There were a number of strange things about the attempted Soviet coup of August 1991, some of which were discussed in mainstream press organs like Newsweek, but other questions remain unasked, much less answered.
One question is why Gorbachev didn't see it coming. As Newsweek says, "For nearly a year conservative hard-liners had all but flaunted their mutinous designs" (9/2/91:22). Gorbachev must have been "blind, arrogant, or just played out" not to have foreseen what would happen.
Another possibility, mentioned in the Soviet press, is that Gorbachev was in on it:
"Commersant [a Moscow business weekly] published an investigative article asking why the plotters had left Gorbachev with his own well-armed security guards. ... Other mysteries remained. Why did Gorbachev have access to his video camera, with which he was able to tape a clandestine message to the outside world?" (9/9/91:14).
A good question. The videotape conveniently documents Gorbachev's having been opposed to the coup and his refusal to cooperate with the plotters. Was he moved to do this before or after he heard the news of the resistance on the radio? And how did his people manage to get hold of the radios and manage to keep them? NW's explanation is lame: "Despite some Soviets' suspicions, the lapses seemed to be just another series of scenes in the Coup of Errors" (9/9/91:14).
Other incredibly amateurish scenes in this "coup of errors" included the following (9/2/91):
1. The plotters "missed" arresting Yeltsin at home by 40 minutes (p. 25).
2. They failed to disconnect the telephones, so that Yeltsin was able to talk with people all over the country and the world, including President Bush (p. 26). "All international telephone calls to Moscow are patched through one switch, but the junta didn't have it cut" (p. 27).
3. They allowed reporters to roam "through the Russian parliament building with cellular phones, letting millions of Soviet citizens know that it was not too late to resist" (p. 27).
4. They "left the power on at key resistance points," allowing the continued use of faxes and photocopiers to spread news of the resistance (p. 27).
5. They failed to stop cable traffic. They "ordered gunmen to the front door of the Telegraph Office, but forgot to order the director not to send out cables" (p. 27).
6. They failed to stop radio and television transmission. They didn't disable the transmitter in the Russian parliament where Yeltsin's broadcasts were picked up by Western stations and relayed throughout the Soviet Union (p. 26) and "allowed CNN to broadcast while other international correspondents reported freely throughout the crisis" (p. 27). "Soviets denounced the coup live on Western networks, but its leaders never shut down Moscow's main satellite relay station or jammed radio broadcasts" (p. 27).
NW suggests that the reason for these failures is that the plotters were "at least 30 years behind the times" or "may have thought that leaving communications open demonstrated moderation." If this is true, if this is the KGB that the CIA has been fighting with its time and our tax money for almost half a century, it's been a total waste. Dan Quayle could have handled the problem more competently.
NW asked acting CIA Director Richard Kerr to comment. Kerr said, "This doesn't look like a professional coup. Something's wrong here" (9/2/91:27). This is an interesting statement. Too bad NW wasn't curious enough to ask him what he meant by it. That the KGB are amateurs? Surely not. That was something funny going on? That it was not what it appeared to be? That it was a hoax–an intentional failure? Perhaps.
We note that NW is not averse to conspiracy theorizing, much as they deride the practice in others, as long as the suspected conspirators are on the other side. NW notes that the "rank and file" of the Alpha Group, the special KGB commando squad that was supposed to storm the Russian White House, "unanimously decided to disobey," which could mean that "a split between the KGB's older leaders and its younger officers may have crippled the coup." This led Mikhail Golovatov, who took over the command of Alpha Group after the coup failed, to say their "refusal to obey has saved the country from civil war." NW comments: "Maybe, maybe not. Disinformation, after all, is the mother's milk of the KGB."
There is no follow-up to this comment, and it's easy to miss, buried in the middle of the article, but it contains a full-blown conspiracy theory. If the idea of the young KGB officers disobeying orders to finish the coup is "disinformation," NW is telling us that they must have been following orders from somebody else, and that this somebody else wanted the coup to fail. Who could this somebody else be? The "new guard" of the KGB? If so, what is the difference between them and the CIA? No one is served better by the failure of the coup and the demise of the "old guard" KGB than the CIA.
