In the eyes of the world it is generally accepted that the Moscow summit conference of 1972 and Washington summit conference of 1973 have reduced tensions between the superpowers and diminished the likelihood of a senseless nuclear exchange which would annihilate mankind. Fresh in one’s mind are the jovial scenes of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev clowning at Washington receptions and embracing movie star Chuck Conners, culminating a series of preliminary agreements of mutual cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union in the areas of arms limitations, science and technology, transportation, oceanography, agricultural research and development, civil aviation, and the peaceful uses of atomic energy. In the spirit of détente the leaders of both nations have pledged to avert a nuclear war.

The benevolent image portrayed by Leonid Brezhnev—the General Secretary’s performance at one Washington reception prompted President Nixon to comment that Brezhnev was the best politician in the room—indicated to millions of American and Russian television viewers that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has embarked on a new foreign policy; one of peaceful coexistence with the free world, rather than a policy based on conquest of the free world. In spite of the emotional rhetoric and promises by leaders of both nations, the truth of the matter is that the Soviet Union today is one of the most repressive, totalitarian, adventuristic military powers in the world, and this fact cannot be ignored in our dealings with them, for it has a direct bearing on our survival as a free nation.

Any agreement reached with the Soviet government must be evaluated in the context of their past record and their domestic and foreign policies. It might be worth reviewing their domestic policy. In testimony before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee in 1973, Avraham Shifrin, a Russian Jew incarcerated for ten years in thirty to thirty-five concentration camps and five prisons throughout the Soviet Union, testified that millions of prisoners remain in thousands of Russian concentration camps and there are generally three to five camps on the outskirts of each city. The CIA estimates that the prison population is currently about 2.5 million, compared to about 425,000 in the United States; this means that on a per capita basis, about five times as many Soviets are incarcerated compared to Americans. The number of prisons and concentration camps in the Soviet Union is estimated to range from nine hundred to several thousand, and the number of political prisoners ranges from ten thousand to several hundred thousand, and higher, depending on one’s source of information. The exact figures are not known because three-fourths of the Soviet Union is closed to foreigners, mainly to conceal the existence of their prison camps. Reports leaking out of the Soviet Union indicate that prisoners are beaten, tortured, starved, forced to sleep on concrete bunks, and if they are fortunate, they are given hot water and permitted to bathe once in ten days.

In addition to the prison and forced labor camp system, the Soviet government uses psychiatric hospitals for incarcerating dissidents and intellectuals. Typical charges against these political prisoners have included the following: disagreement with official doctrine; protesting the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; spreading falsehoods derogatory to the Soviet state and social system; opposing the celebration of Stalin’s birthday; asserting that the forced labor camp commandants under Leonid Brezhnev are the same as those under Stalin; possessing the writings of dissidents such as academician Andrei Sakharov and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; visiting the United States embassy and asking for emigration information; and maintaining that freedom of speech does not exist in the Soviet Union.

Some intellectuals are confined to rooms with psychopaths and mentally disturbed persons, while others are subjected to drug therapy to alleviate disorders such as paranoid delusion of reforming society and schizophrenia. Dissidents are treated with aminazin injections which induce extreme depression and shock; the victim’s body temperature is elevated to one hundred four degrees and simple body movements can produce excruciating pain for up to seventy-two hours after the injection. Another devastating drug used on Soviet dissidents is reserpine. Both drugs destroy the victim’s brain cells so that he is reduced to an empty shell of a living being who can neither read nor write.

Let it be known that in the Soviet Union today the oppressed are not only those who cry out publicly for human rights and democratic reforms. As the Communist Party of the Soviet Union advances its public relations program beyond its barbed wire borders, over 250 million Soviet citizens live in a police state ruled by sixteen men known as the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Through the Committee for State Security of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers—this is the all pervasive Soviet intelligence service and secret police, commonly referred to as the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti)—the Politburo controls the daily lives of its citizenry twenty-four hours a day, from cradle to grave, in the tradition of George Orwell’s Big Brother. The Soviet government literally dictates how parents will raise their children; parents who fail to bring up their children according to the communist code will either find themselves imprisoned or have their children taken away and placed in state-owned orphanages, or both. In recent years, Jews and Baptists have been particularly intimidated by the Soviet regime, and as recently as January of this year, Baptists incarcerated in Soviet forced labor camps have been singled out for special punishment by camp officials.

