From the CWIHP Director

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espite the end of the Cold War almost a decade-and-a-half | ago, its legacy still besets US foreign policy and the world at large. Cold War flashpoints, such as North Korea, Cuba, Afghanistan, and the Middle East continue to impose important challenges on the international community. Recent crises and conflicts underline the importance of gaining a better understanding of the sources of these and other countries' foreign policies, cultural patterns, and world outlooks. This issue of the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Bulletin highlights recent findings from the former Communist world and other international archives on a range of critical issues that affect us today no less than they concerned policymakers and the public during the Cold War.

Of all the United States' former Cold War adversaries, North Korea poses perhaps the most dangerous security problem. North Korea's vitriolic and seemingly unpredictable rhetorical outbursts and actions confront international policymakers on an almost daily basis, yet information on the inner workings and motivations of this highly secretive country is scarce. To address this significant information gap, this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin features a treasure trove of previously unpublished documents from erstwhile communist allies of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). The documents are the result of a special effort by the Project to mine the archives of North Korea's former allies. Coordinated by Kathryn Weathersby and funded by The Korea Foundation, the CWIHP Korea Initiative has been systematically exploring East European, Russian, and (to a lesser extent) Chinese archives for insights into perceptions and policymaking in Pyongyang. The Korea Initiative presented its first findings at a workshop hosted in conjunction with the George Washington University Cold War Group (GWCW) in March 2003 ("North Korea's Crisis Behavior, Past and Present: New Light from the Archives of its Former Allies"), at which leading Korea specialists from academia, research centers, and government agencies in the United States, the Republic of Korea and Eastern Europe provided a first analysis of the significance of the new documents on North Korea.' The newly accessible documentation bears on such questions as North Korea's reaction to aid and external pressures, the internal workings of the Kim regime and the ideological prism of the North Korean leadership. The documents were featured in a front-page article in the Christian Science Monitor in July 2003 ("Files Show a Stubborn North Korea"). As with other materials that the CWIHP Korea Initiative is uncovering, the materials are also accessible online through CWIHP's Virtual Archive.

Reading through the Afghanistan section of this Bulletin issue today remains just as eerie an experience as editing the materials by defected KGB archivist Vasiliy Mitrokhin's on "The KGB in Afghanistan" (which the Project published as CWIHP Working Paper No. 40) while the US and its allies were fighting the Taliban in late 2001 and early 2002. To assess the legacies and lessons of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in light of new evidence, CWIHP organized a major international conference on the conflict April 2002, "Towards an International History of the War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989.” Held in cooperation with the Center's Asia Program and Kennan Institute, GWCW, and the National Security Archive, the "critical oral history" meeting centered on newly released and translated US, Russian, Bulgarian, East German, Czech, and Hungarian documents on the war. Conference participants included former Soviet officials and National Security Council (NSC), State Department, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials from the Carter, Bush, and Reagan administrations, as well as schol

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arly experts from around the world. The Russian materials featured in the Afghanistan section of this issue, generously provided by Anatoly Chernyaev, A. A. Lyakhovsky, and the late Vasiliy Mitrokhin, allow fascinating insights into Soviet intelligence operations in the region, Gorbachev's relationship with Afghan communist leader Nadjibullah, and the debate over withdrawal from Afghanistan within the Kremlin. þ↑ A♫ Documents from the Bulgarian, East German, and Hungarian archives provide a glimpse at the bloc-wide repercussions of the Soviet intervention. Mitrokhin's special contribution, moreover, extends the documentary shadow of the Soviet invasion to the larger history of Soviet policy on the South Asian subcontinent.

As past issues, this Bulletin reflects the activities of the international network that constitutes the Cold War International History Project. Mark Kramer's edition of Ukrainian archival documents continues CWIHP's effort to document the spill-over effects and repercussions of crises within the Soviet empire, in this case the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.2 Svetlana Savranskaya highlights findings from the October 2002 Havana Conference on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Organized by the National Security Archive in partnership with Brown University's Watson Institute for International Affairs and Cuban institutions, the conference brought together US, Russian, and Cuban veterans of the 1962 Cuban Crisis.3 The documents introduced by Jim Hershberg and Vladislav Zubok add to CWIHP's unique corpus of Soviet documents on the Korean War. The Zhivkov Dossier, provided by Jordan Baev, is the most recent archival coup by CWIHP's Bulgarian partner, the Cold War Group Bulgaria.

