History Glance: U.S. Security, Cohesion & the Provocation Factor
Saturday, May 30, 2009 at 07:40PM McCarthy Era
Did the Soviets feed information or suggestion that would shape Senator Joseph McCarthy into a proxy agent provocateur? Most references define the term as persons sent to provoke an opponent to engage in extreme, rash, unpopular, or excessive reactions that discredit a person or idea dangerous to the agent's employer.
The agent need not be a person, but may be information. It may be true information, employed in a way to destroy its own credibility. It may be false information, appearing true. It may be half-truth. Or in the case of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it may have been true information disclosed in a way calculated to activate McCarthy's personality type toward Soviet ends.
Without access to all classified (or destroyed) information, the McCarthy provocation argument is speculative. However it is a reasonable candidate for more research. Ten years ago, authors Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev obtained intelligence records from RARIO, Russia's Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, that suggested Joseph McCarthy's suspicions about large scale Soviet espionage efforts within the US were generally correct. Other verified information from sources such as the Mitrokhin Archive, defector Anatoly Golitsyn and comparative research by historian Christopher Andrew of the U.K., support Weinstein and Vassiliev's findings.
McCarthy's outspoken, egotistical style was consistent with persons prone to embattlement and overstatement. Central to Soviet oppression of its own dissidents were psychological manipulation techniques. Did the Soviets feed McCarthy's personality with information to activate behavior that would provoke resentment and doubt around him?
We know that McCarthy's extreme pursuit of communists all around wearied those subject to him with fear. At some point, cognitive dissonance pushed them toward disbelief in his messages, in part because of his penchant for pointing a fearful prosecutorial finger.
The Soviets knew that influential Americans were tiring of McCarthy. People wanted the fear campaign to go away with its sense of unpredictable unfairness. Those legitimately and falsely within McCarthy's crosshairs had an interest in amplifying both the extremity of the fear and the general sense of unfairness. The pressure predisposed people to want to believe McCarthy was mad, ridiculous and paranoid so that they could be released from the fear.
As few propositions can survive the ridicule or shaming of their key proponents, the public dismissed suspicion of greater magnitudes of Soviet espionage in the US after McCarthy the man was humbled.
The BBC has snippets of two speeches that tell us something about what was happening in the U.S. Senate in the thick of the Cold War. After hearing them, this discussion will turn to some eerily similar sounding rhetoric and technique from the past decade of politics and punditry in the US. Here are the two McCarthy era voices:
The US Underbelly: Twenty-Four-Seven-Campaigning a Cold War Virus?
Having listened, fast forward to recent decades in which the US has waged a Cold War within itself using a 24-7 campaign mode made possible by media technology. This takes place within the traditional media, on the internet, and through government-influenced organizations.
Take for example, the popular and heavily attended Rush Limbaugh radio show. If you listen carefully to the BBC audio link above, you can hear a resemblance between Sen. McCarthy's speaking style, tempo and occasional word choices and that of Rush Limbaugh. The comparison here is not to suggest that either man is a traitor to the US, but that each man was highly influential, had a following, and both were polarizing figures within the US despite their differing fields.
The Limbaugh video I just linked to involves an issue, the substance of which is worth thinking about: whether developments in American government are contrary to individualism. What was your response to the fact that it was Limbaugh who spoke about the status of individualism in the US? Did you either discredit or not listen to whatever he said, or, totally agree depending on your predisposition? Did you take away everything he said, or whatever confirmed your initial response to him?
The national polarization that figures such as McCarthy and Limbaugh provoke ascended to extremes in recent history, when it embroiled multiple courts and ultimately the US Supreme Court in a contested US presidential election in Bush v. Gore. The conservative court would not likely have taken the case had the specter of instability through distrust not haunted the system. The extremity of that erosion should not be underestimated as a national security factor to be addressed.
The lessons taken from divisive figures should not be too simplistic. No one should make political or analytic laws that filter out the messages of such figures based on their negative approach or history. Policy makers during the Cold War should have avoided acceptance of a McCarthy-bad slogan specifically because of the possible employment of tactical agent-provocateur (intended, programmed or incidental) from the USSR against McCarthy. Today, Limbaugh-bad slogans or those applied to liberal polemicists are also unwise if they tend not to take seriously how such broadcasted messages may be used by nations adversarial or competing with the US.