Soviet citizens must be registered with the local militia, and those who are sixteen years or older are issued an internal passport which must be presented by the holder whenever checking into a hotel or using public transportation systems such as trains and airplanes. The state’s control over movement and residency is enhanced by the fact that Soviet citizens must be able to prove that they have an apartment and a job in another city before moving from their present home. Since one cannot move without the consent of the militia or obtain a new job without the blessings of one’s employer, it is virtually impossible for a citizen to relocate without the state’s assistance. Internal passports also contain restrictions which prohibit citizens from traveling through or to certain regions, and collective farmers are outrightly denied passports; they therefore are confined to their land for life. In summary, the Soviet state has complete control over the movements of its people, and it is the state which determines where one can live and work.

The impression has been left in some circles that the Soviet government has eased its censorship regulations, as demonstrated by joining the International Copyright Convention in May 1973; this was one year after the Moscow summit and a month before the Washington summit. To the contrary, Boris D. Pankin, chief of the Soviet copyright agency, has made it clear that his agency is the sole legal body in the Soviet Union that is authorized to deal with foreign publishers. Rather than promoting a free flow of ideas between the East and West, as was originally hoped when the Soviets joined the convention, it is now quite clear that Soviet writers must coordinate all of their work through the copyright agency, and if they fail to do so, they are in violation of Soviet law. In short, the Soviet government claims to have the legal right to prevent dissidents and their foreign publishers from printing anti-Soviet works abroad.

And this takes us to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, a first and historical exposé of the Soviet secret police and prison camp system. The publication of this book in the West has placed the Soviet leadership in the position of either enforcing their censorship law under the guise of the International Copyright Conference and thus further tarnishing their new image, or permitting the work to be published abroad unchallenged, thereby embarking on a liberal course which would certainly open a Pandora’s box with unknown consequences. The enormity of Solzhenitsyn’s courageous challenge to the Kremlin leadership is that he has proclaimed that the secret police terror and forced labor camp system created in 1918 remains in force today. Soviet intellectuals are tortured and imprisoned, and the unknown critics of the Soviet regime, in the words of Solzhenitsyn, are crushed in great numbers in silence.

The West has been similarly warned about blindly accepting détente with the Soviet government by other dissidents. Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, stated late last year in his open letter to the Congress of the United States:

At a time when the Congress is debating fundamental issues of foreign policy, I consider it my duty to express my view on one such issue—protection of the right to freedom of residence within the country of one’s choice. That right was proclaimed by the United Nations in 1948 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…as you know, there are tens of thousands of citizens in the Soviet Union—Jews, Germans, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Armenians, Estonians, Latvians, Turks, and members of other ethnic groups—who want to leave the country and who have been seeking that right for years and for decades at the cost of endless difficulty and humiliation.

You know that prisons, labor camps and mental hospitals are full of people who have sought to exercise this legitimate right…For decades the Soviet Union has been developing under conditions of an intolerable isolation, bringing with it the ugliest consequences. Even a partial preservation of those conditions would be highly perilous for all mankind, for international confidence and détente.

Only last January the poet Alexander Galich, who was expelled from the Soviet writers’ union and the union of cinema workers for inciting Jews to emigrate to Israel, was denied permission to visit his relatives in the United States for ideological reasons. According to academician Sakharov, Galich is now suffering from a grave heart ailment and is forced to live under unbearable poverty conditions. On January 19 of this year the Soviet secret police completed a forty-two hour search of the apartment of Victor Nekrasov, winner of the Stalin literature prize. The secret police confiscated his personal notes, books, manuscripts, foreign publications, and papers pertaining to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. And on January 31, the Soviet ballet dancer Valery Panov, who for two years has been seeking permission to emigrate to Israel with his wife, learned that during a secret meeting in Leningrad, Communist Party officials discussed the possibility of arresting him. The oppression of Soviet citizens continues, in spite of détente.

