Vol. 34 No. 63 - Elizabeth Clare Prophet - December 4, 1991
Prophecy and the Current Crisis
Columbus Day 1991
The Economy * The August 19 Coup
The Changing Face of the Soviet Union
The Columbus Day weekend is for me a time of meditation in the heart of Saint Germain. <47> Recently I have pondered what is happening in the world and what Saint Germain has to tell me about the events of the year drawing to a close. And tonight I bring to you the fruit of my communion with him.
As we celebrate the discovery of the New World, we take stock of where our world is going, where our nation is going and the role each of us can play in fulfilling America’s destiny even as we fulfill our own.
Some of you are familiar with the prophecies I have recorded in my book The Astrology of the Four Horsemen. I would like to review these for you and give you additional facts and figures that are not being brought to our attention by the media or by our president, so that we might exercise righteous judgment in conducting our affairs. Because if we the people don’t know the truth, we can never be liberated by the truth.
The Purpose of Prophecy
Prophecy is edification, exhortation and comfort. These three give us enlightenment by the Holy Spirit. Above all, prophecy tells us what we can expect to see on the world scene and in our daily lives, given our positive and negative karma. God has always sent his prophets to exhort the people when they were going against his laws. He has sent his messengers to turn them from their sinful ways and to alert them to the consequences of their unrighteousness.
The theme of the Old Testament prophets is: Cease your worship of alien gods, your immorality, your child sacrifice and oppression of orphans and widows. Cease your excesses. Return to your God. Keep his commandments. If you do so, these calamities that I have foretold will not come upon the nation.
We who are Saint Germain’s Keepers of the Flame pray without ceasing that adverse prophecies will fail. That is why we gather in our sanctuaries around the world to invoke the intercession of the Lord through prayer and the dynamic decrees we offer in the science of the spoken Word. We ask God for a conversion of hearts. And we answer the call of Mother Mary, who has asked us to fast and pray and to say the rosary to mitigate the prophecies she delivered at Fátima, Medjugorje and in her other appearances in this century.
We also call upon the Holy Spirit to release the violet flame for the transmutation of the 25,800 years of negative karma that is descending upon us specifically from April 23, 1990, to April 22, 2002.
Unless that karma is balanced by faith, good works and devotion to God, or transmuted by the violet flame, it will play itself out in the earth body and the bodies of the people. And at certain cycles, which can be calculated through astrology, that karma will act alchemically to produce earth changes. We have seen this in past cycles of returning karma, such as in the sinking of the continents of Lemuria and Atlantis and a host of other major and minor upheavals over the last 12,000 years.
So this evening I will read for you the “handwriting on the wall” <1> as the handwriting in the skies–astrology. As you know, I use astrology to confirm the prophecy that God gives to me. I receive prophecy both directly from God and from the Ascended Masters Saint Germain and El Morya. I will also give you information from both the media and various experts whom my research department consults with. Although some of my information is not widely known, my facts are documented and my sources are reliable.
My message is not a popular one. You won’t hear it on the evening news or read it in the newspapers. You might hear or read some of the facts that I cite. But the reporters leave out the most important facts and fail to bring the picture into focus. Without the vision of the whole truth, the people and the nations are perishing.
God has given to his people gifts of the Holy Spirit. Among those gifts is the gift of prophecy. In one sense of the word, you are all prophets. You are prophets in your own right. You can predict with a high degree of accuracy: “If I do or do not do this thing, this is what will happen tomorrow, this is where I’ll be in 10 years and this will be the result at the conclusion of my life.”
We can read the prophecy of our health and life span in our bodies according to what we eat or don’t eat and how we take care of them. We can foretell our own future based on our past and present actions. We can foretell the future of a nation based on the actions of its people and leaders. And the older we get, the wiser we ought to get, because we should have learned many lessons from the consequences of our actions.
As for me, I have the gift of prophecy and I am a prophet of God. And the Spirit of the Lord is upon me as it was upon the Old Testament prophets. That doesn’t mean that I am psychic or that I am clairvoyant or that I use a crystal ball. That means that I speak what God tells me to speak and nothing more. But I have seen much, much more than I have ever spoken, because Saint Germain has instructed me to keep silent about certain things.
Although I can only reveal what Saint Germain has allowed me to reveal, I can speak about what experts are saying in the fields of government, international relations and military strategy. I can report what those who don’t toe the party line of the power elite are saying. And there is a party line in the United States, even as there is a party line in the Soviet Union and every other country.
A lecture on prophecy is not a psychic prediction that such-and-such is going to happen or that it’s not going to happen. If you want a reading, you can consult Jeane Dixon or other psychics. You know, there’s a fifty-fifty chance they might be right!
I am not a psychic and I don’t make psychic predictions. I am a student of history, of the Ascended Masters and of my own Real Self. And I am seeking and finding answers. What I have found and what God has given me, I give to you. And so I say to you in the name of the LORD, “Come now and let us reason together.” <2>
I will now present information I have gathered since my last lecture on prophecy, which I delivered at FREEDOM 1991, our July conference. I want you to know what my thinking is on what we’ve been seeing on television and reading in the papers about the August 19 coup, about George Bush’s military cuts and about the woeful state of the economy.
You don’t need me to tell you what’s happening in the world, but you do need to ponder the questions and the answers I’ve put together. And we need to pray. We need to call upon the All-Seeing Eye of God to show the people of the world what our leaders are doing and what is really going on.
When the news is managed by governments, as it always is and has been, the people do not have the truth. And without the truth, we cannot be at the helm of our destiny.
The events and the facts themselves are the indicators of prophecy. When you put them together with the keys that God and the Ascended Masters have given us, you will no longer be forced to accept the conclusions of leaders, pundits and the evening news.
Prophecies That Have Come to Pass
In my book The Astrology of the Four Horsemen, I predicted “the destruction, disintegration or dismantling of our armed forces.” <3> I said that this could happen between December 16, 1990, and October 13, 1991. The most recent fulfillment of this prophecy occurred on September 27, when President Bush announced sweeping unilateral military cuts.
Bush announced that he was ordering the military to do the following: (1) withdraw our 450 Minuteman II intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) from strategic alert, (2) remove our B-52 and B-1B bombers from alert, (3) remove our short-range nuclear weapons from U.S. ships, submarines and naval aircraft, (4) destroy the short-range surface-to-surface nuclear missiles deployed in Europe and elsewhere, (5) cancel the program to develop a single-warhead mobile ICBM.
My prophecy concerning the dismantling of our armed forces had already been fulfilled by numerous other cuts in 1990 and 1991. First of all, in May of 1990 the Air Force decided to dismantle the cornerstone of the U.S. air defense network, the over-the-horizon backscatter radar. It cost us $1.4 billion and took 20 years to develop. It can see enemy bombers as far away as 2,000 miles.
The Air Force built two of the radars, one in Maine and the other on the West Coast. When the Air Force decided to shut both of them down, the Maine congressional delegation lobbied to keep the radar in Maine operational. The Air Force agreed to keep it operational–40 hours a week.
Second, on May 17, 1991, the Associated Press reported that the Navy had “decided not to fully arm the long-range ballistic missiles carried aboard some of its new Trident submarines because of a shortage of its most powerful nuclear warheads.” <4> Thus, our Navy is sending its most modern and lethal submarines to sea without their full complement of 192 warheads.
Third, on May 25, 1991, Knight-Ridder News Service reported that the Pentagon had halted round-the-clock flights of the TACAMO planes that serve as the key wartime link between the president and the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet. <5> Two of these planes have been airborne at all times since the early 1960s, one over the Atlantic and one over the Pacific. In the event of nuclear war, the president would need those planes to order our submarine fleet to retaliate.
Fourth, about a year ago, the Air Force announced that it would no longer keep its Looking Glass airborne nuclear command post flying 24 hours a day.
Put this all together and you see the disintegration of our armed forces.
