ANATOMY OF A THIRD WORLD COLD WAR CRISIS: NEW EAST-BLOC EVIDENCE ON Editor's Note: The Russian and East German documents presented below illuminate the "other side"-other sides, really—of one of the key events that hastened the collapse of U.S.-Soviet detente in the mid-1970s: the Horn of Africa Crisis of 1977-78, in which a regional rivalry between Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as domestic political instability in both countries, became entangled with superpower rivalry and competition for influence in the Third World. While Ethiopia and Somalia had a long-standing dispute over their borders, the immediate causes of the crisis dated to 1974, when a leftist revolution overthrew Ethiopian leader Emperor Haile Selassie, who had been a pillar of Western influence for decades, and to early February 1977, when the Ethiopian revolution took a more militant course when Haile Mengistu Mariam seized control of the ruling “Derg” and eliminated his chief rivals for power, including Teferi Bante, the revolution's erstwhile leader. The Ethiopian Revolution opened up new possibilities for the Soviet Union to expand its influence in the region, where its chief ally had been Somalia, with whom it had concluded a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation. As the documents show, the Soviet Union and its allies, notably Cuban leader Fidel Castro, attempted persistently to keep both Ethiopia and Somalia within the socialist camp. This, in practice, meant trying to damp down Ethiopian-Somali hostility and, in particular, the territorial ambitions of Somali leader Mohammed Siad Barre, who claimed that ethnic Somalis were being persecuted in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia and deserved liberation and incorporation into Somalia proper. In the course of trying to mediate the dispute, Moscow and Havana found that appeals to socialist international solidarity could only go so far in overcoming deep-seated national and even tribal disagreements. Still-as demonstrated by a relatively cordial discussion between U.S. and Soviet diplomats in Addis Ababa in early 1977-the simmering regional hot-spot did not erupt into a full-blown superpower clash until the late summer, when Somalia launched an offensive to capture the Ogaden from Ethiopia. By then, sensing that the Ethiopian leadership was tilting toward Moscow, both the Siad Barre regime in Mogadishu and the Carter Administration in Washington were exploring the possibility of improving U.S.-Somali ties to the detriment of the Soviet Union, and Siad Barre evidently believed that Washington had flashed him at least a dim green light to attack Ethiopia (a claim which U.S. officials denied). The Somali attacks of July-August 1977, shattering a Soviet mediation effort then taking place in Moscow, quickly achieved major success at thrusting into Ethiopian territory; by September-October, Somali or Somali-backed forces had captured most of the Ogaden. The Somali advances prompted desperate pleas from Mengistu for Soviet-bloc military support, and at some point that fall the Soviet Union and Cuba, which had already been providing some weapons to the Derg, decided that it would be unacceptable to allow Ethiopia—a strategically significant country seemingly poised to become an important member of the socialist bloc—to suffer a military defeat at the hands of a country (Somalia) which despite protestations of socialist orientation seemed to be quickly shifting into the "imperialist" camp. The decision by Moscow and Havana to come to Mengistu's rescue became evident between November 1977 and February 1978, as Soviet planes and ships transported roughly 15,000 Cuban troops and large supplies of Soviet weaponry, and a USSR military mission led by Gen. Vasilii I. Petrov helped direct Ethiopian-Cuban military activities. The massive Soviet-Cuban airlift spurred an Ethiopian counter-offensive which evicted Somali forces from the Ogaden and entrenched the Mengistu regime in power. At the same time, these developments cemented both Somalia's defection from the Soviet-bloc (in November, Mogadishu abrogated a 1974 Somali-Soviet friendship treaty) and Ethiopia's dependence on that same Soviet-bloc for military aid, and elevated the conflict to a superpower crisis, as Washington charged Moscow with employing Cuban proxy forces to expand its influence in Africa. Moscow and Havana maintained that they had only helped Ethiopia defend itself from a U.S.