The ‘Dupe’ of Disinformation Has the Last Laugh : Activists: When a U.S.-Soviet led antiwar group won the Nobel in 1985, the CIA sneered. Today we know the partnership was prescient.

It’s official: The CIA has admitted to Congress that Aldrich Ames and the KGB fooled the American intelligence establishment into thinking that the Soviets had more and better weapons than they really had. Between 1984 and 1994, said CIA Director John Deutch, a disinformation campaign hoodwinked Washington with a Potemkin village arms buildup.

I confess. I too was a victim of KGB disinformation. Or so I was told by the CIA victims of KGB disinformation.

From 1983 to 1987, I was executive director of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a federation of groups in 50 countries. The basic message was simple: Thermonuclear explosions would be so vast and horrific that talk of medical preparedness for nuclear war was deeply misleading. Doctors around the world gave detailed and frightening presentations about the scope of human suffering a bombed city could expect; they detailed the untreatable agony and slow death of hundreds of thousands of burn victims. They were right to sound the alarm (and still are), and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. When the prize was announced, we were doubly surprised to learn that we had been dupes of Soviet disinformation. At least that was the press spin. Hawkish officials went on deep background with reporters to let it be known that our group was funded by Moscow, manipulated by the Politburo, and, in its call for a universal test ban, would undermine American attempts to close the window of vulnerability. We were just another peace group that tended to slam the West and go easy on the Russians. Disingenuous at best.

The human rights angle was used effectively against us. The organization had copresidents, one American and one Soviet (the secretary and the treasurer were Americans, and the vice presidents were from all over). Some dissident emigres said that copresident Yevgeni Chazov was a high-ranking apparatchik who oversaw the persecution of Andrei Sakharov. Journalists were told that other Soviet physicians in the group were involved in the use of hospitalization to silence protest. The New York Times ran an op-ed piece by an outraged emigre who hammered Chazov as a torturer and the rest of us as apologists for repression. Other papers picked up the theme. At the press conference in Oslo before the award presentation, questions from Western reporters ran from skeptical to hostile, always asking about Sakharov and links to the Kremlin.

We on the inside knew that most of the American and European members of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War were anticommunist liberals and social democrats. Many were active in human rights movements; some even had campaigned for Sakharov. Almost all of the Boston doctors and staff who actually ran things were decidedly anti-Soviet (we had spent enough time organizing meetings in Eastern Europe that we came to despise the regimes firsthand). There were some Old Left veterans among the American doctors and quite a few academic Marxists in the European groups (usually the ones that were haplessly organized), but the tone and the reality were bourgeois and reformist.

The funny thing is that nobody was more bourgeois and reformist than Chazov. We used to joke that there were more convinced socialists at Tommy’s Lunch in Harvard Square than there were in the Soviet affiliate, a motley stew of idealists, hacks, medical careerists looking for resume material, and well-intentioned legions hoping to attend a conference in a pleasant Western city.

What we saw correctly--what Willy Brandt saw so early and so clearly--was that significant elements of the official East European elites just did not want to fight the West and were bone tired of their isolation and deprivation and institutionalized falsehoods. It’s not that Eastern Europe wasn’t run by thugs--you bet it was--but that influential subcultures of those societies wanted an armistice for the Cold War. Brandt’s Ostpolitik and rock ‘n’ roll and scientific exchanges and West German television and conferences in gorgeous places like Paris and Stockholm made a big difference, bit by bit. We engaged and encouraged the aboveground Soviet subcultures, the Gorbachevians. Like us, they were no heroes. Few people have the courage to be a Vaclav Havel or Andrei Sakharov and stand unyielding for principle regardless of price. You will be shocked--shocked!--to learn that most of our Soviet colleagues wanted to end the arms race and also were anxious about money, careers and monitoring their public opinions so as to stay within the bounds of current political orthodoxy.

On the 10th anniversary of the Nobel for International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War earlier this month, the 1995 Peace Prize went to the Pugwash conference’s Joseph Rotblat, another anti-war campaigner routinely calumnized by the Washington defense-hawk cottage industry. So it’s appropriate now to take stock: Credit Ronald Reagan for scaring and demoralizing the thugs, and credit Willy Brandt for encouraging the Gorbachevians. Honor the outspoken and respect the timid. We dare not forget that the apparatus of the Cold War abides today. The nuclear arsenals can still blow up the world four times over; military budgets groan with in-search-of-an-enemy redundancies; and we approach the millenium with our capacity for denial intact.