Military History: Russia’s Cold War Plan To Crush France (In 7 Days)

The Nazis conquered France in six weeks, in one of the most spectacular military victories in history.

Had the Soviet Union gone to war with the West in the early 1960s, it also planned to blitz France. But unlike the Germans, the Soviets planned to do it in a week, according to the Warsaw Pact’s 1964 war plan, discovered in the military archives of the former Czechoslovakia.

Was this an example of military might or military megalomania? For a system that professed not to believe in God, the Soviet plan appears nothing short of miraculous. Put simply, all the Soviets and their Eastern European allies had to do was launch their offensive from Czechoslovakia, smash through southern Germany, cross the Rhine River, and then drive into southern France. All this to be accomplished in about seven days, or as long as God took to create the Earth. And even He needed to take a rest at the end.

The Soviet plan was nearly as ambitious. It called for the Czech First and Fourth Armies to push for the Franco-German border, while the Soviet Eighth Guards Army advanced on their northern flank and the Hungarians on their southern flank. Paratroopers would seize crossings over the Neckar and Rhine Rivers. The Warsaw Pact tanks and mechanized infantry were expected to thrust about 700 miles from Czechoslovakia to Besancon, about 150 miles northeast of Lyon, by D+8. From there, the Soviets could thrust north to Paris and the Channel ports, or south to the Mediterranean ports such as Marseilles.

To strike from Czechoslovakia to Besancon would require the Red Army to travel around 60 miles per day. To put this in perspective, one of the most rapid advances in history was made by Rommel’s Afrika Korps in June 1942, when German mechanized units routed the British Eighth Army and advanced 350 miles in 10 days, or 35 miles per day. Even during the 1940 German blitz that devastated France, Rommel’s famed 7th Panzer Division advanced only 85 miles in five days.

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Cold War Files: The Showdown That Almost Happened Over Bangladesh in 1971

In 2016, the United States backed India’s application to join the Nuclear Suppliers Group — but didn’t support Pakistan’s. This marked an extraordinary turning point in the United States’ relationship with these historical adversaries.

In 1971, the United States sent part of its Seventh Fleet to threaten war with India on Pakistan’s behalf.

The reasoning behind the deployment is stranger still — it was supposedly to befriend China.

The convoluted Cold War schemes of Pres. Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger help to explain why the United States threatened war with the second most populous country on Earth while also seeking to court the most populous country on the planet.

When the United Kingdom withdrew from colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the territory was partitioned into Hindu-majority India under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru and Muslim Pakistan under Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

However, there were large Muslim populations on both the western and eastern flanks of the Indian sub-continent — resulting in Western and Eastern Pakistan being separated by over a thousand miles, with India in the middle.

Western Pakistan contained the capital, where the Punjabi political elites of the new nation resided. East Pakistan was populated by the Bengali, an entirely different culture speaking an entirely different language.

A significant Hindu minority resided there, unlike in West Pakistan. Despite constituting the majority of Pakistan’s population, Bengalis were second-class citizens and received little development aid.

Pakistan and India almost immediately went to war over Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state whose Hindu ruler elected to join India in exchange for assistance putting down a local revolt. The incident escalated to a full-scale confrontation which simmers to this day.

During the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union vied to recruit India and Pakistan into their respective Cold War camps. India remained a democracy, and led the non-aligned movement seeking to avoid entanglement with one side or the other.

However, India’s cordial relationship with the Soviet Union, including major arms deals, resulted in uneven relations with Washington.

Pakistan, by contrast, received most of its military and economic aid from the United States. Military coups in Pakistan didn’t sour the relationship — but a 1965 war between India and Pakistan brought an embargo on all U.S. military aid to both countries. Millions in economic aid continued to flow, however.