-backed assault from Somalia (and various “reactionary” Arab countries supporting it), whereas Carter Administration hardliners (notably National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski) asserted that the Horn crisis, coming on the heels of the Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola, revealed a rising international assertiveness on the Kremlin's part, a danger requiring a tough American response-if not a direct military involvement to stem the Soviet-Cuban recapture of the Ogaden (or a perceived threat to Somalia), then in the form of a closer relationship with the People's Republic of China, the USSR's bitter communist foe. This new dispute between the USSR and United States flared up in late 1977 just as it seemed that, after a rocky start, the Carter and Brezhnev leaderships were finally beginning to make some progress toward improving relations, and, most importantly, toward conclud ing a SALT II treaty. Instead of finishing up the arms control treaty-which the Soviets had made a prerequisite for a Carter-Brezhnev summit meeting which the American leader eagerly desired—the Horn Crisis exacerbated superpower tensions and, just as important, seemed to tilt the balance of power within the Carter Administration away from Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who stressed reaching agreements with Moscow, and toward Brzezinski, who favored “linkage" between progress toward bilateral accords and Soviet behavior in the Third World. The charges and countercharges between Washington and Moscow, along with disagreements on other areas such as human rights, the Middle East (where the Kremlin accused Washington of backing off an agreed-approach in favor of backing a bilateral Egyptian-Israeli accord), and relations with China, helped stall progress in the SALT II negotiations and generally embitter U.S.-Soviet relations in the first half of 1978. Thus was it said that SALT, or more generally detente, "lies buried in the sands of Ogaden." Exploring why the U.S.-Soviet detente of the mid-1970s was side-tracked by such seemingly obscure and peripheral issues as the regional crisis in the Horn of Africa was one purpose of the "Carter-Brezhnev Project." Spearheaded by Dr. James G. Blight of the Center for Foreign Policy Development at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the CarterBrezhnev Project gathered scholars, former Soviet and American officials, and newly-released documentation for a series of oral history conferences to examine the reasons behind the collapse of detente, and whether those events suggested any lessons for current and future Russian-American relations. Among the scholarly organizations supporting the Project's efforts to obtain fresh evidence from American, Russian, and other archives were the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and declassified documents repository based at George Washington University, and the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), based at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. In this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin, we are pleased to present a sampling of the Russian and East German documents on the 197778 Horn of Africa Crisis that were gathered for the Carter-Brezhnev conference on U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Third World, held in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on 23-26 March 1995. (A much smaller selection was included in a briefing book assembled by the National Security Archive and CWIHP for use during the conference.) Both the Russian and East German documents were obtained and translated via the collective efforts of the National Security Archive, CWIHP, and the CFPD. Most of the Russian documents printed below emanated from the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD in its Russian acronym), the repository for the post-1952 records of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU), located in the former Central Committee headquarters in Old Square in Moscow; some additional documents came from the Archive of the President, Russian Federation (APRF); all were specially declassified by Russian authorities for the Carter-Brezhnev Project. For their assistance in working out the details of locating and obtaining these materials, CWIHP would like to thank N.G. Tomilina, Director of TsKhSD, and her staff, and Vladislav M. Zubok and Malcolm Byrne of the National Security Archive. The East German documents printed below are drawn from a larger collection obtained from the East Berlin-based archive of the former ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), and translated from German, by Christian F. Ostermann, a researcher based at the National Security Archive and the incoming CWIHP Associate Director. These East German documents include reports of communications with Soviet and Cuban officials—including a lengthy excerpt from the transcript of an April 1977 conversation between East German leader Erich Honecker and visiting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had recently attempted a mediation effort between Somalia and Ethiopia—and accounts of an abortive East German effort in 1978 to mediate the ongoing dispute between the central Ethiopian government and the separatist Eritrean guerrilla movement. As with the conflict between Ethiopia and Somalia, both contestants in the Ethiopia-Eritrea clash professed allegiance to socialism, and Moscow hoped to subsume their differences in order to consolidate an anti-Western bloc on the Horn of Africa. All of the photocopied Russian and East German documents printed below, and many other, still-untranslated East-bloc documents (as well as declassified U.S. government documents) concerning the Horn Crisis, are on file and available for scholarly research at the National Security Archive. The Archive is located on the 7th floor of the Gelman Library, 