The Armenian and Georgian archival documents featured in this issue are a result of CWIHP's continued cooperation with Armenian, Azeri, and Georgian (as well as US and Russian) scholars to uncover the hidden history of Soviet policies in the Southern Caucasus. They were among the materials presented at a workshop in July 2002 in the Tsinandali Conference Center in the Kakhety Valley in Georgia. The workshop was the second meeting held in the framework of the initiative, “Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan in the Cold War," launched in the summer of 1999 by the National Security Archive and CWIHP. The main goal of the project is to explore the archives in Tbilisi, Yerevan, and Baku to determine to what extent Cold War era documents, still classified in the central archives in Moscow, would be accessible there, and to bring scholars from the three republics into the larger international network of Cold War scholars."

Since the publication of the last Bulletin, CWIHP has sponsored or co-sponsored a series of conferences in addition to those mentioned above. Together with CWIHP and the National Security Archive, the Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies (CIMA), a newly created federation of Cold War programs at Italian universities, sponsored a critical oral history conference on "The Road to Helsinki: The Early Steps of the CSCE” in September 2003. The meeting, held in cooperation with the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact (PHP), gathered more than a dozen former CSCE diplomats and some fifty scholars to discuss key issues in the national policies and international negotiations that led

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to the 1975 Helsinki Accords." The conference built on an international conference on the history of détente (“NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the Rise of Détente, 1965-1972”), sponsored by CIMA and CWIHP in Dobbiaco in September 2002. A November 2002 conference on "Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean during the Cold War,” held in Mexico City in cooperation with Yale University's Council on Latin American & Iberian Studies and the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social (Mexico City), inaugurated collaborative efforts with Mexican and other Latin American researchers and archivists to relate the Latin American Cold War experience to the emerging international history of the post-1945 world.

A workshop on "China and its Frontier Issue" with China's leading Cold War scholars in the Wuyi Mountains in August 2002 intensified collaborative ties with CWIHP's Chinese partners. In October 2002, CWIHP co-sponsored a conference with the Institute of Political Studies at the Romanian Ministry of Defense and the PHP in Bucharest on "Romania and the Warsaw Pact." Showcasing the first major release of documents from the Romanian, United States, and other archives on the subject, the conference drew considerable public attention to problems of access and research in Romania. Other meetings (co-)organized and sponsored by CWIHP included a March 2003 workshop at the Wilson Center on the recent declassification of US documents on Argentina's "Dirty Wars" (co-sponsored with the Center's Latin American Program). Pushing the boundaries of international history into the lives and the communities of peoples the world over, the International Security Studies Program at Yale University and CWIHP sponsored a meeting on “Lives and Consequences: The Local Impact of the Cold War" in April 2003. For two days, more than a dozen scholars traced the real-world effects of diplomacy on everyday life. In September 2003 the Project teamed up with the Finnish Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Archives for a conference on "The Economic Cold War" in Helsinki, exploring trade relations and trade embargos during the Cold War.10 Hosted by the Cold War Research Center in Budapest, directed by former CWIHP Scholar Csaba Békés, a November 2003 conference on "Central and Eastern European Archival Evidence on the Cold War in Asia" produced fascinating new evidence and exchanges on the impact of the Sino-Soviet rift on the Soviet alliance system and intra-bloc relationships. With graduate students and junior scholars steeped in archival research across the region as central participants, the meeting, sponsored by GWCW and co-sponsored by CWIHP, was in many ways the international debut of a new generation of Cold War historians." A special CWIHP/GWCW Bulletin issue will present many of the new materials to the scholarly community and public at large.