Read the Remainder at War is Boring

Cold War Files: The Cold War’s Deadliest Battleground

When young Americans are taught about the Cold War, we learn that it was exactly that — a decades-long standoff based on the threat of war, one without mass casualties, tanks and guns. Sure, there were spies, assassinations and intrigue, but even history teachers who cover proxy wars tend to leave out one whopping chapter: Angola’s role as surrogate battleground.

During the Cold War, Angola saw the second-largest American deployment of covert aid.

Only Afghanistan’s mujahideen got more aid from the U.S. And the conflict in Angola was very bloody: By the time the Americans and Soviets backed away, in 1991, hundreds of thousands of people had perished. Angola’s ensuing civil war, which ended in 2002, killed 1.5 million, according to some estimates. Turns out the Cold War wasn’t so cold.

It all started with a coup in Portugal — the colonial rulers of Angola — that ushered in a wave of Portuguese decolonization of its African territories. The transition was abrupt, and its sudden power vacuum prompted a violent three-way bid for rule. The U.S. threw its support behind Angola’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, UNITA, and the Soviets backed UNITA’s enemies, the Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA.

The Soviet Union and the U.S. weren’t alone in their meddling. Cuba — led by an ideological imperative to help install a Marxist regime in power — partnered up with the Soviets and poured some 50,000 troops into Angola. The U.S., meanwhile, sidled up to apartheid South Africa to send its troops into Angola. Despite all the spending, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger denied involvement in the southwest African country to Congress for years. With the American public reeling from Richard Nixon’s resignation and the conclusion of the disastrous Vietnam War, the CIA did what it does best: It kept its involvement in Angola secret.

Why Angola? Many scholars argue it was far more than a battle for hearts and minds — the ideological alignment of the powers and their proxies was shaky at best. Instead, the superpowers saw a chance to deplete the other side of weapons and munitions and to maintain physical control of a country valued for its diamonds and oil. The U.S. saw Soviet dominance-by-proxy of Angola as catastrophic, says Keith Somerville, a scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies. It would give them power over parts of the Cape shipping route around the tip of Africa as well as the export of a whole range of minerals — uranium, copper, platinum, coltan and diamonds — from its next-door neighbors, he says.

In the end, the Cold War subsided and the superpowers pressured the warring parties into signing peace accords in 1991. The MPLA won the mandated elections (its leader, José Eduardo Dos Santos, is still in power today). The U.S. abandoned UNITA and established formal diplomatic relations with Angola. UNITA, in retaliation for its loss, reignited a war that raged on until 2002. No doubt foreign meddling prolonged and deepened the conflict — including by leaving Angola with the highest number of land mines in the world — but for many, the persistence of war long after Soviet-American withdrawal shows that the “core issues were there” and foreign powers “exacerbated the situation with arms and ammunition,” says Alex Vines, Africa researcher at Chatham House.

 “Everything changed” after the Cold War “in terms of the way major powers looked at Africa,” Somerville says. Trade became the name of the game. After all, Angola is the second largest oil producer in Africa, after Nigeria. Even today, though, UNITA feels slighted. During Hillary Clinton’s visit to the country as Secretary of State, UNITA expressed dismay that it did not receive a sit-down with its former Cold War backer. Her likely thoughts: Got oil?

Read the Original Article at OZY

Cold War Files: Codename – Chilbom

Shortly after 9:30 on the morning of September 21, 1976, a light blue Chevy Chevelle carrying three passengers moved along Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row, merging into the flow of commuter traffic around Sheridan Circle. The man in the driver’s seat was Orlando Letelier, an economist and fellow at a left-leaning think tank, the Institute of Policy Studies. In the passenger’s seat beside him was 25-year-old Ronni Moffitt, a fundraiser at IPS, and behind her was her husband of four months, Michael Moffitt, also 25, a researcher working with Letelier on issues related to the future of Letelier’s native Chile.

