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Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union Hardcover – January 1, 1994

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 49 ratings

Describes the Reagan administration's covert campaign against the Soviet Union that increased stress on the Soviet economy

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Beginning in 1982, according to the author, then President Ronald Reagan and his senior advisers mapped out a systematic strategy to hasten the demise of the Soviet Union by attacking its fundamental economic and political weaknesses. In a convincing, startling expose that reads like a spy thriller, Schweizer ( Friendly Spies ) draws on interviews with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, KGB generals, Politburo members, Reagan advisers and others to show how the Reagan administration used covert operations, hidden diplomacy, military build-up and policy maneuvers to exacerbate the Soviet crisis in natural resources, sow political discord and weaken the Soviet empire. The Reagan strategy, as revealed here, included restricting Soviet access to Western credit and technology, covert financial and logistical support to Poland's Solidarity movement and to the Czech underground, a campaign to slash Soviet hard currency earnings by driving down the price of oil with Saudi cooperation, and substantial covert aid to the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviet invasion.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

To exhaust the Soviet economy, the Reagan administration tightened technology export controls, launched SDI, funded Afghan resisters, and induced the Saudis to keep oil prices low. The unfolding of this not-so-secret strategy, in which CIA director William Casey took a leading role, is admiringly recounted by the author of Friendly Spies (Atlantic Monthly, 1993) with "re-created" dialogs and homey details of Casey's secret meetings with friendly despots like Pakistan's General Zia and the Saudi royal family. Specifics of the CIA's technology disinformation program and of its relationships with the Vatican, Solidarity, and the Voice of America make interesting reading. Otherwise, there's little new here other than the notion that Casey's maneuvers were key to the demise of the Soviet empire, which, as Schweitzer admits, was already in deep economic trouble by the end of the Carter administration. For general readers with a taste for tabloid history-Robert Decker, Palo Alto, Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Atlantic Monthly Pr; First Edition (January 1, 1994)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 284 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0871135671
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0871135674
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1.25 x 9.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 49 ratings

About the author

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Peter Schweizer
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Investigative journalist and author Peter Schweizer's most recent book, the #1 New York Times bestselling "BLOOD MONEY: How the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye to China Killing Americans," will shock Americans with the extent of China's hidden war on America. His books have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list eight times, including for "Red Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win," as well as "Profiles in Corruption," "Secret Empires," and "Clinton Cash," all bestsellers.

Peter founded the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) in 2012, Previously, he was a consultant to the Office of Presidential Speechwriting in the White House for President George W. Bush. He has also served as a member of the Ultraterrorism Study Group at the U.S. government’s Sandia National Laboratory and is a former consultant to NBC News. His books have been translated into eleven languages and he is a frequent guest commentator on television networks, radio talk shows, and podcasts. He is also the host of GAI’s own weekly podcast, The Drill Down, which relentlessly exposes cronyism and corruption in Washington.

Peter is also the author of the book Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets. Both Extortion and the preceding book, Throw Them All Out, were featured in segments on CBS’s 60 Minutes program.

His other nonfiction books include Reagan’s War (Doubleday, 2002), which the Washington Post praised as “a fascinating, well-written, useful and important look at one of the three or four most important American political leaders of the 20th century. No serious assessment of the 40th president of the United States can ignore the central importance of anti-communism in his career; after Schweizer none will.” The Los Angeles Times called it “A rousing and compelling case that Reagan’s personal and political odyssey…was central to bringing down the ‘evil empire.” He is also the co-author of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (Doubleday, 2004), which the New York Times called “Fascinating…Provides illuminating insights into the internal dynamics of the Bush family dynasty.” The New York Post declared “If you want to know as fully as can be told the story of how the Bushes rose from Midwestern obscurity to equal the records of families like the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and the Adamses — this is the book.”

Other nonfiction works include Architects of Ruin (Harper, 2009) Victory (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994) , Do As I Say (Not As I Do) (Doubleday, 2005), and Makers and Takers (Doubleday, 2008).

His academic books include Landmark Speeches of the American Conservative Movement (Texas A&M University Press, 2006) The Reagan Presidency: Assessing the Man and His Legacy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and The Fall Of The Wall: Reassessing the Causes and Consequences of the End of the Cold War (Hoover Institution Press, 2000). He was also a contributor to Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2008)

His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Review, and elsewhere. He has appeared on numerous radio and television programs.

Peter received his M.Phil. from Oxford University and his B.A. from George Washington University. He lives in Florida with his wife, Rhonda, and his children.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
49 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2014
Some years ago I met a former cabinet minister of the Gorbachev government in the Soviet Union. After many glasses of vodka he began to tell me that all senior members of the government at the time realized that Gorbachev and Reagan were playing a "game of poker" with "Star Wars" being the principle trump card played by the American President. Reagan kept "upping the ante" until Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union would bankrupt itself by trying to maintain its military position. The decision to pull out of East Germany followed directly from this realization. And then came the destruction of the Soviet Union!

This book documents the broader aspects of the "game". Great detail is provided on the personalities and tactics employed by the Reagan team, especially in Afganistan, Poland and with the Arab world to manage the world oil price to assist in the bankrupting of the Soviet Union.