Here are some other prophecies that have come to pass. On July 2, 1990, I said that the lunar eclipse on August 6, 1990, along with other astrological configurations showed that we could see war or catastrophe anywhere in the world around August 6, 1990. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2. That led directly to the Gulf war, which began on January 16, 1991.
On July 2, I also said the United States could see an intensification “of problems related to chemical and petroleum products–from oil spills to difficulties with chemical or toxic wastes–and the danger of chemical and biological warfare.” During the war our troops were vulnerable to chemical and biological weapons and Saddam Hussein unleashed the world’s largest oil spill.
On July 7, I discussed an astrological configuration in George Bush’s chart that indicated that the United States could be involved in a sudden use of force for three months after July 4. I said the United States could become involved in a series of battles or confrontations that “could inaugurate a cycle of events leading to major military conflict.”
On August 8, a month after the configuration in Bush’s chart peaked, U.S. military forces began arriving in Saudi Arabia. These forces prevented Iraq from invading Saudi Arabia and set the stage for future conflict. Major military conflict began on January 16, 1991.
In October of 1987, I said that Saudi Arabia and Israel were among several nations that would face life-and-death challenges between 1988 and 1992. In 1990 Saudi Arabia was in danger of being invaded by Iraq. Israel was subject to repeated attack from Iraqi SCUD missiles and her challenges are growing more severe as world opinion turns against her.
Prophecies for the Near Future
These are just a few of my prophecies that have come to pass. There are other prophecies in The Astrology of the Four Horsemen that could come to pass in the near future. They will directly affect the United States.
There is currently a T-square being formed by transiting Uranus at 13 Capricorn. It is activating another T-square in the U.S. conceptional and natal charts <6> that is formed by the U.S. conceptional Sun at 13 Cancer square to the U.S. conceptional Saturn at 14 Libra opposed to the U.S. natal Mars at 13 Aries.
In chapter 20 of The Astrology of the Four Horsemen, I wrote that under the influence of this configuration “the distribution of power between the branches of government and between the government and the people will most likely be altered.” I said we could see “a history-making power struggle between the president and Congress,...physical danger to the president and members of Congress, violent strikes and political action, an increase in the number of disasters and catastrophes,...the disruption of our alliances and the threat of war.” <7>
Our alliances have already been disrupted. NATO has lost its cohesive force and the Philippines has refused to allow us to renew our base leases.
On January 4, 1992, there will be an eclipse of the Sun that will intensify the possibility of the above events. The effects of the eclipse will last for about six months. This eclipse could herald a breakdown of the social order, the loss of political freedom, anarchy or chaos. I believe that these disruptions may have to do with worsening economic conditions.
All of these astrological configurations take place under the influence of a major conjunction that happened in 1988. Its effects will be felt during the entire 12-year period that began April 23, 1990, and even beyond that period.
I am referring to the conjunction on February 13, 1988, of three major planets in Capricorn–Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. These planets had not come together since the fourteenth century, a century marked by war, famine, economic hardship and the black plague, which wiped out one-third of the population of Europe. The decade of the 1990s comes under the influence of this conjunction. Therefore we can expect to see any or all of the above in the 1990s. The plagues delivered by the Four Horsemen are cancer, AIDS and others.
In a lecture I gave in San Francisco on February 13, 1988, I said that in the next 12 years we would face the possibility of war between the superpowers, economic depression and major earth changes. These portents could still come to pass if we the people do not act in time, specifically a war between the superpowers.
There are peak dates during the decade of the nineties when war is more likely. The first was 1988 to 1991. The next is around January 1994, then from 1998 to 2000.
On January 11, 1994, Mars, Venus, Neptune, the Moon, the Sun, Uranus and Mercury will form a tight megaconjunction in Capricorn. All of these planets will be between 17 and 26 Capricorn.
Every configuration has a period of time in which its effects may be felt. They are not necessarily manifest on the day of the conjunction. The acute effects of this megaconjunction will be felt for about six months before and one year after January 11, 1994.
However, I must stress that we should not rely on astrology. We should rely on the attunement of our hearts with Almighty God, with Jesus Christ, the saints in heaven and the angelic hosts of Light.
Given the unpredictability of the former Soviet Union, war could happen anytime. But before we look at the prospects for war, let’s look at the problems in the economy.
Headed for Chaos?
In The Astrology of the Four Horsemen I wrote, “There will be massive debt liquidation...[and] a crash in the real estate market is likely.” <8> I originally gave this prediction on February 13, 1988. At that time the economic picture looked rosy to many.
But the economy soon took a turn for the worse and hasn’t recovered. We have indeed seen massive debt liquidation. Some examples of debt liquidation I cited in The Astrology of the Four Horsemen were the Savings and Loan bailout and the emerging crisis in the commercial banking industry–both of which continue today. I also cited Donald Trump’s quasi-bankruptcy and the bankruptcy of Drexel, Burnham Lambert (which had been Wall Street’s most profitable firm) and two of the nation’s retailing giants, Allied Stores Corp. and Federated Department Stores Inc.
As I predicted in 1988, the real estate market has crashed–and with a vengeance. The crash affected many sectors of the economy. Today, business failures are often blamed on bad real estate loans or depressed real estate prices.
It is often economic conditions that trigger war, not political conditions. Unfortunately, we the people of the United States tend to be illiterate when it comes to our economy and how it is being managed.
The facts that I am going to present to you about the economy are prophecy in themselves. Chart them on your own graph and see what you compute.
After the boom of the eighties, economists admitted that we were due for a recession. Last year most of them predicted it would be a mild recession with a recovery beginning in the summer of 1991. Today, with gross national product (GNP) figures having dropped for the third quarter in a row, most economists admit that the recovery has not yet begun. They now say we may be headed for a double dip–two recessions in a row.
Bad economic news is easy to find. The real estate market is dismal. The Savings and Loan bailout, which the Bush administration originally said would cost $50 billion, has already cost $240 billion and no one knows what the final ticket will be. One thing we do know, that cost comes out of our pockets. The General Accounting Office estimates the total cost to the taxpayers will be $500 billion over the 40-year period it will take the government to pay off the money it is borrowing to pay for the bailout.
The commercial banks are in trouble too. According to U.S. News & World Report, “[1991] is likely to be the most costly ever in terms of bank failures....Moreover, with at least 64 more big banks possibly going broke over the next three years, a full-fledged taxpayer bailout may loom on the horizon.” <9>
Bank regulators moved slowly to shut down insolvent banks, allowing them to remain open and continue lending for an average of 28 months before closing them. The rationale was that the banks could solicit new and profitable loans, which would allow them to pay their debts, hence to grow their way out of insolvency. But they didn’t. They just kept running up a bigger tab for me and you to pay. It’s outrageous!
Walker Todd, who is writing a book about the Federal Reserve Board, says, “We’re in the grand denial phase, just like 1987 and 1988, when Congress and the Administration did nothing about savings and loans.” <10> According to some critics, Bush is simply trying to postpone the inevitable bill to taxpayers until after Election Day 1992. <11>
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which insures deposits up to $100,000, has had to bail out so many banks that it will be $5 billion in the hole by the end of this year. The fund is asking for a $70 billion loan from the federal government to keep it going. According to Charles A. Bowsher, the comptroller general, the banks will probably not be able to pay back the money they borrow from the government. <12>
The nation’s insurance industry is in trouble too. In July 1991, New Jersey state authorities took over Mutual Benefit Life, the nation’s eighteenth-largest life insurer with assets of $13.5 billion. And insurance policies, unlike bank deposits, are not guaranteed by the federal government.
Moody’s rating service has downgraded about 40 insurance companies this year. Mutual Benefit Life was one of them. It went bust because it couldn’t withstand the consumer panic generated by the lower rating.