The Soviet regime can perpetuate itself only by the brutal use of its network of secret police and forced labor camps, by strict control over human liberties, intellectual freedom, and the press, and by enlisting the support and assistance of idealists abroad. In his confirmation hearings for secretary of state, Dr. Henry Kissinger indicated that though he sympathized with the problems encountered by Soviet dissenters and minority groups in their fight for human rights, the cause of international détente must come first. Besides giving the Soviet Politburo the implicit approval of the executive branch of the U.S. government to further oppress Soviet citizens, the Kissinger position raises a fundamental question: Can the free world have a genuine détente with a ruling body of men who have denied 250 million countrymen their basic human rights and liberties, such as the right to emigrate without fear of retribution? Academician Andrei Sakharov says no, and in his letter to Congress he stated:

The abandonment of a policy of principle would be a betrayal of the thousands of Jews and non-Jews who want to emigrate, of the hundreds in camps and mental hospitals, of the victims of the Berlin Wall.

Such a denial would lead to stronger repressions on ideological grounds. It would be tantamount to total capitulation of democratic principles in face of blackmail, deceit, and violence…I express the hope that the Congress of the United States, reflecting the will and the traditional love of freedom of the American people, will realize its historical responsibility before mankind and will find the strength to rise above temporary partisan considerations of commercialism and prestige.

The Solzhenitsyns, Sakharovs, and nameless others have in effect warned the West not to accept détente with the Soviet Union unless the Soviet leadership initiates a program of reforms in the areas of human rights and intellectual freedom. The burden is clearly on our shoulders. When the horrors of Auschwitz and the other Nazi extermination camps were disclosed to the world after the war, many have since asked whether the German people knew of the pogrom since its inception and whether they silently accepted the doomed fate of Jews rounded up by the Nazis. At first the Nazis burned books, then they burned men. Now, Russians risk their lives to expose the forced labor camp system and repression of intellectuals, and they ask only that the United States pursue a course which upholds the very principles our country was founded upon. The Nixon administration, which in my opinion has compromised fundamental principles to achieve unethical short-term political gains, is now the architect of a dubious foreign policy which will forsake millions of enslaved persons behind the Iron Curtain for an illusionary détente; one which would set a dangerous precedent, and one which would transmit our scientific and technical knowledge to the Soviets in exchange for their promise that they will act responsibly in the future and that they will not blow us off the map.

In 1970 I was one of many sources who reported to the CIA that the Soviet government was interested in an East-West summit conference. Why were the Soviets so anxious to talk with our leaders? Why do my Soviet contacts, whom I deeply respect, write and suggest that efforts such as those of Senator Henry Jackson (i.e., the Jackson Amendment) should be avoided because they could endanger better relations and cooperative ventures between the United States and Soviet Union? The record clearly shows that the Soviet government needs our economic assistance. They are in dire need of long-term loans and scientific and technological expertise to uplift a sagging economy. They need automotive equipment in the agricultural field, computers, instrumentation, and advanced machinery to improve production and the quality of consumer goods. They need guidance in the management of production schedules, manpower, and the transportation of materials. They have yet to solve complex problems of mass producing automobiles and trucks and the development of synthetics, cement, and catalysts needed in the chemical fields. In spite of an efficient espionage network, some secrets stolen from the West cannot be incorporated effectively into the Soviet military-industrial complex because the Soviets also need experienced capitalists from the West to help them, if only temporarily.

Statistics released by the U.S. Department of State and other sources show that in the Soviet Union today about 30 percent of their labor force is involved in agriculture, yet each farmer produces only enough food to feed about four to five persons annually. By comparison, about 4 percent of the American labor force is engaged in agriculture, but the average American farmer produces enough food to feed about forty-eight persons annually. In other words, when measured in terms of annual food output per farmer, the United States is producing food about ten times more efficiently than the Soviet Union. This is the other reason why three-fourths of the Soviet Union is closed to tourists; they do not want the world to see widespread food shortages under the communist system, let alone the Gulag Archipelago described by Solzhenitsyn. It also explains why the Soviet government purchased four hundred million bushels of wheat, two hundred million bushels of corn, and forty million bushels of soybeans from the United States in 1972; this was the one billion dollar grain deal engineered by shrewd Russian negotiators and spawned by bureaucratic neglect, secrecy, and a desire by U.S. government officials to make détente work, regardless of its adverse effects on the American economy.

