually to lead to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. The Pope was a staunch supporter of Poland's Solidarity union and most historians agree he played a vital role in events that eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. At a trial in 1986, Italian prosecutors failed to prove charges that Bulgarian secret services had hired Agca to kill the Pope on behalf of the Soviet Union. "It is completely absurd", said Boris Labusov, spokesman for Russia's foreign intelligence service, the successor to the Soviet-era KGB's First Chief Directorate which operated abroad. "We are tired of denying these assertions. The report said "Bulgarian authorities at the time lied as did the witnesses they sent" and added that "responsibility of some elements" of Bulgarian secret services "certainly exists". In Sofia, the government rejected the report's assertions. "For Bulgaria, this case closed with the court decision in Rome in March 1986," Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev said. He also referred to comments made by the late Pope who said during a visit to Bulgaria in May 2002 that he never believed in the Bulgarian connection. Guzzanti, a senator in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, said the commission decided to re-open the report's chapter on the assassination attempt in 2005 after the Pope wrote about it in his last book before dying. In that book, the Pope said he was convinced the shooting was not Agca's initiative and that "someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it". Guzzanti said his commission heard from investigators in Italy and elsewhere who had probed both the assassination attempt as well as other Cold War-era crimes. He said the commission had photographic evidence that Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian cleared of conspiracy at the 1986 trial, was in St Peter's Square with Agca when the Pope was shot. The photos first emerged in the 1980s but lawyers for Antonov, who worked in the Rome office of Bulgaria's state airline, said the man was a tourist who resembled him.

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