The True Story

Since the Freedom of Information Act has unlocked many secrets, I can now tell the real story behind the fall of the Soviet Union.

We were attending a cocktail party in Los Angeles. Just standing around drinking and holding the usual sort of conversation one might have at any casual social affair. The subject we were discussing was the Cold War, and how we were all tired of living with the "balance of terror". Would our children, and our grandchildren have to spend their entire lives as we did under the threat of nuclear annihilation? I had just finished a seminar in which we students were encouraged to "think outside the box". Drawing on that, I casually suggested that the Cold War might be ended if we just gave the Soviets what they wanted. They wanted to take over the United States, all right then. We could give them everything east of the Mississippi. Being a South westerner, I was willing to make the sacrifice. After all, back there the landscape is cluttered up with trees so that one can't even see the horizon, and they call little dirt-hills mountains. The cities are smelly affairs and the people talk funny. Hell, they don't even have decent chili, and life without chili is only a poor excuse for existence.

Everyone had a good laugh, after all we all knew that the suggestion was only meant to be a humorous aside. What we didn't realize was that the Soviet Consul was also at the party and overheard my remarks. Not long after, the Soviet Consul returned to the Kremlin and was sharing the joke with his peers. They all knew a joke when they heard one, and they got some laughs out of it. We had several agents within the Kremlin at the time, so we have a pretty good idea of what happened next.

The clerical and secretarial staff overheard the talk that the United States was going to force the Soviet Union to take over everything east of the Mississippi. Nothing is ever secret from the staff, and though they may think they run things, they often misunderstand and fail to appreciate all the subtleties as well as their bosses. The soviet clerical people actually failed to understand that the whole thing was a joke. They began to talk, and soon all of Moscow was quietly aware of the story. The CIA might have done something to quiet the talk, but they chose silence instead. As civil servants moved around, the story spread until all of the Soviet Empire was in on the "secret".

It was at that point that the Soviet People rebelled, rose and threw off the chains of tyranny rather than be forced into assuming sovereignty over New England and the Deep South. The rest, as they say is history.

Within the little circle of friends in Los Angeles who knew what had started the chain of events I became something of a pariah. As the Cold War wound down, the Military-Industrial Complex began to spend less on weapons systems and many of our friends were thrown out of work. The economic slow down eventually resulted in the major recession that characterized the early ?'90s. Some of our old friends will not to this day let me begin to tell a story.

****************
This was originally posted to another thread, where it was an appropriate response. However, on reflection I think that the story is more properly sited here.