Cities and states are running out of money too. Over half of all states are coping with large budget deficits. The deficit for the 50 states was $29 billion in fiscal year 1991. In looking for revenue, many states are having to raise taxes, adding to the weight on the already burdened consumers.
Americans are in serious trouble. About 880,000 people go bankrupt every year in this country. Taxes are now about 35 percent of the average person’s income. The average person’s debt now equals 97 percent of his disposable personal income!
Unemployment is the highest it has been in five years. Nearly 2 million people were laid off in the past year. When the unemployment rate dropped by one-tenth of 1 percent in September, President Bush called a press conference to be sure everyone got the message. However, the media was quick to point out that the figures were misleading.
The official unemployment rate is 6.8 percent. That means 9 million of the 125 million workers in the U.S. are unemployed. But unemployment figures do not include those who have quit looking for jobs. There are 1.1 million people in that category. If they were included in the figures, the unemployment rate would be over 8 percent. There are also 6 million Americans who work part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs.
The unemployed are having a tougher time finding work. Corporations can’t afford to hire back the people they laid off. Jobs are disappearing. Time reports that “experts say nearly half the 1.6 million jobs the economy has lost in just the past 13 months may never be restored.” <13> Columnist Warren Brookes points out, “Total civilian employment has actually fallen by more than 700,000 in the last 24 months.” <14>
Manufacturing jobs have been going overseas at an alarming rate. Since July 1988, U.S. manufacturing employment has plunged by nearly 1.1 million jobs. Some of those jobs went to Communist China.
In 1990 we imported over 200 million pairs of shoes manufactured in China. This was made possible in part because George Bush renewed China’s most-favored-nation status. That’s how George Bush repays the Chinese government for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He gives them American jobs!
The middle class has always been the backbone of a stable society, and the middle class is being hurt the most by this recession.
Listen to the following editorial printed in The New York Times. It makes me cry because I know what Saint Germain has intended for the American people, and I see what the power elite and the international bankers and the monopoly capitalists are doing to our people. Their money is being stolen right out of their pockets and their bank accounts, their investments and their insurance policies. The sacred labor of the people who built this nation is being manipulated.
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Last Friday, my husband was laid off from his day job. Since I lost my full-time job nine months ago, he has taken every piece of work he can get. Next month, he will be laid off from his night job for just a few weeks, we hope. It was while we were on vacation camping last August that a call was left on our answering machine at home saying that my services were no longer needed. Because I worked as a consultant, I am not eligible for unemployment benefits. So I sent out resumes, had two interviews, no call-backs. I thought that after the holidays it would pick up. At Christmastime I saw my husband shake my son violently, yelling at him. He adores that child. I’ve never seen him so angry. I knocked my husband to the floor, trying to strangle him in front of the Christmas tree. My son stood at a safe distance on the stairs and said, “Guys, guys...it’s Christmas!” We broke my grandmother’s coffee table in the struggle. We are not violent people. We had bought a second house as an investment (a college fund). We signed the papers the day we were married in 1985. We were lucky to find a buyer now, but the price was awfully low. We couldn’t make the mortgage payments anymore. After the sale, we are still left owing relatives the $40,000 we borrowed for the down payment and closing costs. After six months of not getting any replies to my resumes, I started applying for the kind of work I haven’t done since I was a kid. Waiting tables paid $3.25 an hour–but business wasn’t very good, so tips were few and far between. Last month, I went to work as a checker in the grocery store. I make $5.35 an hour, pay the sitter $3 an hour. After taxes and union dues, I take home just a few dollars a day. A pipe burst in the basement. My son needs glasses. I’m not eligible for health benefits for a year; my husband’s are guaranteed only until the end of this year. Two weeks ago, I got a second notice from the bank that it would begin foreclosing on our home the first of May. So far, nothing has happened, but I’m so concerned that our creditors, reading this, will lose faith in our ability to recover that I am afraid to reveal my own name. I have two college degrees and 18 years’ work experience. My car is 12 years old; my husband’s is eight. Will we be living in them soon? Last week, I got the first two call-backs from all the resumes I’ve sent out since January. One caller has since contacted me to say he hired someone else. Of course I’ll take the other job if it’s offered to me, even though it’s a two-hour commute each way. I won’t see my son much today, as he is shuffled from sitter to nursery school [and] then to grandma’s. I’m sure there are people in the world whose life is worse than mine. I just find myself thinking that this isn’t the life I had in mind when I married five years ago. <15> |
Well, this isn’t the abundant life that Jesus had in mind for us when he said: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” <16> The abundant life of Jesus Christ is not based on Keynesian economics. It’s not based on banks charging enormous interest rates on credit cards or anything else they can get away with. Everywhere we look we see the manipulation of the little people–the farmers and the shopkeepers and the working people–by the power elite.
We the people of this nation deserve to have the supply
that God intended us to have and that we have earned by the sweat of our brow. You ought to make your voice count and see to it that our money isn’t going out the door to pay the tab for the Soviet Union. Because every dollar we give them for food enables them to spend another dollar on their military. You may be aware that Soviet military spending is currently as high as 40 percent of their GNP. You ought to speak out about what you want the government to do with your money.
You have representatives in Washington and in your state capitals. Write! Speak! Say what you believe! It doesn’t matter if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, so long as you put your thoughts on paper and make your voice count. If you are silent, you will have the karma of silence in the face of such infamy as the government is inflicting upon our people today. [12-second applause]
There is no easy way out of our economic mess. The Federal Reserve and the government are trying what worked in previous recessions and it’s not working. The Fed is trying to jump-start the economy by lowering the discount rate, the rate it charges banks to borrow money, but the economy is not responding.
As Business Week reports, “The Federal Reserve has cut the discount rate four times and pushed down the federal funds rate nine times over the past nine months.” <17> The discount rate is 5 percent, the lowest level in 18 years, yet bank lending has not increased since May. Bankers are reluctant to lend and consumers are reluctant to borrow.
Why?
First and foremost, they are saddled with an abundance of debt from the boom of the 1980s.
But while it is fashionable to blame the excesses of the eighties for the problems of the nineties, the problem goes much deeper than that. Its roots are in the Keynesian economics that have provided the rationale for deficit spending and manipulation of interest rates in the U.S. since 1933.
Influential British economist John Maynard Keynes said that only government intervention–not free markets–could bring an economy to full employment. That is a flawed concept. It is a political formulation, not an economic theory. Keynesian economics provided a framework for politicians to artificially spur economic growth in the short run to help insure their reelection. But it inevitably leads to recessions or worse. In the long run, it leads to economic disaster.
Keynes said that the way for governments to intervene was to encourage full employment through spending programs such as those of the New Deal and through authorizing a central bank to fine-tune the economy through control of interest rates. Since the 1930s our government has sought to follow Keynes’ advice.
Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations have spent astronomical amounts of money and run up the better part of our $2.2 trillion deficit. People may have been better off in the short run, but now the taxpayer must foot the bill.
The Fed, our central bank, is an instrument of Keynesian policy. It has the power to raise and lower interest rates. And, during the mid- and late 1980s, it lowered interest rates so that banks could finance a tremendous wave of government, business and consumer spending. Now we are faced with almost insurmountable levels of debt in every area of the economy.
As it always has, excess credit encouraged a misallocation of the nation’s resources. We over-bought, over-built and over-borrowed. One result was the building boom of the eighties, which Time calls “an orgy of overbuilding that has sent the commercial real estate industry into an out-and-out depression.” <18>
Free market economists have always argued that government intervention in the economy causes money to be spent on unneeded items. Today the empty office towers and mountains of debt are a testimony to failed economic policy.
Reaganomics has taken the blame. But Reaganomics was a sham rather than a coherent policy. President Reagan promised to put the nation back on sound financial footing by reducing both taxes and government spending. Instead, he cut the rate at which taxes were rising while increasing government spending, leaving you and me saddled with a debt we will probably never be able to repay.
