The Power of the Word

 

A few years ago, I wrote a column about Lara Prescott’s book, The Secrets We Kept, a novel about CIA’s successful efforts in the late 1950’s to bootleg Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which Novy Mir had refused to publish.  CIA arranged for the first Russian-language edition, and snuck back it into the USSR, hoping to embarrass the Kremlin.  They got more than they hoped for when Pasternak won the Nobel Prize but was discouraged (to put it mildly) from accepting.  For the Soviet Union, it was a public-relations disaster, the engines of terror fearful of a poet.  The story is fiction, but the context, the history, is genuine.  Zhivago opened a crack in the monolith.

Here’s another one.  An account of a CIA covert program with the codename HELPFUL, which is about the projection of soft power.  The author is Charlie English, and the story he tells is called The CIA Book Club.  The idea behind the operation is that reading unregimented literature, books that question the orthodoxy or the received wisdom, can unlock the curious mind.  Not just Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, but Kurt Vonnegut, and Agatha Christie, and Albert Camus.

The focus is Poland in the 1980’s, and interestingly, the book-smuggling effort parallels the rise of Solidarity.  CIA was not directly involved with Solidarity – they were careful to maintain deniability – but they channeled money to the movement, through third parties.  The book thing, though, was more indirect.  It was an opposition of ideas, or of culture, in a generic, popular sense: not Plato’s Republic so much as current issues of Cosmopolitan.  There was, yes, an element of cultural imperialism, Charlie English admits, but the impulse was to show a life outside the Iron Curtain, to show that there was an opportunity for that life, beyond Soviet domination.

It’s a significant distinction.  Not that the lure of a life in Peoria is a better shopping experience than you’d find in Warsaw, an unlimited inventory of Air Jordans, but that Warsaw could aspire to a larger life.  That through reading, through an act of imagination, the act of experiencing a forbidden reality, you could internalize it, you could breathe that intoxicating air.  These people didn’t want to defect, or escape, from Eastern Europe, they wanted to reinvent a community of hope.

Entertaining that future of infinite possibilities seems like a peculiarly American sensibility, Frederick Jackson Turner’s myth of the frontier, and perhaps the New World re-exported it to the Old, but it’s reductive – and condescending - to think in exceptionalist terms.  The eager readers of those books, in Poland and Moldova and Ukraine, didn’t need to be persuaded.  What they were looking for was the light at the end of the tunnel, and the CIA book smugglers opened a road map.

It’s a fascinating window on what appears to be a more innocent age, too.  I’ve always been struck by the irony, that the Soviet Union would ban books, and send writers to mental hospitals, or the Gulag, and in the U.S., we’d let market forces do the work.  Behind the Iron Curtain, you took a Pasternak or a Milovan Djilas seriously; here, you’d simply let them die of neglect. 

It speaks to the power of the written word, even in this degraded information environment, that we can look back at this footnote to the Cold War, and realize wistfully that books lit the match.  They were refuge, and rescue, and the last, best hope of the future. 

The Last Roadside Attraction

  

The last Howard Johnson’s in America closed this June, in Lake George, up in the Adirondacks.  There was one in Lake Placid, too, but it went under in 2015.  The following year the second-to-last, in Bangor, Maine, turned out the lights.  Once upon a time, they were a fixture across the U.S. and Canada, familiar roadside stops – there was one in Times Square - now as forgotten as the passenger pigeon.

 

They started out in Quincy, Mass., a drugstore with a soda fountain, and Howard – there was in fact a Howard – came up with a better ice cream recipe, higher butterfat, and made a killing.  The first restaurant followed.  He franchised a second down in Orleans, on Cape Cod, and popularized the fried clam “strip” (the foot, minus the belly) which became industry standard. 

 

He weathered the stock market crash in 1929, but WWII rationing nearly put him out of business.  He saved himself with War Department contracts to serve food in Army commissaries.  Then he went after state turnpikes, which had tolls, limited access, and service plazas.  He locked up Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Connecticut.  It was the first major nationwide chain.

 

Me, what I remember, is driving up to Maine in the summer, and back in the 1950’s, before the turnpike to Augusta, you took Route 1, along the coast.  Somewhere along the way – I’m guessing a little way north of Portsmouth, NH, or Portland - my dad would pull into the HoJo’s.  I was crazy for the hot dogs, because they nicked them with a knife, so they swelled and popped open on the grill, and they buttered the outside of the rolls, and toasted them on the grill.  It came in a paper sleeve, and you could dress it up in yellow mustard and dill relish, and not have the whole slippery thing slide into your lap.  And of course we got ice cream sodas.  

 

An interesting thing happened, though, in the 1950’s, Brown v. Board of Education.  Howard Johnson’s, and Woolworth’s, both had a lot of outlets in the American South.  Woolworth lunch counters in the South were segregated; they wouldn’t serve black patrons.  Same with Howard Johnson’s.  The fact that these were franchise operations, not corporate, made no nevermind.  There was economic leverage applied.  I used to go to the Woolworth’s in Harvard Square.  They sold everything from notions to tropical fish you took home in plastic bag, but now, I wasn’t supposed to go the lunch counter.  A boycott had been organized, in sympathy with the sit-ins to integrate Southern lunch counters.  Then a Howard Johnson’s in Delaware made the national news when they refused service to a visiting diplomat from Ghana, and there was more than enough embarrassment to go around, the Eisenhower administration trying to build bridges to the Third World as a counterweight to Soviet influence, and Jim Crow making them out to be hypocrites. 

