French Spy Movie Celebrates Ronald Reagan As One Of Heroes Of Cold War
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Cinematic Fiction
Farewell, A Vaguely Accurate Portrayal of the Cold War
by Steve Sailer on July 27, 2010
We won the Cold War two decades ago. Do we yet know why?
As T.S. Eliot noted in Gerontion, “History has many cunning passages,
contrived corridors…” In 1945, Winston Churchill banned all mention of
the immense Ultra project that had broken the Nazi Enigma code.
Ultra’s 1974 declassification rewrote the history of WWII. Hence,
there’s time for new insights into the conflict with Communism to
emerge.
The Cold War offers a trove of gripping and unfamiliar stories.
Slowly, European filmmakers have begun turning their attention to the
biggest story that happened on their continent from 1946-1991. For
example, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film about Stasi
surveillance in East Germany, The Lives of Others, was, to my mind,
the best movie of 2006.
Farewell, an engrossing French spy movie in which Ronald Reagan is one
of the heroes, is perhaps the finest film of this year. Veteran
character actor Fred Ward (astronaut Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff)
plays Reagan in a supporting role, while Willem Dafoe (the Green
Goblin in the first Spider-Man film) portrays his CIA director William
Casey.
Farewell makes the audacious claim that our Cold War victory was
substantially hastened by a lone KGB colonel codenamed “Farewell.” In
1981, Vladimir Vetrov, a fed-up Russian engineer, began copying KGB
technology documents and delivering them to the French equivalent of
the FBI. Socialist François Mitterrand, who had been elected president
that year with the help of the Moscow-controlled French Communist
Party, demonstrated his anti-Communist bona fides by personally
passing along the “Farewell Dossier” to Reagan on July 19, 1981.
In French director Christian Carion’s Farewell, Vetrov (somewhat
fictionalized as “Sergei Gregoriev”) is played with perpetual
bemusement at his world-historical role by the charismatic Serbian
director Emir Kusturica.
The Francophile KGB man didn’t ask his French contact for money, just
for a few Parisian luxuries to remind himself of the halcyon years
he’d spent spying in France. And some Queen albums for his beloved
teenaged son, an engineering prodigy for whom Vetrov wanted a country
of “careers open to talent” rather than Brezhnev’s regime of
hereditary privilege and incompetence.
“In 1982, Vetrov handed over the names of hundreds of Soviet
industrial espionage agents operating in the West. In the film, the
Americans gain confidence from Farewell that they can win the Cold War
through technology competition.
Vetrov did not betray hard-earned Soviet technological advances. By
the 1980s, there weren’t many. Instead, he revealed that—to an extent
that surprised even Reagan—the Soviets were remaining competitive in
the Cold War only by purloining Western breakthroughs.
This had been subject to debate within American intelligence circles
for years. The mainstream CIA view was that the Soviet planned economy
was a formidable rival, a model of rational centralization. Heretics
such as Stefan Possony and Jerry Pournelle countered that from what
they could see in satellite photos, the Soviet Union was actually
“Bulgaria with missiles.”
Farewell was mostly filmed in the grand heart of Czarist Moscow, so
what the movie shows us of Russia looks pretty good. Moscow’s endless
suburbs of shoddy worker’s housing projects are omitted, making the
cinematography easier on the eyes, but obscuring what seems to have
been a key point of Vetrov’s motivation.
In reality, as P.J. O’Rourke reported after taking a 1982 Nation
magazine cruise down the Volga with nostalgic old American lefties,
“The place just wears you out after a while. There is not a square
angle or a plumb line in all the country. Every bit of concrete is
crumbling from too much aggregate in the mix, and everything is made
of concrete.” Vetrov is depicted as a Russian patriot motivated less
by ideology than by a proud nerd’s disgust that the Party, which had
put the first man in space when he was young, could now only come up
with new ideas through theft.
In 1982, Vetrov handed over the names of hundreds of Soviet industrial
espionage agents operating in the West. They were rolled up, leaving
the Soviets flying blind.
In the film, the Americans gain confidence from Farewell that they can
win the Cold War through technology competition. We see a young
Mikhail Gorbachev watching Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech. In
reaction, Gorbachev conspires with an alarmed Air Force general to
shake up the Soviet system.
Perhaps to simplify an already complex plot, Farewell omits the
amusing sabotage campaign organized by Gus Weiss of the National
Security Administration. He explained in 1996: “Contrived computer
chips found their way into Soviet military equipment, flawed turbines
were installed on a gas pipeline… The Soviet Space Shuttle was a
rejected NASA design.” There’s a rumor that American disinformation
caused an immense explosion in a Soviet natural gas pipeline in 1982.
