Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Joseph Sassoon examining the connection between the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and the Iraqi Ba‘th Party under Saddam Hussein in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on declassified documents from the Stasi archive in Berlin and from Iraqi Ba‘th Party records at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution Archives, Sassoon explains how Stasi-Iraqi relations evolved both before and during the Iran-Iraq War. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Iraq maintained close political relations and trade ties in the 1970s and 1980s, but Iraqi leaders’ hopes of establishing extensive intelligence and security cooperation with the Stasi went largely unfulfilled. The Stasi did provide some intelligence assistance, but the extent of cooperation was limited by the East German authorities’ aversion to the Iraqi regime’s violent persecution of Iraqi Communists both at home and abroad. Concerns at Stasi headquarters about the potential compromise of intelligence aid after Iraq’s ties with the United States improved during the Iran-Iraq War, and the growing financial constraints on the Iraqi regime during the war, further limited the extent of GDR-Iraqi intelligence and security cooperation. Even though the Stasi and the Iraqi security forces bore many similarities in their functions and organization, they never worked as closely together as one might have expected.

The next article, by Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, discusses Sino-Soviet relations during the first half of the 1960s, when relations between the two countries’ Communist parties were irreparably damaged. The chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Mao Zedong, was dismayed by the adoption of wide-ranging de-Stalinization policies at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but he initially tried to maintain a fragile rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Before long, however, both international and domestic circumstances induced Mao and the CCP to pursue an increasingly hostile line toward the CPSU. The breakdown of the July 1963 negotiations, which the two sides had held in a last-ditch effort to mend the rift, deepened the enmity between the two sides and was soon followed by a severance of party-to-party ties. Li and Xia draw on a wide range of declassified documents and memoirs from China and from Soviet-bloc countries to reassess this crucial phase of the Sino-Soviet split.

The next article, by Bernhard Blumenau, focuses on the way the United Nations (UN) tried to deal with the problem of international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. Although many Americans tend to regard international terrorism as mainly a phenomenon of the post–Cold War era, the reality is that international terrorism was much more common and much more deadly during the Cold War than it has been after (with the exception of September 2001). The first half of the 1970s witnessed a long series of grisly attacks perpetrated by Middle Eastern terrorist groups such as Black September, and the combination of two events at the end of the decade—the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the seizure of power in Iran by Islamic fundamentalists after the 1979 revolution—spawned equally deadly waves of terrorism in the 1980s. Because of the complexion of the UN, efforts to deal with the problem of international terrorism within that body were extremely difficult. Cold War divisions and North-South tensions stymied progress in most cases. Nonetheless, according to Blumenau, the UN managed to achieve a few important successes, and these indicate that international cooperation on this issue is not necessarily impossible.

The fourth article, by Thomas Tunstall Allcock, reassesses the Eisenhower administration’s policy toward Latin America. Allcock argues that most scholars have regarded Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency as a time when the United States disregarded the economic development needs of Latin American countries, pursued a covert operation to overthrow a far-left government in Guatemala, and prepared another covert operation to oust Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba. In May 1958, during Vice President Richard Nixon’s goodwill visit to Latin America, an angry crowd in Venezuela attacked his car, and this event, according to many scholars, is what began...