Broadening the debate on the history of the Cold War and its legacy based on new evidence has remained a central focus of CWIHP's activities since the publication of the last Bulletin. With funding from the National Endowment for Humanities, GWCW and the Cold War International History Project hosted two summer institutes for about twenty high-school teachers in 2002-2003 to develop an interactive teaching tool for students. Featured in Humanities ("The Unknown Cold War") in March/April 2003, the project will result in a new website that will provide access to the wealth of new documentary resources. Now in its final developmental stage, the new site, "The Cold War Files-Interpreting History Through Documents," is set to go online in late 2004. CWIHP also participated in the Graduate Student Conference spon

sored by GWCW and the University of California-Santa Barbara as well as the first Annual “Summer Institute on Conducting Archival Research" at George Washington University. (For a report by Cambridge University PhD candidate Sutayut Osornprasop, see http:// cwihp.si.edu). In September 2003, the Cold War International History Project hosted a pioneering international conference on "Cold War Memory: Interpreting the Physical Legacy of the Cold War." Co-sponsored by the Association of Air Force Missileers, the Cold War Museum, the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC), the Harry S. Truman Library, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute and organized in cooperation with the Norwegian Aviation Museum, the Eisenhower Foundation and Eisenhower Presidential Library, and the National Coalition for History, the conference was designed to foster a dialogue between Cold War scholars and individuals and organizations charged with interpreting the physical legacy of the Cold War in the United States and abroad. About one hundred cultural resource specialists, leading international scholars, Cold War veterans, media and foundation representatives, government officials, and other professionals from around the world met for two intense days to discuss new findings on the Cold War and their meaning for the conflict's "public history." CWIHP is publishing a report on the proceedings of the meeting on its website.

CWIHP also continues its Cold War seminar series at the Woodrow Wilson Center, designed to bring new findings and publications to the attention of Washington's policy and scholarly community. Recent events included a discussion of "Lyndon Johnson and Europe," the new book by former Wilson Center Fellow Thomas Alan Schwartz; a panel on William Taubman's new biography of Nikita Khrushchev (with commentaries by Clinton Administration Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott and NPR's Daniel Schorr) before a standing room-only audience; a discussion of Milton Bearden's and James Risen's new book on intelligence and the end of the Cold War (“The Main Enemy”); and book launches for CWIHP Senior Scholar Hope Harrison (“Driving the Soviets Up the Wall"), Jeremi Suri (“Power and Protest”), and Jeffrey Kimball ("The Vietnam War Files"). A full list of the meetings and meeting reports is available on the Project's website (http://cwihp.si.edu)

Thanks to the support by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Project was able to award additional CWIHP scholarships. In 2003, CWIHP hosted Russian scholar Sergey Mazov (Russian Academy of Sciences) as its most recent CWIHP Scholar. During his stay in Washington, Sergey Mazov conducted extensive research on Soviet policy towards West Africa. The Project was also fortunate to host Melvyn Leffler (University of Virginia), Jussi Hanhimaki (Graduate Institute, Geneva), Keith R. Allen (Washington), Marilena Gala (University of Florence) and Trudy Huskamp Peterson, former acting National Archivist and former director of the Open Society Archive in Budapest as Wilson Center Fellows and Public Policy Scholars.

CWIHP has been building its website presence, and the Project is currently restructuring its "Virtual Archive" of declassified and translated documents to facilitate full-text searching and collating of original and translated versions of documents. With support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, CWIHP has been exploring the possibilities for developing search engines that would allow harvesting across several online archives and collections. Additional web features go online in the spring and summer of 2004.

CWIHP's varied activities would not be possible without the support of a broadening international network of individuals and

