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Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union

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In this book, Peter Schweizer not only gives detailed accounts of the behind-the-scenes strategies on how the Reagan Administration finalized the downfall of the Soviet Union, he thouroughly documents his sources. Schweizer conducted numerous personal interviews with high-ranking officials that worked during the 1980s at the CIA, National Security Administration, and the State Department. From those he lays out how the Reagan teamers put the Soviet Union in a fatal chokehold through three main areas: 1) bargaining with Saudi Arabia to drive oil prices down, ruining Russia's main source of revenue, 2) covert operations to supply the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan with the arms to expel Russian forces from their country, and 3) underground support for Solidarity members in Poland.

A student friend of mine was taking a course in which his professor was a former head of counterintelligence at the CIA, so I had my friend ask his professor to verify the legitimacy of Schweizer's book. My friend reported back that the professor, who says many reports have been almost fictional, said that he HIGHLY recommends this book for the most honest assessment of how Ronald Reagan and his team won the Cold War.

Once in awhile a book comes along that has that special quality of illuminating a real world mystery. Robert Caro's biography of Johnson and Albert Speer's memoir are two such works. Peter Schweizer's Victory is another.

For years I wondered, as I read news accounts and histories, why no one had a logical explanation for why oil prices had dropped so dramatically in 1985, when just a couple years earlier pundits were saying the sky was the limit for oil. And why, shortly thereafter, did the Eastern Bloc begin to crumble, soon to be followed by the Soviet Union itself? Then why did the Bush Administration see fit to conduct a war to liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia? And were all these momentous events related? The answer is yes. Victory describes clearly how they all were indeed closely related.

King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was worried that he would be overthrown as the Shah of Iran had been, either by Muslim extremists, or by Soviet backed revolutionaries. At the same time, the Reagan Administration was interested in the economic strangulation of the Soviet Union. The source of most of the USSR's hard currency was the sale of its oil on international markets. So a deal was struck.. The US would guarantee the security of the Saudi monarchy with AWACS jets and Stinger missiles and, ultimately, US armed forces. In return, Saudi Arabia would flood the market with oil, driving the price for a barrel of crude from $35 down to $10.

With its oil income cut by 70%, Moscow could no longer buy the technology it needed to keep pace in the arms race, let alone dole out largesse to Poland or East Germany. And when Iraq invaded Saudi Arabia's tiny neighbor Kuwait, it was time for the US to uphold its part of the bargain.

Victory aptly describes this and other maneuverings to win the Cold War, such as the support of the mujahedin in Afghanistan and of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It is based largely on interviews with such key players as Caspar Weinberger, Robert MacFarlane, George Schultz, Richard Pipes, Herb Meyer, and Richard Allen, so that it provides an almost palpable sense of being in the White House as the strategy was crafted. It effectively gives the lie to those facile commentators in the media who claim the Soviet Union fell of its own weight. It didn't. It was pushed.

Peter Schweizer's first contribution to the telling the untold stories of the efforts of the Reagan Administration is quite stunning - offering a uniques inside perspective to the operations and the planning of them that led to the memorable scenes of the Belrin Wall falling.

"Victory" is the story of what happened, and the planning that went on behind the scenes, orchestrated by then-DCI William Casey, who took lessons learned while fighting Adolf Hitler as part of the OSS in World War II, and applied them to fighting the Soviet Union.

Casey will probably go down in history as one of the America's great unsung heroes, joining men like Edwin T. Layton and Joe Rochefort. Schweizer's efforts have laid out this untold story, fought in the shadow world of espionage and covert operations in an engaging story.

Tom Clancy dedicates Executive Orders "to Ronald Wilson Reagan -- The Man who won the War". Schweizer explains why Clancy is more correct than all the news media and intellectual elites who scorned Reagan when he was in office and have ignored his achievements ever since.