This year the federal government took in $944 billion but it is spending over $1.2 trillion. The difference is the deficit, $279 billion. The government must borrow that $279 billion to meet its expenses for this year alone–that’s slightly more than the government pays out in Social Security each year. That $279 billion will be added to the existing national debt of $2.2 trillion.
The national debt is created when the United States government borrows money from American citizens, banks and foreign investors by selling them treasury bills, bonds and securities. The government must then pay interest to the investors. Today the annual interest payments alone on the national debt are $196 billion. That’s 20 percent of the government’s annual income!
And what is that $196 billion buying?
Nothing! We’re just treading water.
And the U.S. government is still not tightening its belt, despite the highly touted budget agreement of last year. If current trends continue, the total deficit for 1991 to 1995 will be $1.1 trillion or more.
President Reagan didn’t have the bravura or the brains to bite the bullet and get the budget under control. Neither does President Bush. They have just pushed the day of reckoning further into the future. But there is a limit to how far that day can be pushed. Borrowing another $1.1 trillion in the next five years will add about $100 billion to our annual debt payments and virtually paralyze the government.
The burden of this recession is being borne largely by the middle class, you and me. As pressure on the middle class increases, predictions I made several years ago may come to pass. These include a breakdown of the social order, the loss of political freedom, anarchy or chaos, and the alteration of our system of government.
We have seen the middle class take to the streets in increasing numbers over economic issues. In Connecticut, a state with a population of only three million, over 40,000 angry demonstrators turned out to protest a new state income tax. In Rhode Island, depositors are protesting the shutdown of 45 banks and credit unions after the failure of their insurance fund.
One activist says that if the crisis isn’t resolved soon, “we could have riots–and riots by people over 60 years old.” <19> Suddenly, chaos in the U.S.A. doesn’t sound as farfetched as it used to. The outcome of chaos will probably be increased government control of the economy.
When things get bad enough, will Americans trade their economic freedom for the security of more and more government control?
In The Astrology of the Four Horsemen, I also predicted that we could see the eclipsing of the power of the power elite, including the Federal Reserve. During the next eight years a series of eclipses will fall in close aspect to the U.S. conceptional Pluto at 27 Capricorn in the second house. Pluto in the second house represents the influence of the power elite in the nation’s economy. The eclipses could indicate the removal of the power elite’s hold on the economy. They could also signal the destruction of the economy itself.
Something Is Coup-Coup in Moscow
For the last 40 years the greatest single threat to the United States has been Soviet nuclear weapons. The threat of annihilation was credible because we believed that the leaders of the Soviet Union had the goal of world domination and were building the military forces to achieve it. To counteract the Soviet threat, the United States formed alliances, negotiated treaties and fought intelligence wars. Of greatest importance, the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars developing weapons that were increasingly more powerful and more sophisticated.
But now, just as the Soviet Union <48> has reached new heights of nuclear and conventional military power, we are told that the Soviet threat no longer exists. The reasons for this are supposedly self-evident. Eastern Europe has broken free from Soviet control and the Warsaw Pact is defunct. And in the wake of the failed military coup of August 19, the Soviet Union itself has disintegrated.
U.S. policymakers no longer believe the Soviets intend to launch a first-strike attack against the United States or to invade Western Europe. As President Bush said on September 27, “The prospect of a Soviet invasion into Western Europe, launched with little or no warning, is no longer a realistic threat.” <20>
The Soviet military is generally represented as being disorganized, dispirited and unable to project power outside Soviet borders. There is also a popular perception that the Soviet army is disintegrating.
The belief that the Soviets are no longer a threat has made the business of defense planning more difficult. Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Washington Post earlier this year, “We no longer have the luxury of having a threat to plan for.” <21> The belief that the Soviets are no longer a threat has been growing ever since revolution swept through Eastern Europe in 1989 and the Cold War came to an end.
In 1990 and 1991 the Soviets supposedly became our ally in the Persian Gulf war. They signed treaties to reduce the number of conventional arms in Europe and to reduce nuclear missiles pointed at the United States. These events made world peace seem like a sure thing. When the August coup in Moscow failed, most American policymakers were convinced that the real democrats and reformers had triumphed over the hard-liners.
There is widespread belief in the United States that today the Soviets either cannot or will not destroy the United States. But there is a world of difference, my friends, between perception and reality.
As recently as September 27, the day President Bush announced his unilateral arms cuts, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney acknowledged that the Soviets “still have the capacity to destroy the United States.” <22> In other words, the Bush administration is basing their policy on their perception of the Soviets’ intentions rather than on the Soviets’ capabilities. What they are really saying is: yes, they have built an arsenal to destroy us but, no, they don’t want to do it.
The August 19 coup is being viewed as a watershed event in the Soviet Union. As President Bush put it, “We’ve seen the peoples of the Soviet Union turn to democracy and freedom, and discard a system of government based on oppression and fear.” <23>
But was this a victory for the forces of freedom or another Soviet scam?
There are several different ways to look at the coup. The conventional wisdom is that it was a last-gasp effort by Communist hard-liners to stop the tide of reform that Gorbachev initiated when he came to power in 1985. They failed. That spelled the end of Communism as a political force in the Soviet Union and transferred power to the reformers.
According to this theory, schisms within the military and unprecedented disobedience by a key unit of the KGB enabled Boris Yeltsin and his political allies to foil the coup leaders’ plan for takeover. The coup leaders, who included the head of the KGB, the interior minister and the defense minister, ensured their own downfall by behavior reminiscent of the Keystone Kops. As Newsweek put it: “The plotters couldn’t shoot [Yeltsin]. They couldn’t arrest him. They couldn’t even disconnect his phone.” <24>
After the coup failed, a number of republics declared their independence. Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist party and the party itself was dissolved. Although some people believe there is still danger from hard-line forces, most are convinced that a new era has begun in the Soviet Union.
But not everyone believes this version of events.
From the beginning, some believed that Gorbachev was in on the coup. Former Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, world chess champion Gary Kasparov and the president of the Republic of Georgia quickly said that Gorbachev himself had organized the coup. <25> Some believe Gorbachev was in on the initial coup planning but that some of his coconspirators tried to hijack it.
There are different theories as to why Gorbachev might have wanted to stage a coup. Shevardnadze said that Gorbachev was trying to provide himself with an excuse to destroy the existing power blocs in Moscow.
Intelligence analyst Angelo Codevilla says that it’s a “reasonable suggestion” that Gorbachev was in on the coup. Like other analysts, he notes that “every one of the people who ran the coup were Gorbachev’s people.” But Codevilla believes that the coup was originally directed against Boris Yeltsin and not Gorbachev and that its objective was to get rid of the freely elected leaders. Codevilla says that the goal of the coup was “the preservation of the Soviet Union by cracking down on the likes of Yeltsin.” <26>
Another intelligence expert says, on the authority of a reliable Western intelligence service, that Gorbachev was involved at least in the initial planning of the coup. According to this theory, the coup leaders were supposed to stage a coup, proclaim Gorbachev the supreme leader and give him complete power to straighten out the Soviet Union’s difficult problems. But things didn’t work out as planned.
On the second day of the coup, the plotters decided they didn’t need Gorbachev and they turned on him. That set in motion a terrible conflict within the party and the KGB. That, plus infighting among the plotters, led to the Keystone-Kops-like confusion. In this scenario the coup was foiled by the heroism of Boris Yeltsin.
Still others, like Professor Harold Rood, believe that Gorbachev and Yeltsin were in cahoots on the coup from the start. Rood, who is an expert in international relations, says that Yeltsin was hardly in danger of being shot during the coup even when he made public statements while standing on Soviet tanks outside the Russian parliament building. The reason–the military didn’t issue ammunition to the troops! <27>
What about the plotters?
What could have induced them to carry out a coup that Gorbachev had organized, knowing that they might lose their careers or lives?
Maybe they were being used.