We are thus given the impression of a completely new KGB, who are not only Russian heroes but international heroes, now working in harmony with the CIA, Mossad and all the other heroic Western intelligence agencies. Vadim Bakatin, the post-coup head of the KGB, apparently told NW that the KGB "should now restrict its role to being a foreign intelligence agency–something like the CIA" (9/2/91:18). This is indirect speech, so it is not clear whether the last part of the sentence comes from Bakatin or NW, but both know perfectly well that neither the CIA nor the KGB has ever restricted itself to "foreign intelligence," i.e. information-gathering. NW knows the KGB's "legion of spies, snoops and thugs" have their counterparts in the CIA, but it prefers to accommodate the "voice in the wilderness" image of the CIA–as information specialists trying to see the world as it really is.
The image of the CIA as a "rogue elephant" (the late Senator Frank Church's coinage) is not entirely accurate either. A better metaphor for the Beast of Langley would be the fox. Better yet: Jekyll and Hyde. Dr. Jekyll (Intelligence) gathers information and gives advice, while Mr. Hyde (Operations) does secretly what is often exactly the opposite of what Jekyll says openly or officially. In order to maintain a secret police–and secret government–within the mythological framework of an open, democratic society, anti-democratic institutions such as the CIA must be schizophrenic. In an authoritarian society such as the former Soviet Union, things are less complicated. Everybody knows about and fears the secret police, which, of course, is part of the government. The people have a clearly adversarial relationship with it and with the government as a whole. In our society, though we have comparably secret and unscrupulous forces ensconced within the structures of government, it is essential to maintain the illusion that we do not. Hence NW's disingenuous naivety, aimed at protecting this illusion.
For example, NW says the CIA (as Dr. Jekyll) told everybody that the coup was going to happen, in plenty of time. "But until tanks rolled in the streets of Moscow, the White House and the State Department insisted that Gorbachev could weather any challenge" (9/2/91:29). How extraordinary that Bush, an ex-director of the CIA, should ignore his own intelligence. Why did he? And why does NW fail to ask this question? When the tanks did roll into Moscow, at 6 a.m. Moscow time on Monday, August 19, Yanayev announced the state of emergency. Here is another puzzle. NW says that Brent Scowcroft awakened Bush with this news at 11:45 p.m. EST (August 18) after hearing it on CNN. If this is how well the president and his National Security Advisor are informed, the nation's security is in bad shape. 11:45 p.m. EST (Aug. 18) would be 7:45 a.m. Moscow time (Aug. 19), which means the first the president heard of what was going on was an hour and a half after it was announced to the world! This is not credible. Furthermore, U.S. spy satellites, which can read the license plates on Soviet cars, would have had no difficulty spotting the tanks moving toward Moscow long before they actually arrived and Yanayev made his announcement. Yet we are asked to believe that neither Bush nor Scowcroft knew anything until Scowcroft saw it on TV.
This picture of Bush and Scowcroft being surprised in their pyjamas (then going back to bed) an hour and a half after the coup was announced further strains credibility when both of them assure us that at no time during the three-day coup was there any danger regarding Soviet nuclear weapons. The government and the nuclear trigger fingers of the second most powerful nation in the world, America's greatest enemy for the past 45 years, change hands, not once, but twice, in three days, and Bush says "There was no reason to be concerned" ((9/2/91:41), with similar assurances from Scowcroft and Powell. Even NW questions this, saying the coup leaders certainly could have launched nuclear weapons or credibly threatened to do so during the three days they were in power (9/2/91:41). This is only common sense. But the question NW does not ask, and the more interesting one, is: How did Bush & Co. know there was "no reason to be concerned"?
On the one hand, Bush was supposedly taken completely by surprise by the coup, having ignored his own intelligence. On the other hand, despite this great surprise, US intelligence was presumably good enough, and credible enough, to reassure the president, so he could reassure the public, that there was never any danger of a nuclear crisis. This is a jarring contradiction. How could the CIA know what was going on in the minds of the coup leaders? How could they have known that there was nothing to worry about? The entire Cold War was built on a foundation of infinite mistrust, and now, with the Soviet Union suddenly back in the hands of the old guard, there is no call for alarm? Again, NW does not ask.
If NW can suspect that the coup was a KGB hoax, we are certainly entitled to wonder if it was a hoax engineered by the CIA in conjunction with rebel elements in the KGB. The objective would be transparent–exactly what has happened. The communist party, the KGB, and the Soviet Union itself are destroyed. If anything could have convinced Western corporations that this huge new market is now safe for investment, this was it. A month before the coup, the US, Britain and Japan "vetoed an appeal by Gorbachev for $20 billion to $30 billion in new Western capital, saying the money would go to waste unless the Soviets carry out market reforms first" (9/2/91:38). The abortive coup broke the dam, and now the bucks are flowing.