Atomic Express

One aspect of Cold War history that I want to vent on today relates to the asymmetry of information. What do I mean by that? Because the Western nations are (relatively) free and open societies, there is an astounding amount of information available to researchers on hidden, secret, and covert activity of those nations during the Cold War. The same does not exist for the Soviets and their satellites, allies, and fellow travelers. This asymmetry itself became a weapon through the period, particularly in the propaganda-diplomatic front of the war or what we would more precisely today call Information Operations. Bluntly put, all of our dirty laundry was fair game by the Soviet propagandists and their supporters in the West, and THEIR dirty laundry remains, even today, comparatively unavailable. For those new to the Cold War, particularly those just becoming interested in its covert aspects (through the game “Call of Duty: Black Ops” for example), it can be easy to develop a skewed perspective. Indeed, the pre-eminence of a conspiracist mindset in the post-9/11 world coupled to the accessibility of the internet makes it easy to believe that AIDS was a US Army bio weapon or that the CIA is/was behind every bad thing that ever happened in the Third World. We simply do not have the same level of insight into Soviet covert activities that we do into American covert activities so it could look to a new observer that the US did more ‘bad stuff’ than the Soviets. Those seeking to discredit the United States and its allies in the post-911/post Iraq world still fall back on those old Cold War themes as ‘proof’ and argue for an impossible policy continuity from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson….all the way to G.W. Bush. How much of the existing conspiracy mythos in the US, on the left and the right, is based on Soviet disinformation from the Cold War? And who is researching this? Nobody.

We need more research. And we need more research from a new generation of people who are interested in redressing the balance. The complicity of pro-Soviet academics in the 1950s in skewing perceptions on the deaths of tens of millions of Ukrainian farmers in the 1930s ( “We didn’t want to demoralize the working class,” asserted Jean Paul Sartre) surely extended to Soviet global covert activity.

     Which brings us to Jed Mercurio’s Ascent (2007). This is a novel that explores the Korean War through the eyes of a Soviet MiG-15 pilot who goes on to be a Cosmonaut in the early Space Age. Yefgenii Yeremin, aka “Ivan the Terrible” guns down US Air Force jets over the Korean peninsula with appalling frequency, ostensibly as a volunteer for the North Korean air force but in reality he is a member of the VVS or ‘Voenno-Vozdushnye Sily Krasnoi Armii’ sent in with several secret squadrons to challenge the United Nations forces protecting the Republic of Korea. Yefgennii tangles with future NASA Astronauts Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Neil Armstrong, and John Glenn before getting posted back home to intercept the U-2’s overflying the Soviet Union…and then its on to Star City, for Cosmonaut training and space. Will Yefgenii make it to the moon or not? It’s a good read and Mercurio has done his utmost to provide us with a depiction of what was on the other side of the hill.

“Ascent”’s fictional Yeremin certainly had his real-life equivalents. The substantial Soviet support for China and North Korea during the Korean War was an open secret at the time but the specifics and certain aspects remain in the shadows. Russia only admitted to the VVS fighter deployment only after the Cold War was over. VVS pilots claimed to had racked up 1000 kills versus UN-member air forces while losing 300 of their own (Xiaoming Zhang’s Red Wings Over the Yalu (Texas A&M , 2002) is the standard work on the subject). Indeed, the “Prisoner of War/Missing in Action” movement that took hold in the United States after the Vietnam War retroactively focused its sites also on the missing F-86 pilots and other aircrew captured by Communist forces and not returned after the war in the mid-1950s. It appears as though a technical exploitation process was established by the Soviets to glean as much as they could about the MiG-15’s primary adversary aircraft and these “Moscow Bound” personnel disappeared into the vastness of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, the Pentagon set up Task Force Russia to try and get to the bottom of the MIA mystery. Some of the early Task Force Russia reports and other primary sources are available HERE. The mystery remains and the search continues, nothing is conclusive, and as usual, nothing is what it appears to be.

Keep in mind, though, that American servicemen in Korea were participating in a UN–sanctioned war protecting a smaller country from aggressive Communist regimes. The legal ambiguity of Vietnam did not exist yet and cannot or should not be read into the Korean War as some American historians eagerly tried to later on. As we saw later in the 1970s and 1980s (and even today) the United States is often portrayed as an aggressive bully, but the Soviet Union gets off lightly. Should it continue to for a whole new generation of students?