New York Times reporter Bill Keller, in an article summarizing various conspiracy theories, writes that Vladimir Shcherbakov, a close confidant of Mr. Gorbachev and many of the plotters, said that “he believed that many of the accused instigators were dupes in a grander plot.” <28> Rood thinks that Gorbachev and Yeltsin set up the plotters, all of whom had been recently promoted to top-level positions by Gorbachev.
Some see the coup as part of a long-term plan set in motion around 1980 by Yuri Andropov, former general secretary of the Communist party and head of the KGB. From this point of view, glasnost was planned by Andropov and others in the KGB. Gorbachev, Yeltsin and Shevardnadze used glasnost and the recent coup to deceive the West.
The purpose of the deception is to gain money and technology and weaken the United States militarily while building Soviet military strength. Since the deception is proving to be successful, according to this scenario the United States is in grave danger.
Finally, Edward Epstein, an expert on Soviet strategic deception, says that Gorbachev was in on the coup in that he was integral to planning a state of emergency. Epstein says that a state of emergency designed to get Western aid had been planned since December 1990. There had been a disagreement between Gorbachev and other top leaders about when to put the state of emergency into effect. Finally, the plotters decided to go ahead without Gorbachev. <29>
Initially the Soviets called the coup a state of emergency rather than a coup. After the Western media used the word coup, the Soviets starting using it too.
One thing which leads me to believe that Gorbachev may have been in on the coup is the nature of the events leading up to it. It’s as if a dramatist decided to use the technique of foreshadowing to make sure that, when the coup did happen, Americans would find it believable.
In the six months prior to the coup, various officials warned of an impending hard-line crackdown. The Soviet government suddenly became more brutal and repressive. In January 1991, Soviet troops cracked down on demonstrators in Lithuania.
The period of foreshadowing was initiated by a charade carried out by Gorbachev’s close friend and companion in glasnost, Eduard Shevardnadze. On December 21, 1990, Shevardnadze resigned as foreign minister in protest against “the onset of dictatorship.” <30>
A senior deputy of the Supreme Soviet, Yuri Blokhin, called Shevardnadze’s televised speech a “well-planned spectacle” aimed at increasing Gorbachev’s power. <31> There is no question in my mind that Shevardnadze’s speech on that occasion was an act. Although separated from the coup by eight months, it may be related. Like the coup, Shevardnadze’s speech was a form of political theater designed to mislead the West.
First, Shevardnadze’s statement that the Soviet Union was in danger of becoming a dictatorship was deceptive. It implied that the Soviet Union was something besides a dictatorship. In fact, at the time, the Soviet Union was already either a dictatorship or an oligarchy. Gorbachev had enormous power and his power was growing steadily.
Second, Shevardnadze’s speech forcefully brought the supposed struggle between hard-liners and reformers to the attention of the West. Shevardnadze had earned a reputation in the West as a liberal reformer. When he resigned he was putting the West on notice that there were consequences for not supporting Gorbachev’s reforms. In essence he was saying, “If you don’t support Gorbachev, we will go back to the Cold War. So send in your dollars today!”
Shevardnadze followed up on his televised sales pitch with a personal visit. Early in 1991 he came to the United States to ask for aid to the Soviet Union in the neighborhood of $90 billion.
Shevardnadze’s resignation speech also set the stage for him to return to the government as a liberal reformer at some future time if, for example, it became necessary for Gorbachev to be moved out of the limelight. <49>
Another element that gives the coup a phony ring is the ineptitude of the plotters. If there is one thing the Soviets know how to do, it’s how to use force. It doesn’t make sense that the plotters were able to cut off communications at Gorbachev’s dacha in the Crimea, which is very hard to do, but failed to cut off communications in Moscow, which is relatively easy to do.
Gorbachev could run the entire Soviet Union from his vacation home in the Crimea. It has redundant secure communications systems. Even if the plotters had cut his phone lines, why didn’t he communicate by radio? It would have been possible to jam Gorbachev’s radio transmitter, but the plotters didn’t even bother to jam his receiver, if he is to be believed. Gorbachev said that he listened to the BBC and the Voice of America while he was under house arrest.
Newsweek carried a story on September 9 that made it seem unlikely that Gorbachev’s communications were cut off. Although Newsweek ultimately dismissed the notion that Gorbachev was in league with the plotters, it said:
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At the time, it sounded like one of the coup plotters’ few effective measures: when Mikhail Gorbachev picked up one phone after another on Aug. 18, he said later, he found them all dead. But last week the head of the plant that manufactured the communications equipment for Gorbachev’s Crimean hideaway claimed that the system was so elaborate that the Gang of Eight could not have cut off the phones. “It isn’t a dacha–it’s one of the primary places from where the country is governed,” factory director Valentin Zanin told the weekly Moscow News. “Isolating the president of the U.S.S.R. from communications is impossible.” If anyone tried to tamper with the primary system, a network of backup systems would kick in, Zanin explained. The core of the network is so secret that he refused to discuss it–except to say cryptically it would allow Gorbachev to restore any interrupted communications with nothing but pen and paper. The mystery deepened with a report in the weekly Commersant that border guards noticed only a brief disruption of all communications in the area during the coup. <32> |
While Gorbachev’s Crimea communications were supposedly dead, communications in Moscow were working fine. The coup leaders did not shut down the local or foreign press, cut the local or international phone lines, or cut off the power or water to Boris Yeltsin’s headquarters. While Gorbachev was incommunicado, Yeltsin chatted with President Bush by telephone and appeared with Diane Sawyer on American TV.
The coup leaders made no attempt to control the media. They didn’t close the airport. They didn’t enforce a curfew. They didn’t shoot either Yeltsin or Gorbachev. They didn’t even arrest Yeltsin. The KGB troops that were sent to arrest him on the morning of the coup arrived half an hour after he had left for work.
Harold Rood says that the coup has a number of similarities to the revolution in Czechoslovakia, which was started by the KGB and the Czech secret police.
It is now known that Moscow started the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe in order to replace hard-liners with Gorbachev-style reformers. That was the Gorbachev-KGB plan to salvage Communism in Eastern Europe. It entailed toppling hard-line leaders and changing the names of the ruling parties from something like “the Communist Party,” which was usually voted out of existence, to something like “the Democratic Socialist Party.”
Gorbachev’s strategy worked well in Bulgaria and Romania, but in Czechoslovakia the secret police lost control of the revolution. Rood says that he and a number of other analysts believe the coup in Moscow “was partly a con job but was really like the revolution in Czechoslovakia,...which got out of hand.” <33>
We may never know whether the hard-line coup went according to plan or was hijacked, but it is essential that we do know whether there has been a fundamental shift in Soviet intentions.
What has really changed since the coup?
If there really is a new Soviet Union, you might expect to see some profound changes in their spying or in their military and space programs. But James McCrery, former head of strategic studies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, says, “The one-word answer to what changed in the Soviet intelligence, military and space programs as a result of the coup is–nothing.” <34>
Let’s look at what the Soviets did with their military during the Gorbachev years. Since 1985 the Soviets have been increasing their defense budget between 6 and 8 percent per year.
On May 13, 1991, Time magazine acknowledged that the Soviets are spending 40 percent of their GNP on the military-industrial complex, which accounts for up to 50 percent of Soviet industrial output. <35> I have been criticized as a reactionary for citing similar figures in the last two years.
Under Gorbachev, the Soviets embarked upon a strategic modernization program of colossal dimensions. They built a record number of cruise missiles, a fleet of rail-mobile and road-mobile ICBMs and a network of new underground command posts for use by their leadership during a nuclear war.
Of greatest importance, they started to replace their fleet of SS-18 MOD 4 missiles with the MOD 5. The SS-18 MOD 4 was the deadliest weapons system in the world. Each missile carries at least 10 warheads and perhaps as many as 30. With the MOD 4 alone, the Soviets could target all U.S. silo-based ICBMs and nuclear submarine bases. But at great expense they developed and produced the MOD 5, which is even deadlier–it is more accurate and 20 percent larger than the MOD 4. They are currently developing the MOD 6, which is deadlier still!