How much of this is true? It’s well documented. But are the documents
disinterested? (Mitterrand came to believe it was a CIA plot to test
his loyalty.) As of 2010, all I can be sure of is CIA
counterintelligence czar James Jesus Angleton’s observation that
spycraft is, in Eliot’s metaphor, a “wilderness of mirrors.”
MichaelW
can it?
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tomcervo
> I love spy movies, but if Reagan is made a hero, it can't be very accurate,
> can it?
>
More than you might think. Once Reagan got into the White House and
learned the full enormity of the possibilities of nuclear war, he
spared no effort to reduce its chances, ignoring the hard-liners to
negotiate nuclear reduction treaties.
The irony being that the same measures advocated by Obama have got
geniuses like Palin and Limbaugh screaming that he's trying to sell us
out the the Russians.
RichA
The left-wing VERMIN still gnash their teeth when they remember it was
Reagan, Pope JPII and Margaret Thatcher who were highly instrumental
in winning the Cold War for the West and helping end Soviet communism.
MichaelW
Pope John Paul supported pedophiles, Reagan dealt in drugs and Thatcher
fought a silly war against a country on the other side of the globe.
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Tom
Actually, in the numerous reports written and aired during the time of
President Ford's death, most Presidential historians agreed it was he
who laid the foundations for ending the Cold War.
Stick to Canadian history, Rich, it's much simpler and more suited to
your I.Q.
Tom
Phlip
You forgot the Nicaraguan Contras. Their coke deals with Ollie North
helped win the Cold War, too!
MichaelW
needed to blow up the twin Towers a decade later.
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Father Haskell
> http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/farewell_a_vaguely_accurate_port...
>
> Cinematic Fiction
Bonzo goes to Bitburg
Ray Fischer
>The left-wing VERMIN still gnash their teeth when they remember it was
Quite the racist nazi, aren't you?
--
Ray Fischer
rfis...@sonic.net
... .- - .- -.
Reagan did, another triumph.
"Tom" <drs...@aol.com> wrote in message
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Tom
--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ne...@netfront.net ---
Rightists are vermin
>
>
> The left-wing VERMIN still gnash their teeth when they remember it was
> Reagan, Pope JPII and Margaret Thatcher who were highly instrumental
> in winning the Cold War for the West and helping end Soviet communism.
>
Ignorant right wing canadian fool. You never finished high school, so how
could you possibly have any expertise on American history. Stick to pushing
broom for a living and renting your body to bikers for gay sex.
Reagan Cold War Myth
Under the assumption that the Soviet Union could not then outspend the US
government in a renewed arms race, Reagan strove to make the Cold War
economically and rhetorically hot. Many analysts argue that the eventual
collapse of the Soviet Union was due more to the re-emergence of separatist
movements under glasnost, an inherent weakness in communist economic theory,
and the depressed global price of crude oil, on which the Soviet economy
during those years depended heavily. Furthermore, Reagan's much heralded
military buildup that increased American military spending by 8% per annum in
fact did not appear to have the planned effect of forcing the Soviets to
mirror American growth: according to CIA estimates, Soviet military spending
leveled off at a growth rate of 1.3% per annum in 1975 and remained at that
level for a decade, although it more than tripled to approximately 4.3% in
1985 through 1987 (though spending on offensive strategic weapons continued
to grow at 1.3% during that period), before returning to 1.3% in 1988.
Perhaps more startling, Reagan's military build up, coupled with his fierce
anti-soviet rhetoric, contributed to Soviet near-panic reaction to a routine
NATO exercises in November 1983, ABLE ARCHER 83. Though the threat of nuclear
war ended abruptly with the end of the exercise, this historically obscure
incident illustrates the possible negative repercussions of Reagan's
"standing tall" to a nuclear power. Some historians, among them Beth B.
Fischer in her book The Reagan Reversal, pin ABLE ARCHER 83 as an incident
which had a profound effect on President Reagan and his turn from a policy of
Confrontation towards the Soviet Union to a policy of rapprochement.
RichA
small part by the Democrat war, Vietnam. Reagan restarted growth.
Reagan drove down interest rates. Reagan helped end the Cold War.
Reagan made Americans feel better (especially compared to now). All
in all, he was a frigging GREAT president.
treadleson
> http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/farewell_a_vaguely_accurate_port...
>
>
> Farewell, A Vaguely Accurate Portrayal of the Cold War
----
Very interesting. My understanding, slight though it may be, is that
the big reasons for the downfall were Glasnost, Reagan's medium range
missiles, Afghan war, Solidarity, and the Pope. And this guy, I
guess.
Reagan and W. Europeans governments helped destabilize Soviet Union by
supporting Solidarity, supporting Afghan rebels, and changing nuclear
balance on the continent. That's quite a bit for a few short years.