2130 H St. NW, Washington, DC 20037, and can be reached at (202) 994-7000 (telephone); (202) 994-7005 (fax); and nsarchiv@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (e-mail). To assess the significance of these materials for understanding the Horn of Africa Crisis, the CWIHP Bulletin has solicited commentaries from three scholars: Ermias Abebe, an Ethiopian-born scholar who obtained his Master's degree at Moscow State University and recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, has completed a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Third World in the 1970s, using Russian, American, and Ethiopian sources; Paul B. Henze, author of The Horn of Africa from War to Peace (Macmillan, 1991) and during the Carter Administration a staff member of the National Security Council, and currently a researcher affiliated with the Washington, D.C.-office of the Rand Corporation; and Christian F. Ostermann, currently completing a dissertation for the University of Hamburg on U.S.-East German relations in the 1950s, is a researcher based at the National Security Archive and the incoming CWIHP Associate Director. Their commentaries begin below, preceding the section of translated East-bloc documents. In the future, CWIHP hopes to organize additional activities, including a scholarly conference or workshop, to gather further sources and perspectives on the international history of the Horn of Africa Crisis. These would include still-missing pieces of the puzzle from the Russian and American archives, materials from the region such as Ethiopia and Somalia, and, if possible, Cuban records that could clarify Havana's actions and motivations during the crisis. -James G. Hershberg THE HORN, THE COLD WAR, AND DOCUMENTS FROM THE FORMER EAST-BLOC: AN ETHIOPIAN VIEW by Ermias Abebe The materials presented here as part of a collection of recently declassified documents from the former Eastern bloc begin to shed invaluable light on the intricacies and evolution of former Soviet, East German, and Cuban interpretations of and influence on the politics of the Horn of Africa between 1977-1978. The word begin is emphasized because, at the same time, these documents are far from comprehensive in that a number of very critical events and developments during this period find scant or no mention. Some of these issues will be mentioned in this commentary. Nevertheless, reviewing these documents, it will be difficult indeed to underplay the crucial significance of the East-West standoff which served as the context in which the former USSR and its allies comprehended and attempted to shape the politics of the region. Ultimately, this prism led to the gradual choice of cultivating close ties and rendering decisive support to the military government in Ethiopia beginning in 1976. In turn, this choice molded that regime and guaranteed its survival until 1991 when only the end of the Cold War and diminished Soviet support coupled with the Eritrean and Tigrean liberation front victories led to its collapse. The publication of these documents should therefore serve as a valuable stimulus for international scholarship on superpower involvement in Africa during the Cold War and also arouse scholars on Ethiopia in particular to reexamine and enrich conventional wisdom about the political history of the Mengistu era. Furthermore, the fact that the country now has a completely different leadership which is not tainted. with the atrocities of Mengistu and the Derg means, at least theoretically, that it will have nothing to lose by collaborating in international research efforts and releasing pertinent documents from Ethiopian archives (unlike Angola for example). On the contrary, such a col laboration would not only enable the new Ethiopia to take deserved credit from the international scholarly community, but also to reap the intellectual reward of a better understanding of a regime that it fought so gallantly and with immense sacrifice to topple. My specific comments on these documents will focus on three major themes-Soviet influence on: (a) the military regime; (b) the Ethio-Somali war and; (c) the Eritrean secessionist movement. I. Soviet relations with the PMAC Soviet interest in winning a position of strength on the Horn of Africa dates from the 1960s. Probably, the major explanations are related to the area's strategic value. First, two important international confrontations cut across the Horn: the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the Sino-Soviet rivalry, whose geographic expression involved the whole area stretching from the Western Pacific, to Southeast and South Asia, and into the Indian Ocean littoral. Also, the Horn's strategic location along EastWest communication and transportation routes enables it to serve as a critical vantage point to command or interdict oil shipments from the Middle East and elsewhere. Furthermore, in the postcolonial setting, newly liberated African states had increasingly become targets for Marxist-Leninist ideological expansion to alienate "Western imperialist states." As Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev had once remarked, “Africa [had become] a main field of battle for