 

It’s a little strange, and not a little scary, that we can connect that ten-year-old kid with his hot dog and an ice cream soda to a larger and more ambiguous circumstance, the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the struggle for personal respect and ordinary decency, and the realization that political change is both local and glacial, but that experience was in fact one of my earliest encounters with the wider world – an understanding that the boundaries I took to be solid as stone, family, neighborhood, tribe, were as brittle as glass, and afforded no protection.  The world could break in.  There were more than twenty-eight flavors.  The story we believed was a comforting construct, a fiction we’d chosen, just one among many. 

I don’t know that it made me apprehensive, so much.  More of an insight, that this was the world grown-ups inhabited, all day and every day.  It was a small glimpse of wisdom.

But still, admittedly, a lot to read into a hot dog. 

Performance Anxiety

Talking to a guy I know – we’ll call him Mike – who was once upon a time in the same trade I was, and who still has skin in the game, I wondered what he thought about how badly the Russians have stepped on their dicks in Ukraine.  There were in fact two parts to the question: why Russia has underperformed so fatally, and why Western intelligence so overestimated their war-fighting capacity beforehand.

Mike happened to be on his way to Ft. Huachuca for a workshop, or a briefing, or a roundtable, at the least a guarded conversation with some other stakeholders on this very subject, so he already had his ducks lined up, and was ready to share them. 

The chief impediment is that Russian command authority is rigidly hierarchal.  The culture and doctrine are top down.  Initiative is career suicide.  And the weakest link is simply that there’s no professional NCO class, not in the sense that an American combat soldier would understand.  Russian junior enlisted are cannon fodder; their sergeants are brutal, indifferent, and corrupt.  Morale is clearly in the toilet, unit cohesion near collapse. 

Where, then, did the intelligence consensus come from, that the Russians were going to kick ass in Ukraine?  Mike had an answer for that one, too.  We put a lot of faith in the hardware.  That’s because intelligence analysis mirrors our own presumptions.  In other words, NSA looks at the performance specs for, say, the MiG-31, and the obvious question is how it stacks up against the F-16.  Same thing with tanks, or infantry weapons: the AK-47 is one of the most copied guns in the world.  Our attention is fixed on the platform.  Mike’s point being that less weight was given to the personnel, the existing skillset of the pilots or the tank crews or the ground-pounders, or in support.

Like a lot of things, once you hear the explanation, you slap your forehead and tell yourself it makes perfect sense.  Nor do I think it’s Monday-morning quarterbacking.  For me, it actually conforms to what I learned back in Berlin, in the 1960’s, during the Cold War, when our target was the Soviet occupying forces in Eastern Europe, and the Warsaw Pact.  Poland and East Germany and Hungary and the other satellites were being trained by Russians, on Russian equipment, so there was a lot of overlap. 

The reason we were there, if I haven’t made it clear before, or if you’re new to this space, was to provide a basic profile of what the Russians could throw at us.  In military vocabulary, it’s called an Order of Battle.  A specific example might be: How many aircraft are at Zossen Wunsdorf? - Are they fighters or ground attack? – And how many pilots? - What’s their readiness posture?  This is all numbing detail, but it kept the Cold War from going hot.

Here’s why I don’t think the Russians have learned anything in fifty years.  Back in the day, they had sophisticated systems and platforms, but they didn’t trust them, or they didn’t trust their people, which adds up to the same.  They scrambled fighters, for drills, using Ground-Controlled Intercept, or GCI.  MiG-21’s and Yak-28’s were fitted with on-board pursuit radars, and a ground station tracking their targets could transmit encrypted signals directly from the ground radar to the pursuit radar on the aircraft, and the radar would vector the plane to target, all done electronically.  Hands off.  Fire and forget.  We, meaning your humble servant and his crowd, were listening to the pilot chatter, we could image the Russian ground radar, we could follow the encrypted signals, we intercepted the frequency shifts from the aircraft’s radar and knew when it went from Lock to Launch.  In effect, we were in the cockpit, too.  And not a single one of those pilots, or their command structure on the ground, believed the system would work on its own.  Every instruction the pilots got, every course correction that was transmitted, over a secure network, the pilot would repeat, in the clear, on Voice.  “Roger that, turning to heading 270.”  At which point you watched him on radar, changing course to 270.  I kid you not.  And you wonder why Russian generals are getting blown out of their shoes in Ukraine?  They’re using open comms.

I think there are other reasons for what’s going on.  I think the Ukrainian defense is heroic.  Volodymyr Zelensky has bigger balls than Vladimir Putin.  And the resolve from NATO has been unexpectedly solid.  But at its most basic level, the Russian disaster is a character flaw.  Arrogance defeats empires.