Much of the news media and liberal academia would have you believe that Gorbachev was the hero who modernized the Soviet Union and liberated it from the past. Schweizer outlines in detail the long strategic effort to defeat the Soviet Union through a multiplicity of specific strategies. From delaying and minimizing the natural gas pipeline to western Europe, to working with the Saudis to bring down the price of oil (the number one source of hard currency for the Soviet Union), to actively working to cut off technology from reaching the Soviet Union, to launching an arms race of high technology systems that would bloc obsolesce the old systems and force the Soviets into an exhausting effort to keep up, to financing opposition forces in Afghanistan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Central America.

Again and again Schweizer shows the methodical determined efforts of the Reagan team to undermine and roll back the Soviet Union. Trying to describe the end of the Soviet Empire without Reagan is like trying to describe the South losing the Civil War without mentioning Lincoln and Grant. This book should be read by every citizen interested in just how effective their country can be when it has a strategy and courageous disciplined leaders.

VICTORY opens with a quote by former KGB general Oleg Kalugin: "American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union." VICTORY REVEALS HOW. This is living history from over twenty major players, with those interviewed listed at the end of each chapter. Several including Caspar Weinberger, John Poindexter, Bill Clark and Roger Robinson also reviewed the manuscript. The introduction lists seven key elements of the plan initiated by Reagan in early 1981. It points out that Reagan unlike some other Presidents did not view arms control agreements and treaties as the measure of his success. VICTORY is an account of the secret offensive including economic and psychological fronts designed to win the Cold War. Reagan used our strengths to take advantage of Soviet weaknesses. After success, the task is often seen as easy. The details in the book showed that winning the Cold War was made much harder by some Americans and many Western Europeans, some of whom now say it was inevitable You will see how critical, for instance, the AWACS aircraft were to the outcome.

This book is an interesting collection of true-life spy stories, behind the scenes political maneuvering, and good old-fashioned covert operations. What got me so interested in the book in the first place was the A list of people the author interviewed for the book - Caspar Weinberger, Robert MacFarlane, George Schultz, Richard Pipes, Herb Meyer, and Richard Allen. Other then actually being part of the meetings and operations, I do not know how the author could have got a better description of the events.

The book gives you a run down of some of the more successful and not all that well-known operations that the Reagan team pulled off during his administration. I was really surprised at all the focus and wrangling on the oil prices and the behind the scenes work the U.S. did for the Gulf States. I couldn't help but think that the Shah of Iran was correct in blaming the Carter administration for his downfall given all the other support that America could give to keep these leaders in power. We also get a large dose of the help the U.S. and the Vatican provided to the Poland Solidarity group. Reagan just had his hand in everything.

My only issue with the book is that I would have liked a bit more overall detail, the book was a bit short I thought. I would have liked another 50-100 pages. The author did a good job, but he is not an edge of the seat author. He just spelled out the case very professionally with a little pro Reagan bias. For an interesting different view of many of these operations I would suggest you find a copy of "The Forth World War". It is the memoir of the head of the French version of the CIA during the late 70 - 80's and deals with a lot of the same issues and operations that this book covered. The bonus of the book is some very reviling and interesting predictions about his view of the upcoming worldwide religious war.

The Cold War was a war of nerves. Like all war, it was costly and wasteful. And like most war, determining the key event or strategy that led to its particular end point may be subject to endless debate. Peter Schweizer's point is that but for the strategy developed by the Reagan team and adopted by President Reagan in 1981 to 1983, the particular ending resulting in the collapse of the Soviet Union would not have occurred. The story he tells is compelling. History may well confirm his analysis.

This is not an academic work. It is more a multiple memoir. Most of Mr. Schweizer's citations are of interviews he conducted of major figures in the Reagan Administration. It also reads like a cookbook with one recipe. The ingredients-military buildup, economic embargos, support of regional conflicts in Communist lands, and most important, adoption of the strategic defense initiative-are set up in the first part of the book. These ingredients were more or less in place by the end of 1983. The book then becomes repetitious, sort of like telling the cook to stir the pot and then stir the pot some more. In the end, Gorbachev comes on the scene, recognizes that the pot has boiled over and takes it off the stove.

