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from the moral conscience of the civilized world. It was considered an ‘American affair.’ By September 1989, CIA Director William Webster publicly unveiled a bold new intelligence mandate for U.S. intelligence. Pointing to the increasing signs that Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was eager to reach a mutual disarmament agreement with NATO, and especially with the United States, Webster told an elite gathering of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on September 19 that year that his CIA was retooling itself for new tasks in the post-cold war era. Webster told his audience, ‘economic issues I mentioned—trade imbalances and technological development—illustrate a point that is becoming increasingly clear: our political and military allies are also our economic competitors.’ The new mission of U.S. intelligence worldwide was to be economic espionage and other acts against key industrial ‘allied’ nations, rather than hunting communist operations and subversion. THE FALL OF A WALL PANICS SOME CIRCLES Then, in November 1989, events in eastern Europe took a most dramatic, and to many in Washington and London, a wholly unexpected turn. Mikhail Gorbachev had privately met with the old-guard Honecker communist leadership in East Germany, and had more or less ordered them to give way to the enormous popular movement for freedom sweeping East Germany since that spring. Within weeks, the old order in the DDR was swept aside in a genuine popular revolution. Moscow had apparently realized that continuing its old efforts to maintain a costly and inefficient empire through force was likely to cause the destruction of the Soviet Union itself. The collapse of the world oil price in 1986 had perhaps been the final fatal blow to Moscow’s illusions that reform within the rotten communist bureaucracy could work. Soviet export earnings from its oil sales to the West, the major source of its hard currency earnings since the early 1970s, collapsed after 1986, just when popular demand for change prompted Gorbachev to promise far more than he was able to deliver. The economic chaos which ensued was the major factor motivating the Moscow leadership to cut its ties with its east European satellites of the Warsaw Pact. Moscow hoped that a united Germany, under the strong economic direction of West Germany, could provide a suitable partner to help rebuild the collapsing Soviet system. But while official Washington put on a face of public approval for the dramatic end to 40 years of communist domination in
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