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December 11, 1962

Letter from Acting Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army V. Ivanov, to the Chief of the Main Staff of the Navy

This memo explains that the combat readiness of ships in the Northern, Baltic, and Black Seas is to be withdrawn and previously planned voyages are to be cancelled. The memo was sent in December 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended.

December 7, 1962

Order from the Acting Chief of the Main Staff of the Navy, Vice Admiral I. Yeliseyev, to the Acting Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Cde V.D. Ivanov

A request asking permission to discharge personnel from ships located in the Northern, Black, and Baltic Seas. The request was sent in December 1962, after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended.

September 14, 1961

Reception by N.S. Khrushchev of Japanese Ambassador H. Yamada, September 14, 1961

The two parties discuss solutions for improving Soviet-Japanese trade relations. Khrushchev expresses concern about Japan's military ties with the US, given that there are US army bases in Japan. Yamada raises the concern of logistical difficulties faced by Japanese businesspeople visiting the USSR. The two parties also discuss Soviet-Japanese treaties and geopolitical relations. 

October 28, 2020

Interview with Donald Sinclair

Donald Sinclair is a former Canadian diplomat. He served as a member of the Canadian delegation to ACRS. 

October 2, 2020

Interview with Daniel Poneman

Daniel Poneman was director of Defense Policy and Arms Control at the National Security Council. He served as a member of the US 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 .  

September 13, 2020

Interview with Fred Axelgard

Fred Axelgard is a former US diplomat. He served as a member of the US delegation to ACRS.

October 7, 1977

Report on Visits to the Mongolian People's Republic and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

In September 1977, W. Jaruzelski  visited Mongolia and the DPRK. While in North Korea, Jaruzelski met with President Kim Il Sung and the Minister of National Defense O Jin U.  Although Jaruzelski did make several critical comments about the DPRK in his secret post-trip report, he still spoke in highly favorable terms about the country and generally recommended that Poland strengthen its relations with North Korea. 

Jaruzelsk's report also includes commentary on China's relations with both Mongolia and the DPRK.

March 26, 1965

Palestine Delegation in Peking

Formed in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was not the first Palestinian organization after the nakba (catastrophe), the escape from violence and the Israeli expulsion of a good half of Palestinians in 1948. The two most important earlier organizations were Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-‘Arab (Arab Nationalists Movement [ANM]) and Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini (Palestinian National Liberation Movement [Fatah]).

Founded in 1951 in Beirut, ANM became committed to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) and his version of pan-Arab nationalism, which it saw as the means to liberate Palestine, opening a separate Palestinian branch in 1959. (In 1967, it would give rise to the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which split in 1968, one wing forming the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP)).

Rejecting Arab states’ tutelage, Fatah was officially born in 1959, though organizational activities began in 1956 and though it built on military cells operating from Egyptian-ruled Gaza from the early 1950s. After Arab armies’ crushing loss against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 killed any remaining hopes, weakened since the early 1960s, that Arab armies would liberate Palestine, Fatah grew in strength. In 1969, it took command of the PLO. The latter had been founded in 1964 for several reasons. Nasser hoped to weaken Fatah and Syria, a state then in competition with him. Also, the PLO served (upper) middle class Palestinians some of whom—like Ahmad al-Shuqayri (1908-1908), Palestine’s representative to the Arab League and the PLO’s founder and first chairman—had played a Palestinian political role until 1948 and wished to do so again. And these men and women believed Palestinians needed their own statist entity, as Yezid Sayigh’s monumental Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993 (1997) notes.

In 1965, PLO delegates led by Shuqayri for the first time visited the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as reported in the English issue of the multi-language international organ Peking Review. Already in 1964 a small Fatah delegation led by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004) had accepted an invitation to visit Beijing, founding an office there. Sure, upon its establishment in 1949 the PRC had de jure recognized Israel, following the lead of the Soviet Union that acted as its older brother in the communist camp. (Israel in turn was the first Middle Eastern state to recognize the PRC, in 1950.) But after the PRC and the USSR split in 1960, Beijing amplified its anti-imperialist rhetoric and policies versus the Soviet Union and the United States, as Gregg Brazinksy’s Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War (2017) has shown. It was in this context that it from the mid-1960s delivered arms especially to Fatah and the PLO—it soon also would train fighters—and that it politically embraced the Palestinian cause. The PRC framed this policy as that of one “revolutionary people” helping another one, a story strand in Paul Chamberlin’s The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order (2012). By the early 1970s, however, Chinese support became more lukewarm. Moreover, after the death of Chairman Mao Zedong (1893-1976), relations with Israel cautiously warmed, though remaining surreptitious until the establishment of full diplomatic ties in 1992.

Pagination