institutions. The Project is pleased to welcome the establishment of a Mongolian Cold War Group, host to the March 2004 workshop in Ulaanbaatar. Spurred by the efforts of Sergey Radchenko and former Wilson Center Tsedenbar Batbayar, fascinating new materials on the Sino-Soviet split are becoming available in the Mongolian archives. A November 2003 workshop with Serbian scholars in Belgrade, organized by Svetozar Rajak at the London School of Economics, provided first glimpses at the potential riches of the Yugoslav archives on topics ranging from the Cold War on the Balkans to the non-alignment movement. Cooperation has also intensified with a group of Cold War scholars in Tirana (led by Ana Lalaj), who, with support by CWIHP, are in the process of mining the Albanian archives. CWIHP's Italian partner CIMA, led by Ennio Di Nolfo, Massimiliano Guderzo and Leopoldo Nuti, is spearheading a systematic exploration of the Détente years. Following my recent trip to Yalta, Kyiv and Lviv, plans are underway for a Cold War conference in Ukraine that would build on the work of Mark Kramer and others featured in this Bulletin issue. Our partners in Beijing and Shanghai, the Modern History Research Center at Beijing University and the Cold War Studies Center at East China Normal University are playing central roles in collaborative efforts to assess the history of Chinese foreign policy in a series of meetings over the next three years, sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation. Thanks to CWIHP Senior Research Scholar Dennis Deletant (University of London) and his partners in Bucharest, we are incrementally gaining | access to Romanian party, foreign ministry and military archives. Just how significant the archives of smaller powers can be is demonstrated by the prolific activities of former CWIHP Fellow Jordan Baev and his colleagues in Sofia. From the Warsaw Pact to Latin America to Afghanistan, the Bulgarian archives turn out to be an ever widening "backdoor" into Soviet policy. CWIHP Senior Scholar Vojtech Mastny and his colleagues at the Zurich-based Parallel History Project continue to document the history of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In the future, the Project hopes to intensify its contacts with scholars and institutions in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and well as Africa.

This Bulletin issue-and the activities mentioned above-would not have been possible without the generous support by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Chicago), The Andrew Mellon Foundation (New York), The Henry Luce Foundation (New York), The Korea Foundation (Seoul), and as well as individual donors. I am indebted to my colleagues at the Woodrow Wilson Center, in particular Lee H. Hamilton, Michael van Dusen, Lauren Crowley, Robert Hathaway, Robert Litwak, Blair Ruble, and Samuel F. Wells, as well as the members of the CWIHP Advisory Committee, chaired by William Taubman, for their steadfast support. CWIHP scholars and partners, in particular Keith Allen, Jordan Baev, Csaba Békés, Tom Blanton, Gregg Brazinsky, William Burr, Malcolm Byrne, Sandra Cavalucci, Chen Jian, Massimiliano Cricco, Jeffrey Engel, Laura Fasanaro, Ilya Gaiduk, Gary Goldberg, Jim Goldgeier, Christopher Goscha, Hope Harrison, Jamil Hansanli, Jim Hershberg, Mihail Ionescu, Tvrtko Jakovina, Gilbert Joseph, Karl Kleve, Sue Lamie, Vojtech Mastny, Neamat Nojumi, Leopoldo Nuti, Trudy Huskamp Peterson, Sergey Radchenko, Hannu Rautkallio, Svetlana Savranskaya, Bernd Schäfer, Thomas Schwartz, Douglas Selvage, Daniela Spenser, Balazs Szalontai, Shen Zhihua, Oldrich Tuma, Yu Weimin, Odd Arne Westad, Kathryn Weathersby, David Wolff, and Vladislav Zubok provided essential support in the making of this Issue and the activities underlying it. The Project's outstanding staff, M. Dee Beutel, Nancy Meyers, Mircea Munteanu,

The conference received generous support from The Henry Luce Foundation and the Korea Foundation.

2 Conferences on Cold War flashpoints included: “Poland 19801982: Internal Crisis, International Dimensions," Jachranka-Warsaw, 8-10 November 1997, co-organized with the Institute for Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Warsaw) and the National Security Archive; "The Crisis Year 1953 and the Cold War in Europe," Potsdam, 10-12 November 1996, co-organized with the Center for Contemporary History Research (Potsdam) and the National Security Archive; "Hungary and the World, 1956: The New Archival Evidence," Budapest, 26-29 September 1996, cosponsored with the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Budapest) and the National Security Archive; and "Czechoslovakia and the World, 1968: The New Archival Evidence," Prague, 18-20 April 1994, co-sponsored with The Prague Spring 1968 Foundation (Prague) and the National Security Archive. For information on these conferences, see past CWIHP Bulletin, in particular nos. 8/9, 10 and 11. See also Mark Kramer, “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part 1): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest," Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (March 1998), pp. 234-247.

