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October 15, 2020

Interview with Eran Lerman

Eran Lerman is a former Israeli intelligence officer. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS. 

November 2, 2020

Interview with Ariel Levite

Dr. Ariel Levite is a former Israeli senior official. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS and the inter-ministerial committee on arms control. 

November 2, 2020

Interview with Shimon Stein

Shimon Stein is a former Israeli diplomat. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS. 

November 11, 2020

Interview with Sallai Meridor

Sallai Meridor is a former Israeli diplomat. He served as a member of the Israeli delegation to ACRS. 

September 23, 2020

Interview with Daniel Kurtzer

Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer is a former US diplomat. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Near East Bureau at the US Department of State during the ACRS process, the coordinator of the multilateral peace talks following the Madrid peace conference, and the U.S. representative in the multilateral Steering Group .  

October 16, 2020

Interview with Shlomo Brom

Shlomo Brom is a former Israeli military official. He represented the Israeli Defense Forces in the Israel delegation to ACRS. 

July 2, 1957

Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate, Washington, D.C., July 2, 1957

On July 2, 1957, US senator John F. Kennedy made his perhaps best-known senatorial speech—on Algeria.

Home to about 8 million Muslims, 1.2 million European settlers, and 130,000 Jews, it was from October 1954 embroiled in what France dubbed “events”—domestic events, to be precise. Virtually all settlers and most metropolitan French saw Algeria as an indivisible part of France. Algeria had been integrated into metropolitan administrative structures in 1847, towards the end of a structurally if not intentionally genocidal pacification campaign; Algeria’s population dropped by half between 1830, when France invaded, and the early 1870s. Eighty years and many political turns later (see e.g. Messali Hadj’s 1927 speech in this collection), in 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) launched a war for independence. Kennedy did not quite see eye to eye with the FLN.

As Kennedy's speech shows, he did not want France entirely out of North Africa. However, he had criticized French action already in early 1950s Indochina. And in 1957 he met with Abdelkader Chanderli (1915-1993), an unaccredited representative of the FLN at the United Nations in New York and in Washington, DC, and a linchpin of the FLN’s successful international offensive described in Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Thus, Kennedy supported the FLN’s demand for independence, which explains its very positive reaction to his speech.

And thus, unlike the 1952-1960 Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) that officially backed the views of NATO ally France and kept delivering arms, the Democratic senator diagnosed a “war” by “Western imperialism” that, together with if different from “Soviet imperialism,” is “the great enemy of … the most powerful single force in the world today: ... man's eternal desire to be free and independent.” (In fact, Kennedy’s speech on the Algerian example of Western imperialism was the first of two, the second concerning the Polish example of Sovietimperialism. On another, domestic note, to support African Algeria’s independence was an attempt to woe civil-rights-movement-era African Americans without enraging white voters.) To be sure, Kennedy saw France as an ally, too. But France’s war was tainting Washington too much, which helped Moscow. In Kennedy’s eyes, to support the US Cold War against the Soviet Union meant granting Algeria independence. The official French line was the exact opposite: only continued French presence in Algeria could keep Moscow and its Egyptian puppet, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, from controlling the Mediterranean and encroaching on Africa.

1987

KGB, Information Nr. 2742 [to Bulgarian State Security]

The Soviet KGB seeks Bulgaria's support with "active measures" relating to the origins of the AIDS virus as well as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

September 7, 1985

KGB, Information Nr. 2955 [to Bulgarian State Security]

The Soviet KGB seeks to create a "favorable opinion for us abroad" through active measures connected with the appearance of AIDS in the United States. The KGB also claims that the US Department of Defense is behind the "rapid spread of the AIDS disease"

February 26, 1989

Memorandum of Conversation: President Bush's Meeting with General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Zhao Ziyang of the People's Republic of China, February 26, 1989, 4:00 p.m. - 5:40 p.m.

George H.W. Bush and Zhao Ziyang discuss Sino-American relations and China's reform and opening, in addition to the situations in Korea, India, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.

Pagination