But Gorbachev inadvertently opened a Pandora's box with glasnost
because the system was unable to tolerate seeing the degree of
corruption and criminality that suddenly came pouring out in this
sudden, new openness. As I understand it, this was a case where
"transparency" won the day, and now there was no longer any way to
make a legitimate case for maintaining that system.
Antonio E. Gonzalez
wrote:
>
>
>The left-wing VERMIN still gnash their teeth when they remember it was
>Reagan, Pope JPII and Margaret Thatcher who were highly instrumental
>in winning the Cold War for the West and helping end Soviet communism.
Ummm, his name's Gorbachev . . .
--
- ReFlex76
trotsky
I've got a sneaking suspicion that Rich was a hardcore user of LSD at
some point.
trotsky
And when he committed felonies, he just couldn't remember anything--that
was a hoot!
Phlip
> >The left-wing VERMIN still gnash their teeth when they remember it was
> >Reagan, Pope JPII and Margaret Thatcher who were highly instrumental
> >in winning the Cold War for the West and helping end Soviet communism.
>
> Ummm, his name's Gorbachev . . .
Nonono, Gorbachev was the commie who LOST the Cold War, when St Reagan
(riding a white unicorn) gunned him down, at High Noon, in the Final
Battle of Communism, on the plains of Megido, near the Jordan River.
And the Russian hardliners who tried to coup-d'etat Gorbachev - they
were on OUR SIDE. But he got away, and straight into Reagan's trap!
I heard all that on these newsgroups, so it must be true!
Phlip
> Reagan and W. Europeans governments helped destabilize Soviet Union by
> supporting Solidarity, supporting Afghan rebels, and changing nuclear
> balance on the continent. That's quite a bit for a few short years.
The SU was already economically unstable.
(In general, the reason we oppose communism is not because it's evil,
but because IT DOESN'T WORK. Living well is the best revenge.)
Reagan's fun and games, cited there, PROLONGED the Cold War. If the SU
had collapsed slowly, it wouldn't be the huge fascist kleptocracy it
is today.
Imagine no Vladimir Putin. If this is "winning", I would have
preferred "losing".
Father Haskell
> Reagan and W. Europeans governments helped destabilize Soviet Union by
> supporting Solidarity, supporting Afghan rebels
including bin Laden. Would probably have been better to have
let the Soviets stay.
Phlip
And Reagan could have stopped Carter's policy of encouraging Afghan
extremists to murder their moderate political rivals.
Antonio E. Gonzalez
wrote:
> Reagan: Destroyed inflation after 8 years,
One thing he should get credit for, though even this might have
eventually taken care of itself . . .
inflation caused in no
>small part by the Democrat war, Vietnam.
Eisenhower was no Democrat . . .
>Reagan restarted growth.
Only if you made $200,000 a year or more; pretty stagnant for
everyone below . . .
>Reagan drove down interest rates.
Not necesarily a good thing (see S&L fraud under him) . . .
>Reagan helped end the Cold War.
Sure, like the appendix "helps" the digestive tract . . .
>Reagan made Americans feel better (especially compared to now).
Plenty of Americans feel great now, especially with the current
President!
All
>in all, he was a frigging GREAT president.
Not so much!
--
- ReFlex76
tomcervo
Don't forget, he also invented sunlight, and big tits.
treadleson
> On Jul 31, 11:36 pm, treadleson <treadl...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Reagan and W. Europeans governments helped destabilize Soviet Union by
> > supporting Solidarity, supporting Afghan rebels, and changing nuclear
> > balance on the continent. That's quite a bit for a few short years.
>
> The SU was already economically unstable.
>
> (In general, the reason we oppose communism is not because it's evil,
> but because IT DOESN'T WORK. Living well is the best revenge.)
----
> Reagan's fun and games, cited there, PROLONGED the Cold War. If the SU
> had collapsed slowly, it wouldn't be the huge fascist kleptocracy it
> is today.
This scenario reinforces the idea that Reagan "won" the cold war, an
idea that many reject. The speed with which the SU fell can probably
be attributed mainly to Solidarity and Glasnost, so it's the union and
Gorby that you probably can thank for the fascist kleptocracy. And Man
Of Marble.
moviePig
trotsky
> On Aug 1, 11:55 pm, tomcervo<tomce...@aol.com> wrote:
>> On Aug 1, 2:08 am, RichA<rander3...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Reagan: Destroyed inflation after 8 years, inflation caused in no
>>> small part by the Democrat war, Vietnam. Reagan restarted growth.
>>> Reagan drove down interest rates. Reagan helped end the Cold War.
>>> Reagan made Americans feel better (especially compared to now). All
>>> in all, he was a frigging GREAT president.
>>
>> Don't forget, he also invented sunlight, and big tits.
>
> "It's morning wood in America..."
Question: if I pissed on Reagan's grave would it be just a misdemeanor?