Page 77 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 77 of 237

No one bothered to tell the embassy or the State Department that the newspaper article was written by the CIA.

***

1956: The Khrushchev Speech

The CIA's manufacture of bogus Communist material has not always led to a happy result. But the agency has had
one noteworthy success in obtaining a real Communist document.

When Khrushchev delivered his historic secret speech attacking Stalin's crimes at the 20th Communist Party
Congress in Moscow in February, 1956, Allen Dulles ordered a vast and intensive hunt for the text. He assumed
there had to be one, because Khrushchev had spoken for seven hours.

The word went out inside the CIA: whoever could deliver the document would be amply recognized by Dulles as
an intelligence ace. At whatever price, the CIA was determined to obtain the secret speech.

First, analysts determined what individuals and what Communist nations might have been given a copy -- in other
words, where to go looking for it. Then agents fanned out all over the Communist world to find it.

One top CIA operator turned up in Belgrade with an intriguing scheme -- he would make a direct pitch to the
Yugoslav Government to bootleg him a copy. Tito and Stalin, after all, had split in 1948. With the permission of
Ambassador James W. Riddleberger, the CIA man called on a certain high Yugoslav official.

For nearly two hours he argued his case, listing the reasons why Washington deserved a copy of the top-secret
document. The sales talk must have been convincing, for at one point the Yugoslav seemed ready to hand over a
copy. But then he thought better of it, and backed off.

The CIA did finally get its hands on a text -- but not in Moscow. Money and other considerations changed hands.
The man who made the deal to deliver the speech claimed he needed the money, not for himself, but to make
arrangements to protect others who might be involved. At least that is what he told the CIA.

With the speech in Dulles' hands, a new problem had to be faced. Dulles did not want to release the 26,000-word
text unless he could be sure it was genuine. For several weeks during May, 1956, the CIA had the text in hand,
but said nothing.

CIA analysts pored over the text, examining every word, each phrase in an attempt to authenticate it. The experts
finally decided that the document contained information that only Khrushchev could have been in a position to
know. Together with other clues buried in the text, this convinced the analysts the document was bona fide.
Dulles gave his approval, and on June 4 the State Department released the text.

To this day the CIA does not know precisely what document it obtained: whether it was the speech that
Khrushchev prepared for delivery at the Congress, or the verbatim speech he did deliver, or possibly a slightly
altered version for distribution to certain satellite nations. The CIA does not know which it is because the text-as-
delivered was never published by Khrushchev. On the other hand, Moscow has not flatly denied its authenticity.*

"There is no fatal inevitability of war," Khrushchev said in the speech, in rejecting one of the basic tenets of
Lenin. The CIA felt a deserved sense of satisfaction in having run the speech to ground. For it was the first
tangible evidence of the historic split between Communist China and the Soviet Union.