Reliable sources estimate that roughly one-fifth of all state-owned urban dwellings in the Soviet Union are without running water or sewers, and less than half are without baths. Private homes comprise about one-third of the city dwellings and many of these can be categorized as shacks, reminiscent of the scenes in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago. In blunt language, the Communist Party has mismanaged the economic development of the Soviet Union and the Politburo is now relying on the United States to bail them out of their self-made mess.

One reason for the failure of Soviet domestic programs is that since World War II, the Soviets have expended a disproportionate share of their national income on defense and military affairs. Though the Soviet gross national product is roughly half of ours, they are currently spending more on defense than we are. (The United States’ annual defense budget is currently about eighty billion dollars). By pursuing a defense-oriented policy for several decades, the Soviets now find themselves in need of foreign economic assistance.

It is now worth examining the publicized and unpublicized aspects of the Soviet defense program, and how it relates to their foreign policy and détente. A very strong case can be made that the Soviets gave up nothing when General Secretary Brezhnev signed the SALT Agreement with President Nixon during the Moscow summit of 1972. First of all, the track record of agreements between the Soviet Union and the United States prior to the Moscow summit is not encouraging. The Senate Judiciary Committee reported that in seven summit meetings between the leaders of the two superpowers, the Soviets have violated twenty-four of twenty-five agreements made. In other international agreements, the record speaks for itself:

  • During and after World War II the Soviets guaranteed the United States that Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania would be free and be permitted to hold free elections, but these countries are now ruled by communist dictators.
  • They promised a unified Germany after World War II, but barbed wire fences and brick walls now separate West Germans from their occupied East German neighbors.
  • They promised to repatriate World War II prisoners, but millions were sent to slave labor camps.
  • They promised that Korea would be free, but a communist regime was installed in the northern part of Korea and the southern part was subsequently invaded, precipitating the Korean War.
  • They promised free travel between Berlin and Western Europe, but they supervised the Berlin Blockade in the late 1940s and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.
  • They promised that only defensive weapons were being installed in Cuba in 1962, but they were in fact installing offensive ballistic missiles, precipitating the Cuban missile crisis.
  • They promised in 1958 to join the United States in a nuclear test ban moratorium, but in 1961 they abrogated the agreement and initiated a new series of nuclear tests to assist them in the development of anti-ballistic missile technology.
  • They supported the August 1970 Middle East cease-fire agreement, but they provided Egypt with surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and supervised their installation on the west bank of the Suez Canal, thereby violating the terms of the agreement.

In essence, the Soviet Union reserves the right to break any agreement which at a later date they deem to be against their best interests.

The second reason why it can be argued that the Soviets gave up nothing by signing the SALT interim five-year agreement is that U.S. representatives, through secrecy, negligence, and stupidity, negotiated away our national security during the late 1970s by limiting the United States from deploying additional strategic weapons while permitting the Soviets to continue their massive arms build-up. For example, during the late 1960s the Soviets were deploying about two hundred to two hundred fifty intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) per year, but Leonid Brezhnev did not sign the SALT agreement until May of 1972 when the Soviets had deployed about 50 percent more land-based ICBMs than the United States. According to the agreement, the Soviets are permitted to deploy 1,618 land-based ICBM launchers, compared to 1,054 for the United States. U.S. negotiators argued that we could afford to grant the Soviets an edge in numbers of ICBM launchers because the United States was technologically superior to the Soviets in areas such as missile accuracy and the deployment of multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles, the so-called MIRVs, which allow as many as ten or more nuclear warheads to be carried on a missile, and upon command, can direct each warhead to a separate target. Though the Soviets lag behind the United States in missile technology today, knowledgeable experts concede that by the late 1970s, the Soviets will have closed the technology gap because of their first-rate research and development effort. In effect, our SALT negotiators have assured the Soviets’ strategic superiority in the missile field.