If all we know is the badness of a McCarthy or Limbaugh, we will miss out on any letters of truth they may have carried in their burning mail bags. Someone needs to take the bags from them, put out the fire and sort the mail. But focus on the bag's contents. Search these influential persons thoroughly for what they actually have, or for what their propaganda (true and / or false) means. It's belief among large audiences is itself worth analyzing. If truth-tellers are hard to find, indicators derived from them may be more helpful.
What is the rational response to a McCarthy or Limbaugh? Did you listen to the BBC link's audio of Republican Sen. Margaret Smith Chase calling for unity against the enemy, not internecine political warfare within the two-party system?
Sen. Chase spoke to the emotional fatigue of the nation over McCarthy's divisive tactics, yet she also called for unity in awareness of the Soviet espionage and military threat. Her response was a more complex non-partisan stance simply delivered. It was free of the cognitive dissonance that had been falling out all around McCarthy. It was a refreshing view wisely chosen by BBC editors in the link above.
US Politics and Cohesion
Yet what if Cold War techniques infected US politics, culture and society? Are we our own agent provocateurs in the US, driven by the ceaseless campaign model? Have we not already seen the incivility decried in McCarthy's actions amplified in recent decades? Let's analyze an example from a recent senate contest.
Agent provocateur tactics may have played out in a recent North Carolina U.S. Senate campaign. Let's look at this response by Kay Hagan against incumbent Sen. Elizabeth Dole. Hagan responded to an attack on her Christianity by incumbent opponent Senator Elizabeth Dole's campaign after Hagan reportedly met with a group called Godless Americans PAC.
This analyst wondered why Hagan, a Presbyterian elder and Sunday school teacher running for office in a majority Christian state, would seek the support of a group called the Godless Americans PAC without a plan. The answer: she didn't. This analysis disagrees with that of Bill Bennett's on the CNN Wolf Blitzer link above in which he criticized Hagan's meeting with the PAC as politically unwise.
Hagan's meeting with the PAC, intended or not, worked as an agent provocateur. It tempted Senator Dole with a juicy slam dunk argument that Hagan must be Godless herself if she met with an atheist PAC. And once that hook was set, it enabled Hagan to air the devastating response that made Dole appear grasping, mean-spirited, careless and even fraudulent. Hagan cast the bait, Dole bit, and Hagan set the hook, reeling Dole out of the sea of power. This is ugly politics, but Hagan came out looking like the true Christian. Was she?
Conclusion
The 24-7 campaign culture hearkens back to Cold War divisiveness. It raises the question: do the partisans care whether what they do and say invites results planned for by opponent regime intelligence agencies? Even in campaigns?
Tectonic ideologic and religious division are exactly those sort of topics useful to an international opponent without a shot fired. Fomenting disintegration among them from top to bottom. A house divided against itself cannot stand. Not all of the technology in the world can stop it if it becomes deeply entrenched.
US partisans have moved into all-campaigning all-the-time, a sign that U.S. identity and cohesion are under attack outside of campaign season. If a nation is constantly in campaign mode, how can it have unified legitimacy of leadership? In 2000, the elections moved into the courts. Al Franken's race for the Senate became litigation.
The existence of the two parties dominating U.S. politics has long been a tool for a pendulum-like manipulation of extreme partisan fears on both sides. The politics of fear employed by both parties is territory ripe for foreign agency exploitation. It happened to the Soviets at immense human cost. Perhaps they learned its efficacy from the Nazis during WW2.
ABP Analyst
The flap over Cambridge PD and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has become an excessive distraction to the US Presidency. Designed or not, the Cambridge situation became a provocation to the Obama Administration.
What divisions have not been exploited by two-party politics in constant campaign mode? Perhaps campaign activity would best be limited to time, place and manner just as commercial speech is. The place for specific cases and controversies over race issues to be most productively decided is through the courts and or via the Congress.
Race and ethnicity are among the most corrosive agents to the glue of a nation state. Enemies with the means will almost always exploit the propaganda value of a Cambridge incident, especially with timing so close to a scheduled Supreme Court decision on racial preferences in civil service tests. Such a schedule can be watched, planned for, and a provocation encouraged. Here, another civil service item mixed with racial tension arises on the heels of Ricci v. DeStefano. It may have been unprovoked and merely coincidental. Planned or not, it will be used.
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