The SS-18 is a first-strike weapon by definition. It has the power and accuracy needed to destroy U.S. ICBMs and other high-priority military targets. Most U.S. long-range nuclear weapons are neither powerful enough nor accurate enough to be called first-strike weapons. Remember that.
If the Soviets have no intention of launching a first strike, why are they building more first-strike weapons?
We’ve got to demand that our president and Congress start asking questions like this. What’s more, we’ve got to demand that they base their policies on the right answers.
The SS-18 modernization has been going on simultaneously with the period of Soviet liberalization and arms control negotiations. Critics might argue that everything has changed in the wake of the coup. Well, before the coup we were told that everything had changed because the Cold War was over. At that time the Soviets were in the midst of modernizing their SS-18s. Today it is not surprising to again hear that “everything has changed.” But it’s still wrong.
A Question of Strategy
Mary FitzGerald, an expert on Soviet military strategy at the Hudson Institute, says that since the coup there has been no change in the direction of Soviet military policy, even though there was a change of leadership at the highest levels of the military.
FitzGerald has been studying the statements of Marshal Yevgeny Shaposhnikov, the new Soviet defense minister, and other leading Soviet generals. She says, “I don’t see any difference in their views at all on the nature of future war or the need to compete with the West, in fact to be superior to the West.” <36>
Despite the disintegration of the Soviet Union, FitzGerald says that the Red Army is not disintegrating. She complains that the media annoys her when “they assume there is no more Soviet military.” <37>
While reporting on problems in the Soviet army, the media is ignoring the most important story–how the Soviet military is using glasnost to acquire the next generation of military technology.
There has been a reform movement in the Soviet military since the start of glasnost. More than a decade ago the Soviets saw the need to reform their economy. One of the main reasons for the reform was to keep up with the West in the development of advanced conventional munitions of the kind used in the Persian Gulf war.
Soviet military leaders saw the development of advanced conventional weapons as a revolution in military affairs. These weapons included everything from “smart bombs” to lasers and particle-beam weapons to kinetic-energy weapons, such as hypervelocity projectiles.
Soviet leaders saw glasnost as a necessary tactical maneuver during which they could overhaul their economy and give it the infrastructure needed to build the new weapons. Glasnost also provided Soviet leaders with the proper climate to get the West to give them the money and technology they needed to upgrade their military.
There is a great deal of overlap between the needs of the Soviet civilian economy and the military economy. For example, the technology that could modernize a tractor factory could also be used to build better tanks. And fiber optics can both revolutionize civilian telephone systems and enhance military communications.
As FitzGerald puts it, “If [the Soviets] are going to fix their economy, they’re also going to...simultaneously give the military what they want.” <38> Thus, any help we give to the Soviet civilian economy automatically increases their capacity to build high-tech weapons.
At the start of glasnost, Soviet military leaders often talked about glasnost in their journals as something that could give them “breathing space” in their competition with the West. They did not conceive of glasnost as a period of true peace between the superpowers. They saw it as a tactical retreat.
In short, they saw the period of warming relations with the West as a chance to get an economic and technological quick fix in order to catch up with the West in high-tech conventional weapons. They already had overwhelming superiority in nuclear weapons and traditional conventional weapons.
In addition, Soviet military leaders conceived of a new military concept, that of the “air-space war.” The air-space war is based on the integrated use of advanced conventional munitions and nuclear weapons deployed on aircraft and in space. The weapons would be linked up with a ground-, air- and space-based communications network. As they see it, the future air-space war will be fought on a global basis.
Soviet doctrine today holds that advances in military technology have been so great that in the air-space war there is a convergence of offense and defense. There is no longer a military front or rear since an attacker can swiftly strike all geographic locations simultaneously with ease.
The Soviets have always placed a high priority on surprise attack. But FitzGerald says that since the success of the U.S. surprise attack in the Persian Gulf war, their desire to attack first has grown exponentially.
Remember, FitzGerald is studying the statements of the Soviet generals themselves. And I can verify by prophecy that they do have the desire and the intent to attack first and without warning.
According to FitzGerald, “After the Persian Gulf war they blew the lid off the old sacred formulas about surprise so that now it is the one decisive factor in the course and outcome of war. In fact, the initial period is now the only period in the war.” <39>
Every day we hear stories about how weak the Soviets are. Their economy is a mess. They are facing starvation. The nation is fragmenting as republics leave the union and their military is disintegrating.
As we have seen, their military is not disintegrating and all else is not as it seems. The Soviets are pulling out all the stops to convince the West they are weaker than they really are, economically, politically and militarily.
First, the Soviet economy is not as bad as it appears to be. That is not to say that the Soviet economy is good. It is bad but it has always been bad, and the United States has helped it out before.
In 1921, for example, the United States sent the Soviets enough food to provide for more than 10 million meals a day to stave off widespread starvation due to a famine caused by Bolshevik economic measures. The leadership of the United States did not have the brains to let the Bolsheviks collapse under their own weight. They supported them every step of the way, which is why we are dealing with the Soviet Union as it is today.
As Edward Epstein says, “At almost any point in [Soviet] history you find people talking about starvation” and the disorganization of the economy. “You can’t find a time when they were a prosperous society.” <40> So the current chaos in the Soviet economy is par for the course, but that doesn’t mean that the Soviets are rushing to adopt a free market economy.
Contrary to Soviet statements, it would not be terribly difficult to introduce a free market economy in the Soviet Union. Intelligence expert Charles Via correctly points out that the Soviets already have a free market, which is now called the black market.
Via’s plan for how the Soviet Union could establish a market economy goes like this: Legalize the black market. Then establish a service sector. Legalize the small retail operations, from barber shops to shoemakers. Foreign banks could quickly provide a banking system. To solve the food problem, divide up the collective farms among the individual farmers.
The tricky problem is what to do with their inefficient medium and heavy industry. Via’s solution is to gradually cut back the subsidies and let the workers or whoever has capital purchase them. The government should only underwrite the industries that cannot make it on their own and are essential to the state. <41>
No doubt there are other ways for the Soviets to convert to a market economy. In fact, they could have made the transition long ago, just as they could have converted their defense industries to civilian production.
For five years the Soviets have claimed that it is difficult to make the transition from producing military goods to producing consumer goods. They talk as if workers who can produce, say, nuclear-powered submarines costing a billion or so dollars each can’t make toasters. The truth of the matter is that the Soviets want to produce weapons and they don’t want to adopt a free market economy.
First, a free market economy would decentralize the political power in the Soviet Union more than the leaders are willing to tolerate. Second, the Soviet economy is based on slave labor and any substantive change would destroy Moscow’s power.
Epstein says that “a free economy would be disastrous [to the Soviet power elite] unless the Soviet Union was going to become a country with an economy the size of Sweden. The basic dynamic of the situation is that if they want power, they have to have a slave society. It doesn’t matter if that slave society is Communist or fascist. [But] it has to be totalitarian.” <42>
It’s hardly likely that the Soviets will decide that they don’t want to be a powerful society. And if they haven’t made that decision, then they are using the current disorder to get economic aid and technological assistance from the West. Thus, in the short run, Soviet leaders are making an effort to make things seem worse than they actually are.
Here’s one last example. The Soviet Union is the world’s largest gold producer after South Africa, but in late September the Soviet economic reform chief, Grigory Yavlinsky, said Soviet gold reserves had dropped to 240 tons and were in danger of running out. International gold experts believe the Soviets have around 2,000 tons of gold.
The gold experts doubt the Soviets could have sold enough gold to significantly deplete their stock. The markets haven’t reflected sales of that magnitude. Instead, the gold experts suspect the Soviets are deliberately underestimating their gold holdings in order to get more financial support from the West.