communism." Moreover, in one of the documents published here, Cuba's Fidel Castro reinforces this idea in an April 1977 meeting with his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, by stating that "in Africa we can inflict a severe defeat on the entire reactionary imperialist policy. We can free Africa from the influence of the USA and of the Chinese . . . Ethiopia has a great revolutionary potential... So there is a great counterweight to [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat's betrayal in Egypt ... We must have an integrated strategy for the whole African continent." Thus, the Soviet Union along with its allies apparently hoped to anchor themselves firmly on the Horn in an attempt to position themselves to play important political and/or military roles in the whole volatile region. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the Ethiopian Revolution in 1974, Moscow was slow to react to the overthrow of imperial rule and the military takeover in Addis Ababa led by the Provisional Military Administrative Council (PMAC) or Derg. This hesitancy might be explained by a legitimate Soviet reluctance to antagonize Somalia, especially in light of recent setbacks the Sudan and Egypt, where Moscow had lost influence in spite of massive economic and military aid to these countries. It must be remembered here that Somalia had a territorial dispute with Ethiopia over the Ogaden and that the USSR, at this time, had already cultivated a strong presence in Somalia. That presence was cemented with Gen. Mohammed Said Barre's successful military coup in October 1969 after which he turned his country's orientation sharply toward Moscow, signing a Soviet-Somali Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1974. Under the treaty, the Somali government was generously supplied with military aid and the Soviets acquired access to the strategic port of Berbera. With all this at stake, Moscow had reason to be prudent in assessing the PMAC's reliability before considering a new commitment. The PMAC, on the other hand, had two serious problems of its own which inhibited it from seeking an immediate embrace from Moscow. One was that initially it was unclear about its ideological preference and international orientation. An illuminating account of this confusion is provided by Major Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a high ranking official of the military regime who later defected to the United States and wrote a book. In it he stated that the PMAC was so "ignorant in the realm of ideology that at one point in the early stage of the revolution delegations were sent to Tanzania, Yugoslavia, China, and India to shop for one for Ethiopia."2 It is important to note that the Soviet Union was apparently not even considered as a possible source of ideological inspiration by the military rulers at an early stage. The other problem was that the Council engaged in three major successive rounds of bloody power struggles before Mengistu emerged as the uncontested leader. In providing a very short account of these struggles, an important point to underline at the outset is that unlike some of the contenders he ultimately managed to annihilate, Mengistu had neither educational exposure to nor interest in communist ideology and/or the Soviet Union prior to the PMAC's formation. As he admitted in one interview, his first encounter with Russians happened only after the revolution. Perhaps one of his phenomenal abilities lay in his capacity to understand quickly and adopt new ideas when they served a useful purpose in his quest for power. The first round of weeding out opponents was carried out in November 1974 when Gen. Aman Andom, the first PMAC chairman, along with a few other members of the Council and more than 50 former high-ranking officials, were summarily executed, shocking both Ethiopians and the international community. The second round of executions occurred in July 1976. This time the victims were active educated officers within the PMAC, like Major Sisay Habte and Lieutenants Bewiketu Kassa and Sileshi Beyene, who maintained connections with radical elements among university students, teachers, and labor organizers and who were instrumental in initially steering the Council to the Left from its original nationalist orientation. A major restructuring of the PMAC in December 1976, when its members voted to strip Mengistu of power and institute "collective leadership," served as the prelude to the third and decisive round of killings. The architects of the restructuring included respected PMAC members like the nominal chairman who succeeded Aman Andom: Gen. Teferi Banti, Maj. Alemayehu Haile and Capt. Mogus Wolde Michael. Again, especially the last two, like those mentioned earlier, were important figures in introducing socialism to the Council. However, on 3 February 1977 Mengistu embarked on a sudden and swift retali ation. With the help of the chief of the palace security force commander, he essentially carried out a mafia-style coup by simply ambushing and executing the ringleaders of the restructuring who were unsuspectingly preparing for a regular Council meeting in the palace grounds. The following