I couldn't put this book down until I finished it! Nor could I prevent myself from lamenting the disastrous decline of direction that has affected America since the Reagan years. The current inhabitant of the White House is not even in the same ballpark as Reagan. A pity!
8 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2015
This book is about how Ronald Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union. He supported the Solidarity movement in Poland with cash and supplies, along with the opposition in Afghanistan that created a guerrilla war that the Soviets could not overcome. He got the Saudis to lower the cost of oil by becoming a strategic ally of the kingdom. He cut off the flow of technology to the Soviets that caused their industrial machine to falter. Many have said that the Soviet Union just failed when it was a well organized campaign that toppled the Soviet regime. Gorbachev certainly helped in the fall of the Soviet regime. Others like Bin Laden claim that their guerrilla tactics caused this great state to fail. Ronald Reagan and his policies toppled the Soviet regime and caused the communist system to be discredited.

I loved this book and the revelations on how American policy caused the Soviet regime to be consigned to the ash heap of history. A solid read about how policies truly due matter.
6 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2013
Victory is a terrific story which explains much of what happened in the US during the Reagan governance. The obvious is the collapse of the Soviet Union. This collapse had been predicted by Goldwater and Vandenberg for years. They saw the USSR as misguided, inefficient and "Upper Volta with missles." Reagan had the opportunity to act and did it and did it mostly in secret. His policies seeded the US technology industry and staggered the oil industry. When Adm. Poindexter, a senior defense official, was asked why they were willing to virtually wreck the economy of the oil states, Poindexter replied that there are always casualties of war. That means it was deliberate. By far the most intriguing character in the story is William Casey, head of the CIA. What a remarkable player. Everyone needs to read this book.
Ed Cummins Houston, TX
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on November 14, 2002
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.
24 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2015
I found the book informative. It pieces together the strategic offensive planned by the Reagan administration in the early eighties to instigate the demise of Soviet Union – a lamentably successful endeavour. This strategy consisted in a multi-pronged approach: a directly confrontational diplomatic attitude, renewed support to anti-Communist movements worldwide, massive assistance to the Afghan Mujahidin guerrillas and to the Solidarnosch movement in Poland, and most of all, an all-out effort to strain the Soviet economy.

This was effected: by manipulating oil prices (a vital Soviet export) in collusion with the Saudis (who in exchange received much needed military support and a guarantee of American intervention in case their position was seriously threatened); by denying the Soviets access to Western technology; and, most of all, by effecting heavy investments in military technology, spearheaded by the SDI project. The idea was to start an arms race that shifted the confrontation from quantity to quality and from mass production to high-tech innovation – a dimension that the Soviet economic system was ill-suited to cope with.

My problem with the book is that it is so repetitive. It basically mulls over the same points in nearly all chapters, constantly adding minor details as it follows a chronological timeline. This book might be cut down to half its size with no appreciable loss of content.

As an European, however, I was impressed by the fact that, if the author is correct, back in the eighties the Soviets and the European pacifists were right in denouncing the aggressive intentions of the Reagan administation. Contrary to what was purported by Western governments and medias, the Star Wars project, the deployment of the Pershing and Cruise missiles and the support to the Afghan resistance WERE part of a belligerent crusade aimed to subvert the strategic balance between the superpowers and strike at the foundations of Communism. For example, Schweizer details how Reagan regarded Afghanistan as an opportunity window to create a generation of Islamic extremists eager to declare a holy war against atheism and so bring war and terrorism into the enemy’s “soft belly” – the Soviet Islamic provinces of Central Asia. (The nation that invented the ‘war on terrorism’ was never shy of wielding it against others.) It was never a matter of reacting to Soviet assertiveness; the administration’s intents were aggressive from start, and the president was eager to fight to the last Afghan in order to advance his agenda.

Schweizer also reports how Reagan made his purpose clear to his closest ally, Margaret Tatcher, and that she recommended to carefully downplay the ideological undertones inherent to his crusade in order to make the endeavour more palatable to other European governments. These paladins of freedom and democracy purposefully deceived public opinion and warped the minds of hundred of millions of their own (as well as foreign) citizens in order to further their planes – and the controlled medias played along all the time.

The medias’ connivance comes as no surprise to the reader who learns that in Reagan’s time “in addition to sharing information, nearly 200 major US corporations were providing cover for CIA agents” (p.187). The Wikileaks and Snowden scandals, plus the role played by NGOs in the color revolutions engineered by the American government worldwide (along with the support lent by social networks to them), should be read under this light.

Contrary to the author’s very intentions, this book can be a revealing medium to lift the mask of hypocrisy that to this day shrouds the robber nature of the American empire.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Nouman
5.0 out of 5 stars it is in good condition as described in the advertisement
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 13, 2015
Received the book, it is in good condition as described in the advertisement.

Thank you
Laherrere Jean
5.0 out of 5 stars livre trés important pour comprendre la vraie cause de la chute de l'Union Soviétique
Reviewed in France on May 31, 2013
écrit en 1994 bien après la chute de l'URSS grâce a de nombreux interviews de personnalités impliquées des 2 cotes
l'ancien secrétaire de l'énergie de Reagan Hodell a déclaré en 1995 que c'est en lisant ce livre qu'il a compris ce qu'ont fait en secret Reagan et la CIA