The fragmentation of the Soviet Union into a series of separate nations is the most radical change in the Soviet Union. Many Americans believe that the Soviet threat no longer exists because the Soviet Union itself no longer exists. In reality, there is much less to the breakup of the Soviet Union than meets the eye.
The old Soviet Union was an imperial empire run from Moscow. Russia is the largest and most important of the Soviet republics. Russia has 76 percent of the Soviet Union’s land mass and 51 percent of the population. It produces 91 percent of the Soviet Union’s oil and 75 percent of its natural gas. It generates about half of the Soviet Union’s agricultural output and much of its industrial output.
It may be that Moscow has decided that it’s better off without the other republics, at least for the time being. In any case, the Soviet Union will remain more or less the same whether or not the republics permanently leave the union.
Several intelligence experts believe that the Baltic states, which have left the union, will be independent but not sovereign. Like Finland, they will be forced by the mere presence of their large and powerful neighbor to tailor their policies to Moscow’s liking. In short, they will be Finlandized.
In addition, Moscow may be more than happy to have the Moslem republics, such as Kazakhstan and Tadzhikistan, leave the union. For two decades analysts have wondered whether the disproportionate number of Moslems in the Soviet army would be loyal to Moscow in a future conflict. Experts have also worried that an exploding Moslem population would create instability in the Soviet Union.
Charles Via says that Moscow may be intentionally letting the Moslem republics go. Here’s why.
First, it would enable Russia to drastically reduce the number of potentially unreliable Moslems in the Soviet armed forces. Second, the Moslem republics have been draining economic resources from the Soviet Union but supplying little in return. Third, the economies of the Moslem republics have been structured so that they are dependent on Moscow. Finally, as separate countries the Moslem republics would form a buffer zone between Russia and China, Afghanistan and Iran.
Whether or not they choose to stay in a legal political union with the rest of the Soviet republics, the Moslem republics will remain in a de facto economic union. As a result, they will be largely subject to Moscow’s control.
None of the independent republics that were part of the Soviet Union can afford to fund significant armed forces. Therefore, they will be intimidated by the Soviet (or Russian) army and also under its protection. Thus, by allowing the republics to go their way, Moscow will retain many of the benefits of an empire while reducing some of the costs. <43>
I think that letting the Moslem republics go may only be a temporary tactical retreat and that Moscow may reassert control over them in the future.
The most recent so-called irreversible change we have seen in the Soviet Union is the fragmentation of the KGB into three parts. It remains to be seen how the intelligence service will function, but it is not time to celebrate the demise of the KGB. It has been reorganized and renamed a half-dozen times in the last 70 years.
It was first called the Cheka, then the GPU, then the OGPU, then the NKVD, then the NKGB, the MGB and finally the KGB. The KGB will be replaced by three other organizations and that may give us too many initials to remember. But there is little reason to believe the Soviets will stop their foreign spying.
On September 30, Mikhail Gorbachev appointed Yevgeny Primakov to take control of Soviet foreign intelligence operations. Primakov is a Middle East specialist with a background in disinformation. He takes over at a time when the FBI reports that the level of Soviet spying is the highest it has been in recent decades.
To summarize my assessment, while the Soviet Union has its problems, they are not as serious as many in the West have been led to believe. Rather than disintegrating, the Soviet Union is adjusting its structure. The Soviet military is attempting a technological revolution. It is clear that the Soviet leadership has undertaken this period of reform in order to increase its military power, gain money and technology from the West and solve some social problems. It is also clear that the Soviets have deliberately exaggerated the severity of their problems. The question is why.
The Mind of the Opposing General
Soviet leaders are students of the great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu taught that deception is the essence of strategy. The target of the strategist is the mind of the opposing general. The object of strategy is to defeat the enemy without fighting and, if fighting is necessary, to create the conditions whereby victory is assured before the war begins.
Thus, Sun Tzu taught that when a nation is strong it should attempt to appear weak. He wrote: “When capable, feign incapacity....Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him....Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance.” <44>
James Jesus Angleton, former head of CIA counter-intelligence, encapsulated some of Sun Tzu’s ideas in the maxim “Hide order behind a cloak of disorder.” <45> That is just what the Soviets are doing today. They are using their real weaknesses to hide their real strengths.
Did you hear what I said? They are using their real weaknesses to hide their real strengths.
As a result most Americans, including President Bush, although he of all people should know better as former head of the CIA, think the Soviets are much weaker and far more disorganized than they are. Worse, they do not see that the Soviets still wish to use military force to dominate or destroy the United States and capture Western Europe.
In the past, arms control agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union have taken years to negotiate. Now arms control cuts are not even negotiated; they are announced during press conferences.
Bush’s unilateral arms cut could be disastrous. It is the latest in a long series of arms control failures although it was not even negotiated. Most Americans are not aware of these failures so I will recite just a few of them.
If I wind up with any karma in this life, it will not be on the side of having failed to give out the necessary information! [11-second applause] And you will not wind up with the karma of having failed to listen or to act, because you are doing both.
The United States has always ended up in a worse position after negotiating an arms control treaty with the Soviets. It’s not just because the Soviets cheat; the treaties themselves are flawed, which speaks badly for our negotiating team. Come on, George Bush, get out there and tell the American people what’s really been going on!
The United States allowed the Soviets to develop a first-strike capability beginning in the 1960s. A first-strike capability means being able to destroy most of the enemy’s nuclear weapons before they are launched and being able to shoot down or absorb a retaliatory strike. In order to launch a first strike, a nation must have enough powerful, accurate weapons to destroy most or all of the enemy’s nuclear weapons.
Rather than redress the unstable situation by deploying defenses against ballistic missiles, U.S. policymakers tried to get the Soviets to solve our problem for us through arms control negotiations. The negotiations and the treaties that resulted from them were doomed to fail–starting with the earliest major arms control agreement, SALT I.
It was not in the Soviets’ interest to correct the strategic imbalance. And believe it or not, U.S. SALT I negotiators had no idea just how many missiles and warheads the Soviets had, because they wouldn’t tell us. Instead of insisting the Soviets provide an accurate inventory of their missiles before negotiating an agreement, U.S. negotiators supplied the Soviets with the American estimate of Soviet inventory. The Soviets then used our estimates as working figures!
In addition, the U.S. had no way to count Soviet missiles, hence no way to verify the agreement. The Soviets could produce missiles and store them in warehouses and we would never know about it. So we decided to count launchers rather than missiles.
As a result, SALT I limited only the number of launchers, such as missile silos, and not the number of missiles. Since the treaty only limited launchers and not missiles, it was tragically flawed.
U.S. negotiators assumed the Soviets would build only one missile per silo, probably because U.S. missiles are “hot-launched,” that is, the silos cannot quickly be reused once a missile is fired from them. But the Soviets developed cold-launched missiles that enabled them to fire another missile out of a silo almost immediately after launching the first missile.
Since the Soviets went to the trouble of developing cold-launched missiles, it is almost certain that they built more missiles than silos. They may have hundreds or thousands of missiles in excess of those which show up on the published inventories, and it’s all perfectly legal under our existing arms control treaties.
But even if we assume that the Soviets built only one missile per launcher, SALT I was a failure. U.S. negotiators failed to get a concrete definition of the term heavy missile into the treaty. That allowed the Soviets to replace their SS-9 missile, which was a first-strike weapon, with the SS-18, which was a more effective first-strike weapon. Consequently, SALT I did not limit nuclear arms and thereby give the United States greater security as its advocates had promised. It allowed the Soviets a quick fourfold increase in the number of their known strategic missile warheads.
And so it has been with arms control negotiations ever since. The Soviets are simply better at it than we are. Therefore the United States has grown more and more vulnerable to a Soviet first strike.