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3 The conference featured extraordinary discussions and new revelations from the archives from ten countries -including memoranda of conversation between Cuban and Soviet leaders, detailed information on Cuban-Soviet military ties, recently declassified US intelligence analyses, and new information about nuclear dangers arising from the crisis that have been unknown until now. See "The Missiles of 1962 Haunt the Iraq Debate,” by Todd S. Purdum, Week In Review, New York Times, 13 October 2002; "When the World Stood on Edge And Nobody Died Beautifully, by Tim Wiener, New York Times, 13 October 2002;, "Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb in 1962 Crisis, Forum is Told", by Marion Lloyd Boston Sunday Globe, 13 October 2002, p. A20; "Cold War foes visit Soviet-made missile silo in Cuba," by Anthony Boadle, Reuters English News Service, 13 October 2002; “40 Years After Missile Crisis, Players Swap Stories in Cuba," by Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, 13 October 2002, p. A28; “Meeting Between Soviet, Cuban and American Officials to Discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis, 40 Years Later," by Tom Gjelten, Weekend Edition Saturday National Public Radio, 12 October 2002;, “Nightline Cuban Missile Crisis," by George Stephanopoulos, ABC News Nightline, 12 October 2002; "Reflections on the Cuban missile crisis,” by Randall Pinkston, CBS Evening News, 12 October 2002. For more information on the conference, see the National Security Archive website: http://nsarchive.org.

4 See in particular the articles and compilations by Kathryn Weathersby in CWIHP Bulletins nos. 4, 5, 6-7 and 11.

5 The first meeting of scholars from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and the United States took place in Tbilisi in October 2000. See CWIHP Bulletin 12/13 (Fall/Winter 2001).

"Diplomat-veterans included Ambassador Jim Goodby (US), Ambassador John Maresca (US), Sir Crispin Tickell (UK), Sir Rodric Braithwaite (UK), Ambassador Yuri Kashlev (Russia), Ambassa

dor Yuri Dubinin (Russia), Ambassador Jacques Andréani (France), Ambassador Nicolae Ecobescu (Romania), Ambassador Luigi Vittorio Ferraris (Italy) and Ambassador Eduard Brunner (Switzerland).

7 The conference was organized in the framework of the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

8 Panelists included Juan Gabriel Tokatlián, San Andrés University; Mark Falcoff, American Enterprise Institute; Beatriz Nofal, Eco-Axis and a former Under-Secretary of Industry and Trade; Carlos Osorio, National Security Archive; Carlos Sersale di Cerisano, former director general for human rights in the Argentine Foreign Ministry; Kathryn Sikkink, University of Minnesota; John Dinges, Columbia University School of Journalism; F. A. “Tex” Harris, a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires at the height of the Dirty War; and María José Guembe, Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS). The conference proceedings have been published as Argentina-United States Bilateral Relations: An Historical Per

spective and Future Challenges, ed. by Cynthia Arnson. For a complimentary copy, please contact the Wilson Center at lap@wwic.si.edu. The book was launched in Buenos Aires on 4 December 2003 during a conference on the "Dirty War." The meeting was covered by Mexico's largest daily: “Kissinger pidió acelerar la represión en Argentina: El ex secretario buscaba evitar una condena a la dictadura,” El Universal, 5 December 2003, p. 2.

9 The conference proceedings, edited by Jeffrey Engel, are slated for publication in the CWIHP book series.

10 Conference proceedings are to be published.

11 Additional sponsorship of the conference was provided by the National Security Archive; The 1956 Institute (Budapest), Temple University's Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, the Parallel History Project on NATO and the Warsaw Pact, the CWIHP Korea Initiative, the London School of Economics Cold War Studies Program and the University of Virginia's Miller Center and History Department.

Introduction By Kathryn Weathersby

Introduction By Christian F. Ostermann

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More East-Bloc Sources on Afghanistan

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