Editor’s Note

This issue begins with an article by Giordana Pulcini and Or Rabinowitz discussing the Israeli air force’s attempt to destroy the Osirak nuclear processing facility in Iraq forty years ago, in June 1981. They focus, in particular, on how the raid and its aftermath affected U.S. policy regarding nuclear nonproliferation. Iraq under Saddam Hussein had been seeking to use the Osirak plant to produce large supplies of highly enriched uranium for a nuclear arsenal. The raid occurred only a short while after the new U.S. administration under Ronald Reagan had taken office, and the administration was caught off-guard by the event. The authors show that this was in part because of the inadequate transfer of information in Washington during the transition from the Carter administration to the Reagan administration, and in part because of misunderstandings between U.S. and Israeli officials. When responding to the raid, the administration had to cope with the complex politics of the Middle East and the bias of the United Nations (UN) against Israel. The article explains how tension that arose between the Reagan administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN body that handled implementation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, over the Osirak raid had longer-term effects on the administration’s nonproliferation policy, including the role of the IAEA in dealing with Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

The next article, by Margaret Manchester, examines the diverse roles of private corporations in the Cold War, focusing on the experience of the giant U.S. company International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT). In 1949, as the Cold War was sharply deteriorating, the Hungarian authorities arrested two Western executives of the Hungarian subsidiary of ITT—one from the United States, Robert Vogeler, and the other from Great Britain, Edgar Sanders—as well as five Hungarian employees. They were tortured and imprisoned for more than a year after sham trials on charges of espionage and sabotage. The Stalinist regime in Hungary came under strong international pressure to release the ITT executives and eventually did free them well before their prison sentences were up. The U.S. government at the time insisted that the ITT personnel were innocent. After examining declassified records from both Hungary and the United States, Manchester finds that in fact Vogeler and Sanders were providing sensitive information to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The case was important not only in affecting the CIA’s ties with Western multinational corporations and other private entities but also in revealing the negligible leeway for East-West diplomatic cooperation during the Stalin era.

The next article, by Alanna O’Malley, shifts the focus to Congo-Léopoldville, a country in sub-Saharan Africa that was repeatedly buffeted by the Cold War after it gained independence from Belgium in 1960. O’Malley discusses the Simba rebellion in eastern Congo in 1963–1965, when Cuban- and Soviet-backed insurgents captured a large swath of territory and set up a “People’s Republic of Congo” in Stanleyville (now called Kisangani) to confront the pro-Western government in Léopoldville (now known as Kinshasa). In 1964 the rebels seized nearly 1,000 U.S. and European (mostly Belgian and British) nationals and sought to use them for leverage against the Congolese army, which, with Western backing, was moving in to crush the rebellion. The hostage-taking prompted Belgium and the United States to send in commandos whose mission ostensibly was to rescue the hostages. In reality, the main purpose of the intervention was to help the Congolese army suppress the Simba rebellion. Although the U.S.-Belgian troops ended the rebellion once and for all, the incursion damaged the West’s image in Africa, where many governments were taken aback by the Congolese army’s failure to prevent the Simba rebels and its own soldiers from perpetrating mass atrocities in late 1964 and by the Western powers’ conspicuous use of military force to safeguard their political and economic interests in Africa.

The next article, by Andrew Jenks, discusses the Apollo-Soyuz joint space mission in 1975, with its celebrated image of a handshake in space, as an example of cooperation...