Bush’s unilateral arms cut made the situation worse. His proposal tacitly acknowledged that most of the U.S. bombers and land-based ICBMs would almost certainly be destroyed during a Soviet first strike. Therefore it was no concession to take the bombers off alert status and deactivate the 450 Minuteman II missiles.
Without a good strategic defense, most of the bombers would be lost in the opening moments of a U.S.-Soviet war. Those bombers that did survive would not be much of a threat to the Soviet Union since they would have little chance of penetrating the extensive Soviet air defense.
But there are two other problems. First, with the exception of our air-delivered nuclear weapons, Bush is quickly denuclearizing Western Europe. Nuclear weapons were deployed in Western Europe to offset overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority. If we remove those weapons, the Soviets could easily overrun Europe. In fact, they could have done it even with the tactical nuclear weapons in place, but it would have been more difficult.
Because the Warsaw Pact has been disbanded, most Americans believe that the Soviets cannot attack and conquer Europe. The loss of Eastern Europe creates some technical problems for the Soviets, but they are still capable of doing it.
Although the Soviets signed the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, which was supposed to reduce conventional weapons, they have circumvented it. They withdrew 70,000 pieces of military equipment, including artillery and tanks, east of the Urals rather than destroying them as the treaty mandates. These weapons could be used to invade Europe, especially in the wake of a successful Soviet first strike on the United States.
U.S. deterrence against a Soviet first strike is disintegrating. We have shut down our air defense radars and grounded the airborne command post and the planes that allow the president to communicate with missile-carrying submarines in time of war. We have allowed the Persian Gulf war to deplete our stockpiles of advanced conventional munitions. And we are cutting our forces in Europe. This shows that the Soviet strategy to attack the mind of the opposing general (president) is working.
The objective reality is that the Soviets are a dangerous enemy. U.S. policymakers are simply blind to their capability and their intent. They are willfully blind. They do not want to know. As a result, the United States is in grave danger as we sit here tonight. I want you to know that we cannot even perceive, much less respond to, a mortal threat against North America.
Deploy Strategic Defense Now!
We need to deploy strategic defense and not just because there may be another coup or a military takeover in the Soviet Union. We have to act as if the current Soviet leaders are fully capable of initiating a first strike.
We have strategic defense systems we can deploy now. These include ERIS and HEDI antiballistic missiles (ABMs) and Brilliant Pebbles. HEDI is an ABM that destroys warheads as they reenter the atmosphere. It could defend our cities and military bases. ERIS is an ABM that destroys warheads in space. It could defend much of North America from one site in the center of the country and from two on the coasts.
Brilliant Pebbles are small, space-based, nonnuclear missiles. We could deploy a system of several thousand Brilliant Pebbles stationed around the world in space. The “Pebbles” could hit ICBMs and even medium-range missiles as they travel through space. This network would provide protection for all nations–not just the United States–against everything from a terrorist attack to an accidental launch to a full-on first strike.
These three systems would cost $75 billion or $80 billion to deploy. That’s expensive. But as I’ve said before, it’s cheaper than losing a single city. Strategic defense could decrease the need to deploy expensive offensive systems. Ultimately it would allow us to cut the defense budget.
According to one study, this three-layered defense made up of ground- and space-based systems would be 93 percent effective against a full-scale Soviet ICBM attack. <46> We do not have ABMs today to defend us against that attack or against any other missiles coming in from any other Third World country that gets those missiles. With this system in place, the Soviets might never launch their surprise attack.
This is my peace plan. I will tell it and tell it again wherever I speak, because it is the truth that when acted upon will make America and the world free! [36-second standing ovation]
“Prophecy and the Current Crisis” is based on a lecture given by Elizabeth Clare Prophet on Monday, October 14, 1991, at the New Orleans Airport Hilton.
1. Dan. 5:5-31.
2. Isa. 1:18.
4. “Navy Cuts Back on Missile Arming,” Billings (Mont.) Gazette, 17 May 1991, p. 2A.
5. “Planes for Starting WWIII Grounded,” Billings (Mont.) Gazette, 25 May 1991, p. 2A.
7. Prophet, The Astrology of the Four Horsemen, pp. 243, 241, 244.
9. Susan Dentzer, “Brink of Disaster,” U.S. News & World Report, 14 October 1991, pp. 55-56.
10. Stephen Labaton, “Are Banks Going Down the Same Path as S. & L.s?” New York Times, 16 June 1991, sec. 4, p. 1.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. John Greenwald, “Permanent Pink Slips,” Time, 9 September 1991, p. 54.
14. Warren Brookes, “New Jobs Bushed-Out?” Washington Times, 2 September 1991, p. F1.
15. Jane Doe, “The Recession Hits Home,” New York Times, 11 May 1991, p. 13.
16. John 10:10.
17. “Will Cheaper Money Work?” Business Week, 30 September 1991, p. 20.
18. John Greenwald, “A Slump That Won’t Go Away,” Time, 14 October 1991, p. 42.
19. “Mad as Hell in Rhode Island,” Newsweek, 7 October 1991, p. 46.
20. “Remarks by President Bush on Reducing U.S. and Soviet Nuclear Weapons,” New York Times, 28 September 1991, p. 4.
21. “Missions Implausible,” U.S. News & World Report, 14 October 1991, p. 27.
22. Richard Cheney, “Nightline,” ABC News, 27 September 1991.
23. “Remarks by President Bush,” New York Times, 28 September 1991, p. 4.
24. “The People vs. the Plotters,” Newsweek, 2 September 1991, p. 34.
25. “World News Tonight,” ABC News, 21 August 1991; David Braaten, “Potemkin Coup?” Inside the Beltway, Washington Times, 21 August 1991, p. A6.
26. Telephone interview with Angelo Codevilla, intelligence analyst, 11 October 1991.
27. Telephone interview with Harold Rood, professor at the Center for Defense and Strategic Studies, Southwest Missouri State University, 8 October 1991.
28. Bill Keller, “Subplots Within the Plot Intrigue Coup Theorists,” New York Times, 28 August 1991, p. A10.
29. Telephone interview with Edward Epstein, expert on Soviet strategic deception, 10 October 1991.
30. “A Protest against Dictatorship,” New York Times, 21 December 1991, p. A7.
31. “Putting Shevardnadze’s Resignation in Context,” Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, House Republican Research Committee, 9 January 1991.
32. “Could Gorbachev Have Phoned Home?” Newsweek, 9 September 1991, p. 27.
33. Rood, telephone interview.
34. Telephone interview with James McCrery, former head of strategic studies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, 10 October 1991.
35. Bruce W. Nelan, “Moscow’s Hungry Monster,” Time, 13 May 1991, p. 35.
36. Telephone interview with Mary FitzGerald, Hudson Institute, 11 October 1991.
37. Ibid.
38. FitzGerald, telephone interview, 7 June 1991.
39. Ibid.
40. Epstein, telephone interview.
41. Telephone interview with Charles Via, chairman of the Center for Intelligence Studies, 8 October 1991.
42. Epstein, telephone interview.
43. Via, telephone interview, 10 September 1991.
44. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, trans. Samuel B. Griffith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 66, 67.
45. Edward Jay Epstein, Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 289.
46. John Gardner et al., Missile Defense in the 1990s (Washington, D.C.: George C. Marshall Institute, 1987).
47. Saint Joseph
48. As we go to press (12-16-91), it seems certain that whatever emerges from the chaos of the Soviet Union will not be called the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, for want of a better term, I
have used the terms Soviet and Soviet Union to describe leaders, resources and a geographical location that, because of unsettled conditions, currently have no other accepted name.
49. Since October 14, 1991, when I delivered this update on prophecy, Eduard Shevardnadze has returned to the Soviet government. On November 19, Shevardnadze resumed his post as
Soviet foreign minister. He was reappointed by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev after the former foreign minister, Boris Pankin, who served since shortly after the
August 1991 coup, was named ambassador to Britain.
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