day he was "unanimously voted" chairman by the remaining PMAC members. The documents from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Socialist Unity Party of [East] Germany (SED) presented here begin with. activities dating from early February 1977. Notably, the first two documents, the memorandum of conversation between Soviet Counselor-Minister in Ethiopia S. Sinitsin with the Political Counselor of the US Embassy in Ethiopia Herbert Malin as well as the CPSU's Third African Department Report on Somali-Ethiopian territorial disputes are both dated February 2, i.e., one day before Mengistu's bloody coup. It will be recalled that at the time it was widely reported that the USSR Ambassador to Ethiopia Anatolii Ratanov was the first person to congratulate Mengistu immediately after the carnage, leading to speculation by some Western authors that the Soviets might have had a hand in the affair by providing intelligence support or, at least, had prior information and might have provided tacit approval before the killings occurred.3 If that were the case, certainly these documents shed no light. In fact, the first document distinctly mentions the visit of an Ethiopian delegation to Moscow in July 1976 and the resulting joint Soviet-Ethiopian communique as the prelude to closer ties between the two countries after the Ethiopian revolution. On the Ethiopian side, that delegation was led by Mogus, one of the casualties of Mengistu's coup. It seems the Soviets would have been unlikely to highlight this information had they known about the impending events. Of course, one can also argue that given that the Soviet Counselor-Minister was dealing with his American counterpart, disinformation would have been the order of the day. It might be valuable to point out a possible Soviet displeasure with the Ethiopian leadership prior to the coup which is implied between the lines of one of the discussions of the CPSU Third African Department Report. This refers to a late-1976 Cuban and South Yemeni initiative to provide mediation in the Ethio-Somali dispute. The report mentions that the Somali government, while not rejecting the proposal, had spoken out in favor of including direct Soviet participation in the negotiations. Ethiopia, on the other hand, the report notes, regarded the mediation initiative favorably, but "did not express an analogous wish" (about Soviet participation) and thus the Cubans and Yemenis (on their own) were taking diplomatic steps to organize mediation. Could this have been a factor causing Soviet apprehension about the Ethiopian leadership's reliability prior to Mengistu's consolidation of power? The answer at this point can only be conjecture. The first head of state from the communist bloc to meet with Mengistu after his coup was Castro. He visited Addis Ababa on March 14-15, just a little more than a month later. On March 16 he then flew across the Red Sea to Aden, South Yemen, to co-chair a joint Cuban-Yemeni mediation effort to settle the Ethio-Somali dispute to which Somali's Barre as well as Mengistu were invited. It is not clear from the documents whether this meeting had been prearranged before the coup or whether it was hastily scheduled after it. Whatever the case, a few weeks later, on 3 April, Castro went to East Berlin to report about his African mission and consult with the East German leader Erich Honecker. The transcript of that meeting presented here records Castro's vivid first impressions about Mengistu, revealing the latter's apparent success in winning over both the heart and support of the Cuban leader in such a relatively short time. Castro spoke of Mengistu as a “quiet, honest, and convinced... revolutionary leader... an intellectual personality who showed his wisdom on February 3." His massacre is portrayed and condoned as “a turning point in the development of the Ethiopian revolution when . . . a consequential decision was made to meet the challenge by rightists" in the PMAC. To the extent that the communist states shared information with each other and with Moscow to devise and coordinate policy, as it is assumed they did, Castro's account provided an excellent report card for Mengistu. Furthermore, as it is known from other sources that Castro later flew to Moscow to report on his trip, one may presume that he presented the same glowing assessment of Mengistu to the Soviet leadership. Mengistu also indulges in a diplomatic contribution to widen the emerging rift between Somalia and the socialist states by discrediting the revolutionary potential of its leadership. In one record of conversation held on March 18, his head of foreign affairs, Maj. Berhanu Bayeh, quotes the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram to point out to Sinitsin the possibility of Somalia joining Sudan, Egypt and Syria in a unified political command. He adds that Barre had been on record declaring that Somalia achieved its revolution independently and can acquire help from other countries besides the Soviet Union and its allies. Given the recent Soviet loss of Egypt and Sudan, this information was probably intended to arouse Moscow's apprehension. Supporting his own professed commitment to Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union with practical deeds, at the end of the following April Mengistu ordered the closure of the U.S. communications station in Asmara, the U.S. Information Service (USIS) center, and the American military assistance advisory offices, and abrogated the EthioU.S. Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement-the official treaty of alliance with the United States dating from 1953. It is also remarkable how Mengistu was apparently successful in projecting himself to the Soviets as a genuine, pro-Soviet, revolutionary leader constantly challenged by nationalist elements within his own Council. In one May 1978 conversation report, Rotislav Ulianovskii, an influential senior Third World policy analyst in the CPSU, instructs his East German counterpart Friedel Trappen, arguing: Mengistu deserves to be regarded by us as a man who represents internation alist positions. By contrast to him, Berhanu Bayeh and Fikre Selassie as well as Legesse Asfaw and others are marked by nationalism although they are faithful to him . . . I emphasize again, we have to apply maximum caution, circumspection and tactfulness toward Mengistu so that the nationalists will not grasp him by the throat. According to the views of many Ethiopians, including former insiders in the Mengistu regime such as Dawit (cited above), nothing could be further from the truth except for the remark on loyalty. First of all, between February and November 1977 Mengistu had consolidated absolute power. Secondly, he was raised and trained in the traditional Amharised Ethiopian military tradition and therefore, by background, the most ardent nationalist of them all. After the revolution he had repeatedly and successfully maneuvered between dressing up as an ideologue and as a nationalist whenever each was politically expedient. Mengistu evidently fostered this misperception apparently to bolster his own image (as an internationalist) and, at the same time, to limit demands and pressures from the socialist community. Interestingly, Mengistu's regime repeatedly employed the "China card" to attract Soviet support. In one document discussing Ethiopia's desire to acquire U.S.-manufactured arms from Vietnam with Soviet help, Berhanu emphasizes that "in contrast to the past the PMAC intends to consider this issue with the Vietnamese directly, rather than running to the People's Republic of China [PRC] for mediation." The reference to the past alluded to the leftist elements of the Military Council who were liquidated in the coup. In another conversation report, in July 1977, Cuba's military specialist in Addis Ababa, General Arnoldo Ochoa, conveys to Soviet Ambassador Ratanov that Mengistu had personally assured him about the decline in Ethiopian-Chinese relations following the PMAC's finding that the PRC was providing military assistance to the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF). Mengistu, according to Ochoa, had explained the decision to limit all relations with Beijing to the minimum and to devise measures against Chinese ideological penetration in Ethiopia. That same month, yet another conversation record, this time between Mengistu and Ratanov, reveals Soviet apprehension about the dissemination of anti-Soviet (Maoist) literature in Addis Ababa. That September, the Ethiopian Foreign Minister Felleke Gedle Giorgis "especially dwelled on the Chinese position on the Ethiopian Revolution" in his talks with Ratanov. Admitting to PRC economic aid at the initial stage of the revolution, he noted the changing Chinese stand as the revolution deepened (perhaps alluding to the forging of closer ties with the USSR). China then began to render comprehensive assistance to Somalia during the military conflict. By February 1978, according to a joint report by the CPSU Third Africa Department and the Political Department of the GDR Embassy in Moscow, the Soviets noted (presumably with satisfaction) Beijing's hostile attitudes toward the Ethiopian leadership as well as the minimal popular support enjoyed by pro-Maoist groups in the country. Another noteworthy issue discussed in three documents concerns "Operation Torch"-an alleged imperialist conspiracy spearheaded by the CIA to assassinate Ethiopian leaders and destabilize the revolution in September-October 1977 with the help of regional forces hostile to the country. Again allegedly, Ethiopian authorities received a letter revealing the pending plot from unknown sources in Africa and then conveyed this threat to the ambassadors of the socialist countries. A few days later, the Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Ministry, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, visited the Soviet embassy and provided a copy of the letter to Ratanov. Interestingly, Dawit mentions this incident in his book.4 He notes an unsuccessful attempt by the Ethiopian government to verify the letter through follow-up inquiries and describes the great sense of panic and suspicion it had created in the Foreign Office. Moreover, while he alludes to the possibility that the letter may have been fabricated, he unfortunately does not state a likely source. The mysterious |