Our negotiators mistakenly assumed that the Soviets will not have a reliable MIRV system operational until the late 1970s. The record shows that on January 28, the Soviets test-fired a MIRV into the Pacific Ocean, and it is known that their weapons are currently capable of delivering nuclear warheads which are 1,250 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb to within one mile of the designated U.S. target.

There is another disturbing aspect of the SALT agreement which must be made public at this time. When President Nixon signed the SALT agreement in St. Vladimir Hall, the Executive Office and the U.S. intelligence community were aware that the Soviets were designing their land-based ICBM launch silos so that they could be used over again. The public and United States senators, however, were never informed of this fact, and the illusion was created during this political year that SALT represented a slowdown in the Soviet arms build-up, when there was nothing further from the truth. Compared to the U.S. land-based ICBM force of 1,054, designed on the basis of one ICBM per launcher, the Soviets are expected to have up to 4,000 operational land-based ICBMs by the late 1970s, and these missiles can be launched from the 1,618 launchers which are permissible under the SALT agreement. With the reusable launchers and a MIRV capability, the Soviets will be able to deliver well over 10,000 nuclear warheads to U.S. targets—a reign of terror more deadly than the Gulag Archipelago described by Solzhenitsyn. Compared to U.S. missiles, by the end of this decade, Russian ICBMs will be capable of carrying still larger warheads, more MIRVs, more decoys to foil U.S. defenses, and more on-board protective shielding to prevent them from being destroyed. And this can be achieved without violating the terms of the SALT agreement.

The secret record shows that the Executive Office and the U.S. intelligence community were aware of Soviet work on reusable ICBM launchers by 1970 at the latest. As Pratt & Whitney Aircraft’s foreign technology expert, my intelligence assessments were distributed to the CIA, Executive Office of the President, Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other branches of the U.S. government. In a secret document I authored entitled Annual Report on Foreign Rocket Technology (1968-1969) (report identification number PWA-FR-3195; the report was released to the CIA and Air Force intelligence units during May 1969), it was stated in the strategic threat summary that the Soviets were designing reusable ICBM launch silos. As the Soviets were engaged in a massive clandestine ICBM arms build-up during this period, I prepared an 800-page, two-volume secret document the following year. The first version (report number PWA-FR-3760, dated July 15, 1970) was released to the Air Force and CIA. Again, in the strategic threat summary, I stated that the Soviets were designing reusable ICBM launchers. Because the report was political dynamite—the trends indicated that our political leaders were misleading the country and the U.S. military-industrial complex was squandering our tax monies because of poor planning at the highest levels—Pratt & Whitney Aircraft management ordered me to delete the strategic threat section entirely, or I would not be permitted to distribute the report outside the U.S. intelligence community. I therefore rewrote the report, but I still included a summary section covering the reusable Soviet ICBM launchers. Two copies of this document, report number PWA-FR-3760A, dated September 1, 1970, were sent to the Executive Office of the President on October 29, 1970. Similarly, other U.S. government documents correctly assessed Soviet intentions regarding reusable launchers. In other words, the SALT agreement was signed with the knowledge that a loophole existed for the Soviets to subvert the intent of the agreement, but this was never announced publicly.

By early 1971 Pratt & Whitney Aircraft suddenly rejected requests by bona fide government agencies to receive the censored version of the secret report; organizations such as the prestigious Hudson Institute, which performs special studies on national security issues, were flatly rejected access to the report on the grounds that all available copies have been distributed, when a number of copies existed in the company’s files. The documents were subsequently destroyed by the company because they were political dynamite.

In a tumultuous series of events, I learned from a reliable intelligence source that President Nixon became involved in a foreign technology problem concerning Pratt & Whitney. By this time management threatened to fire me if I attempted to write my planned book on the Soviets. During a 2-1/2 months leave of absence from the company in 1971 without pay, I conducted research on my book in Europe. When I returned to work, I was fired by Pratt & Whitney Aircraft management. Seven months later President Nixon signed the SALT agreement in Moscow, culminating years of secret negotiations with the Soviets. If the public had been told the truth of the Soviet capability and the Nixon Administration had disclosed beforehand the scope of U.S. concessions to the U.S. Senate and defense specialists, the SALT agreement would never have been ratified.