Other authors have been critical of the Reagan team's efforts. Schweizer points out that some of the criticisms were expressed by team members (especially Haig and Schultz) at the time the secret decisions were made. As time passes and peace allows for a more expansive view of the events in the 1980s, criticism will likely increase. A book such as this one will be all the more important then, as a reminder of what was done and how and why it was done.

As the son of one who fought the Soviets in the CIA for 25 years, I was especially happy to give him this book for his recent birthday-after reading it first. The breathtaking tour de force engineered by Bill Casey as CIA chief at such a small investment to bring down the mighty Soviet empire is finally acknowledged. Thank God he was spared the inquisitorial attacks of Lawrence Walsh who falsely accused great patriots like Casper Weinberger and Elliott Abrahms who also worked so hard for that noble effort. It is very instructive to see how men who refused to bow before the Holy Grail of the arms control community were able to achieve in less than a decade what the Whiz Kids could not achieve despite spending far more blood and treasure of ours. Can you guess which group is lionized by much of the mainstream media?

At times, it is easy to question the wisdom of the American electorate. Yet at truly critical junctures, the voting public has shown an uncanny knack for electing leaders who were ideally suited for the challenges of the times. Certainly, that was the case in 1932, with the election of FDR, and again in 1980, with the rise to prominence of Ronald Reagan.

The origin of the demise of the Iron Curtain -- and ultimate break-up of the Soviet Union -- can be traced to Reagan's arrival on the world geopolitical stage in the early 1980s. Author Peter Schweizer provides copious evidence for how the Reagan Administration's policies contributed to the collapse of the USSR. Some of these policies included: covert support for Afghan rebels and the Polish underground; the unprecedented military build-up and technology commitment (including SDI); the efforts to stem technology transfers and subsidized financial credits to Eastern Bloc nations, and significantly, to hobble the development of the Siberian natural gas pipeline; the "special relationship" forged with the Saudis, which ultimately led to the precipitous decline in oil prices (costing the USSR billions in lost hard currency).

Reagan's policy of active confrontation with the Soviet Union was a stark departure from bi-partisan orthodoxy, which had attempted to "accommodate," or, at best, "contain" Soviet expansion.

This is one of the two best books I've read thus far about the Reagan Administration. The other was "Revolution: The Reagan Legacy" by Martin Anderson. That book took us through the inner workings of the Reagan White House as seen from the perspective of a non-political scholar who just happened to be an insider at the time. This book tells the story of the Reagan Administration's seven year struggle to restore America's military strength while at the same time undermining the Soviet Economy and sapping Soviet strength so as to hasten the demise of the Soviet Union. Boring as all that may seem; this book reads more like a spy thriller than a history book since it primarily focuses on the extraordinary efforts of one man, William Casey, Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).

About all I knew about Bill Casey before reading this book was that he was the secretive head of the CIA who had a tendency to mumble (Reagan said he was the only man in the CIA who didn't need a scrambler.), that some people thought he was the man behind the Iran-Contra Affair, and that he died of a malignant brain tumor before he could be called to testify about Iran-Contra. Now I see him as a truly great American hero who played a vital role in the demise of the Soviet Union. In fact, after reading this book, I'm almost convinced that it wouldn't and couldn't have been done without him. As the author says, Reagan had the vision and pointed the direction, but it was men like Bill Casey who made it happen.

This, then, is a great read about an unsung American hero. After reading it you will understand in some detail the grand scale of Reagan's seven year plan to restore America's strength; to re-establish America's reputation as a trustworthy ally; to undermine and stall the Soviet economy; to support and encourage those struggling against Soviet oppression behind the iron curtain; and to aid those fighting against the expansion of the Soviet Empire. You will also see how that plan was implemented and will most likely marvel at the efforts of Bill Casey who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make the President's policies a reality. Casey, like the President, was clearly the right man, in the right place, at the right time.

In the end, you will also wonder how it can be possible that Reagan's political opponents in the United States have been able to assign the lion's share of credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union to the Soviet Premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, rather than to America's President, Ronald Reagan. As the author so aptly points out, "[It is] a most curious development, giving the vanquished more credit than the victor." Only in American politics would such a thing be possible.