, few state planners believed that the Soviets intended to confront the West militarily. George Kennan, head of U.S. State Department planning, could not have been clearer when he argued in 1947 that "it is not Russian military power which is threatening us, it is Russian political power."
This is a theme that runs through the state documentary record. Vietnam, for example, is considered the defining event of the cold war: a collision between communist expansion in Southeast Asia and the U.S. determination to stop it. In reality, the CIA found that evidence of "Kremlin-directed conspiracy" could be found "in virtually all countries except Vietnam," which appeared to be "an anomaly." (Noam Chomsky, Year 501.) According to Major Patti of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA), stationed in Hanoi in 1945, the Vietnamese at that time were possessed of "an extraordinary pro-American spirit that was everywhere at the birth of Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam." (John Pilger, Heroes) The Vietnamese, Patti reports, "didn’t regard America as an imperial power. They thought we were different from the Europeans and they were desperate not to be associated with international communism, not with the Chinese or Russians, but with us in America."
Ho Chi Minh’s repeated and impassioned appeals (as many as 12) to President Roosevelt and other senior U.S. officials for U.S. support for Vietnamese independence received no written reply<@151>only the subsequent delivery of some 3.9 million tons of bombs on the South Vietnamese "ally" alone.
Elsewhere, in 1954, referring to the "Communist threat" in Guatemala, U.S. Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, thanked "the loyal citizens of Guatemala who, in the face of terrorism and violence and against what seemed insuperable odds, had the courage and the will to eliminate the traitorous tools of foreign despots." (Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti)
In the real world: "No shred of evidence ever turned up after the [Guatemalan] coup establishing a secret tie to the Soviets." (Kinzer and Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit; Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network)
In similar vein, one of the most reputable analysts of British foreign policy, Ritchie Ovendale, noted with regards to the British intervention in Malaya, that Britain was "fighting the communist terrorists to enable Malaya to become independent and help itself…to prevent the spread of communism and resist Russian expansion."
Malaya, in fact, was deemed the "greatest material prize in South-East Asia," for which independence from Western control was not an option. As to the "communist terrorists," according to the Colonial Office four years after the beginning of the emergency. "No operational links have been established as existing" between Malaya and Soviet or Chinese communists, with no material support being offered.
Wherever we look during the cold war we find that the perception of the Soviet military threat expressed in high-level secret documents is very different from that which was claimed to be perceived. The Middle East, for example, was, in popular mythology, at permanent risk of a Soviet push to the Persian Gulf. In July 1950, the British Chiefs of staff noted that "the success of indirect or subversive action by the Soviet government…in any of the Arab states or in Israel is improbable in the immediate future." The threat of direct Soviet action was not even deemed worth discussing. The U.S. State Department noted in 1950 that communist parties were "non-existent in Yemen and Saudi Arabia; outlawed in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon and apparently unorganised in Jordan." Indeed "throughout the Arab states, at the present time, extreme rightist or ultra-nationalist elements may exercise greater influence and form a greater threat to the maintenance of a pro-Western orientation than the communists."
Astonishing though it may seem for someone exposed to the propaganda blitz of the post-war period, the same is true of Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, Iran, British Guinea, and any number of other places where attacks wer