In addition to affording the Soviets a 50 percent advantage in numbers of ICBM land-based launchers over the United States, the SALT agreement permits the Soviets to deploy sixty-two modern ballistic missile submarines compared to forty-four for the United States and nine hundred fifty submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) compared to seven hundred ten for the United States. And lest we forget, the Soviets currently possess a first-rate modern navy that is second to none; whereas two-thirds of the U.S. naval fleet is over 20 years old, only one-tenth of the active Soviet fleet is over 20 years old. The Soviets currently have an operational SLBM with a range of about four thousand nautical miles, whereas the U.S. will not have this range capability in a SLBM until 1978. Likewise, the Soviets currently have an operational long-range supersonic bomber—NATO code name BACKFIRE—which is not covered by SALT, and it can travel about 1,500 mph; the United States is not expected to deploy its B-I supersonic bomber until 1978, and only if Congress approves its production.

Since the late 1960s, the Soviet government has been engaged in an aggressive military-oriented, reusable earth-to-orbit space shuttle development program. The program is currently managed by the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, the Moscow Aviation Institute, and the Central Aerohydrodynamics Institute, and it will support a network of orbiting space stations which the Soviets will have in operation during the 1980s. The Russian space shuttle will permit their ministry of defense to inject military payloads into earth orbit at relatively low cost compared to their existing inventory of throwaway (expendable) launch vehicles. Some typical payloads of the Russian space shuttle will include (a) maneuverable spacecraft systems for inspecting or destroying American satellites, (b) manned and unmanned reusable orbit-to-orbit spaceships which will be left in orbit indefinitely for delivering or retrieving spy-in-the-sky satellites, (c) spaceships for conducting routine logistics, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, and (d) space station modules which can be assembled in orbit by automatic means for conducting military space research. Some of the weapons systems that the Russian space shuttle will deliver into orbit, derived from substantial investments in military research and development programs (at the expense of domestic programs), will be used to form an advanced space-based laser defense network for destroying U.S. military satellites and strategic delivery vehicles such as supersonic bombers, land-based inter-continental ballistic missiles, and submarine launched ballistic missiles. The planned Soviet space complex, consisting of a network of earth orbiting space stations, a fleet of low-cost manned and unmanned reusable orbit-to-orbit spaceships, and a fleet of low-cost manned reusable space shuttle systems to provide earth-to-orbit logistics is aggressive by American standards. For comparison, the redirection of the U.S. earth-to-orbit space shuttle program in 1971 emulated the Russian program status during 1968-1969; the development of a U.S. orbit-to-orbit shuttle has been deferred because of budgetary reasons; the U.S. has no space station plans after Skylab, though the Europeans plan to develop a mini space lab for the 1980s.

In summary, the Soviets have been quite busy since the humiliating Cuban missile crisis in 1962. If the current trends continue and should they execute their development plans, by the end of this decade the Soviets will achieve absolute military, strategic, and space superiority over the United States, and détente would be reduced to memories of courageous Soviet intellectuals who asked America to remain firm on fundamental principles.

In conclusion, agreements made with the Soviets must be evaluated in terms of their past record and present domestic and foreign policies. The questions of human rights, economic assistance, and military posture vis-á-vis détente are all interrelated. We must never support a policy that forsakes the rights of enslaved persons behind the Iron Curtain, nor one which would provide economic assistance to a nation engaged in a massive clandestine arms build-up, nor one which guarantees the Soviets strategic superiority over the United States by the end of this decade.

Has the protracted conflict with communism ended? Not by a long shot.

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1. James, Peter N. Soviet Conquest From Space. (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1974).
2. Barron, John KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents. (New York, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Press, 1974).
3. Editions of U.S. News and World Report, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, the Palm Beach Post and Times, and the Congressional Record.
4. Information provided by the Department of State and Department of Defense.