It was a small miracle that Letelier was there in Washington that morning, working at IPS, commuting from the house he shared in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and four sons. Six years earlier, he had been a close confidante to Salvador Allende, the democratic socialist elected president of Chile in September 1970. For two years, Letelier served as Allende’s ambassador to the United States. In May 1973, he became foreign minister, and three months later, as right-wing resistance to Allende was intensifying, he was appointed defense minister, in charge of a military establishment openly hostile to the president.

On September 11, 1973, that hostility erupted into a deadly coup led by military leader General Augusto Pinochet. Allende’s three years in office had been marked by intense social instability, fomented in part by the United States, which since 1962 had been covertly financing newspapers, political parties, and, eventually, neo-fascist paramilitary groups as part of its covert war against leftist political movements in Latin America. That morning tanks surrounded Moneda Palace, the seat of Chile’s presidency. Just before noon, the Chilean air force began strafing the building. A firefight ensued between military forces and pro-Allende snipers positioned around the palace. Rather than be taken prisoner or forced into exile, Allende, holed up in La Moneda, took his own life.

Over the next few months, more than 1,200 people—leftist politicians and government officials, union leaders, activists, and students—were summarily executed. Many were arrested, brought to detention centers, and then murdered, their bodies flung across Santiago thoroughfares and dumped along urban riverbanks. On the morning of the coup, Letelier rushed to the Defense Ministry to try to restore order. In an interview published posthumously inPlayboy in 1977, Letelier said that the moment he entered the ministry, he “felt a gun in my back” and was quickly “surrounded by ten or twelve men,” all pointing their weapons at him. He was taken into military custody. That night, from his holding room, Letelier watched nearly two dozen executions in the palace courtyard. At 5 a.m., he heard a commotion outside his room. “Now it’s the turn of the minister,” one soldier said. About 30 minutes later, a group of armed men entered his room, one carrying a blindfold. Letelier knew immediately what was coming. While he was being led to the courtyard, however, an argument ensued between two officers over who was in charge. Letelier remembered one of his captors saying, “You’re lucky. They won’t give it to you, you bastard.”

Instead he was flown with other prominent political prisoners to a detention center on Dawson Island, a frigid, forlorn place in the Strait of Magellan, closer to the tip of Antarctica than to Santiago. Letelier was beaten, threatened with execution, and forced to perform hard labor in subzero conditions. He remembered Dawson as “an inaccessible, frozen hell.”

After three months there, Letelier, malnourished and greatly weakened, weighed only 125 pounds. Another six months went by before he was transferred to a less punitive facility north of Santiago. A year after the coup, he was suddenly released from military custody and sent to Venezuela, where the powerful governor of Caracas had been lobbying for his release. He rejoined his family there and was offered the research position at IPS, which was hostile to the junta and critical of U.S. intervention in Latin America.

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Espionage Files: The Most Dangerous Spy You’ve Never Heard Of

Programming note: Explore untold stories of American spies: CNN Original Series “Declassified” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. ET/PT only on CNN.

(CNN)She put American combat troops in harm’s way, betrayed her own people and handed over so many secrets that experts say the U.S. may never know the full extent of the damage.

Ana Montes was the Queen of Cuba, an American who from 1985 to the September 11, 2001 attacks handed over U.S. military secrets to Havana while working as a top analyst for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.

But despite her crimes, Montes remains largely unknown.

You might not think Cuba could do much harm to a superpower like the U.S., said retired DIA official Chris Simmons, appearing on CNN’s “Declassified.”

But you’d be wrong.

The threat increases, he said, when Havana goes on to sell those U.S. military secrets to Montes’ anger about U.S. foreign policy complicated her relationships and drew the attention of Cubans who enticed her to turn her back on friends, family and her own country.

Montes’ anger about U.S. foreign policy complicated her relationships and drew the attention of Cubans who enticed her to turn her back on friends, family and her own country.

The fascinating spycraft that surfaced from her case offers a rare glimpse into the invisible world of espionage, where some experts believe there could be as many as 100,000 foreign agents working inside the U.S.

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