How Russia Can and Can't Help Obama

U.S. President Barack Obama's recent diplomatic effort to push past differences between the United States and Russia in order to seek cooperation on matters of mutual interest has a fascinating and little-known antecedent. In 1987, I received an unusual request. The Kremlin invited a group of American terrorism experts to come to Moscow. It said it wished to explore how the United States and the Soviet Union might cooperate in combating terrorism.

The idea seemed almost absurd. This was the bitter height of the Cold War. True, Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan had hit it off personally, and the two reached some surprising arms-control agreements. But personal cordiality did not extend to other areas of superpower competition.

Many U.S. analysts suspected Moscow of backing terrorist campaigns in the Middle East and Western Europe. Meanwhile, the United States was redoubling its efforts to aid the mujahedeen in driving the occupying Soviet force from Afghanistan and backing Contra rebels against the Marxist Sandinistas who had, with Cuban assistance, taken over Nicaragua. Each side was accusing the other of sponsoring terrorism.

For 15 years I had been directing the RAND Corporation's research on terrorism, and though skeptical of the view that all the world's terrorists were linked to a command post in the Kremlin, neither did I see the Soviet Union as the United States' most likely ally in combating terrorism.

Wary of walking into a propaganda ploy, I sought advice from Washington. Officials at the State Department informed me that the U.S. government wouldn't touch the Moscow meeting with a 10-foot pole, but as a private citizen, I could do whatever I wanted (and if I went ahead, U.S. officials were very interested in what the Soviets were up to).

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Only somewhat reassured, I decided to participate, but urged that a pre-meeting meeting be held with Soviet organizers to establish ground rules. We would assemble as private citizens, not national representatives. There would be no public pronouncements. No signed communiqués. No photo ops. If the Soviets insisted on ideological debates, these would be held only at 2 a.m., and attendance would be optional. The Soviets agreed, and our first meeting was set for early 1988.

Led by John Marks, a former State Department intelligence official, we traveled under the auspices of Search for Common Ground, a daring but respected nongovernmental organization. Our team included among others, Robert Kupperman, former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; Geoffrey Kemp, former assistant to President Reagan for national security affairs; John Murphy from Villanova Law School; Augustus Richard Norton, then a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Marguerite Millhauser, a conflict resolution attorney; and Robin Wright, a reporter who had written a splendid book about Middle Eastern terrorism. We were joined later by former CIA Director William Colby and Ray Cline, a former CIA deputy director. The Soviet team included officials from various ministries, academies, and institutes, as well as KGB officers who said they were retired.

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GARO

9:41 PM ET

August 26, 2009

Nobody will believe it.

The author of this article should know that it is very difficult to tell a lie and convince the readers. We live in the era of the internet. The 80's are long gone.

JAY GETTY

12:26 AM ET

August 27, 2009

I predicted the downfall, by popular uprising, of the government

Operating out of Moscow by 1980; and delivered that analysis to Congress in June 1986; and I have responses from the Senate. In the long version of that same paper, I predicted that if we did not democratize the governments of South Asia, a terrorist organization would over through one of them. I have the copyright on "long lasting war and sell lots of weapons" (long war) under the heading "Syrious Business" delivered to every member of Congress in 1991. I wrote the strategy for avoiding this war in 1978; and it is still the basis for winning the war today; no it has not been adopted yet. By 1999 I was visiting New York “to see that beautiful city before the terrorist hit the World Trade Center” and I refused to go south of 40th Street. In 1989, before the Berlin Wall fall, I delivered to every member of Congress the specific prediction that Gorbachev would be running around selling his books for “American dollars only”. By June 2003 I wrote the outcome of the Iraq war. I am nobody and it is/was/remains just that obvious and predictable. I can tell you without hesitation that this war is only a weapons deal and that it has barely got started; That is just how they laughed at all of the above! If anyone asks, I will tell you how to win this war!

In hindsight, KGB analysts and Soviet officials were extraordinarily prescient about the perils of Islamist terrorism and the fallout from the Afghan jihad. But could Russia, for all its faults and foibles, be a more valuable counterterrorism partner today?

BY BRIAN MICHAEL JENKINS | AUGUST 26, 2009

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