STALIN, JOSEF (1879-1953). Born as Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili to illiterate peasants in Georgia, Stalin—whose nickname refers to steel—became enamored of socialism while attending seminary school and honed his Marxist skills as an underground agitator in the Russian Caucasus. Soon after, he joined up with Vladimir Lenin but took no active part in the 1917 October Revolution that ousted the Russian czar and brought into being the Soviet Union.
After the revolution, Stalin became general secretary of the new Soviet Communist Party and secretly began consolidating power. Soon after Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin took over the reins of power, began undoing Lenin’s market socialist policies by implementing a program of draconian industrialization, and forced agricultural collectivization. Stalin blamed the resulting resistance and food shortages on rich peasants (kulaks) and forced them into prison camps (gulags) in Siberia. In the 1930s, Stalin also consolidated his power by purging his opponents from the Communist Party and either killing or imprisoning them.
In 1939, Stalin agreed to a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. However, Nazi Germany’s leader, Adolph Hitler, abrogated the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Stalin, who was unprepared for the invasion, reorganized the Soviet Red Army and launched a massive resistance effort that forced German occupation forces from Soviet territory and drove them into Germany, while Western forces marched into Germany from the west. Germany surrendered to Allied forces in May 1945.
Following World War II, Stalin established a series of communist governments in East European satellite countries, which later formed the backbone of the Warsaw Pact. Stalin’s actions sparked the Cold War—the ideological and military competition between the East and the West—that lasted until 1991. To fight the Cold War effectively, Stalin sought military power, first by strengthening the role of the Red Army internally and externally and then building and maintaining strategic nuclear forces. Stalin died in March 1953, officially from a cerebral hemorrhage, and unofficially from poisoning.
STAR GATE (OPERATION). From 1972 until the mid-1990s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and some other agencies of the U. S. government funded parapsychological research, such as remote viewing, mental telepathy, and extrasensory perception (ESP), at the Stanford Research Institute and Science Applications International Corporation. The highly classified project sought to discover the applications of such methods in clandestine and covert operations. See also OPERATION MKULTRA.
STARLITE (SYSTEM). Starlite is a constellation of radar satellites, first proposed in 1997, to provide near-continuous, day and night, allweather, imaging support to battle commanders in the field. The acronym stands for Surveillance, Targeting, and Reconnaissance Satellite, which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
STEPHENSON, WILLIAM SAMUEL (1896-1989). Prior to America’s entry into World War II, Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian entrepreneur, headed the New York Office of British Security Coordination and was the representative of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Washington, D. C. Stephenson, code-named INTREPID, was instrumental in pressing President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish the coordinator of information (COI) position to coordinate U. S. intelligence activities and lobbied for William J. Donovan to head it.
COI Donovan, having recently toured British defenses at the behest of William S. Stephenson and President Roosevelt, had gained the trust of British prime minister Winston Churchill. When America entered the war, Donovan became head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which worked closely with and learned from British and Canadian intelligence officials. Stephenson was highly regarded by the Americans who worked with him. In 1946, General Donovan awarded Sir William Stephenson the Medal for Merit, the highest civilian decoration awarded by the United States (and never before awarded to a foreigner). One of William S. Stephenson’s legacies was that former OSS officers formed the core of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when established in 1947.
STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TALKS (SALT). These arms control negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union were initiated on 17 November 1969. The first round of talks, alternating between Helsinki and Vienna, produced a set of agreements (SALT I) on 26 May 1972—the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the Interim Agreement on Strategic Offensive Arms, both of which restricted the parties in the type and quantity of weapons each could possess. For example, the Interim Agreement limited the United States to 1054 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and the Soviet Union to 1607 ICBMs. The second round of negotiations resulted in a set of agreements (SALT II) restricting the number of each side’s strategic weapons. The U. S. Senate did not ratify SALT II because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, but both sides observed its major limitations until 1986.
Both SALT I and SALT II provided verification regimes that included the use of national technical means, consisting of overhead reconnaissance, imagery intelligence (IMINT), and signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities. The agreements specified that neither side could obstruct monitoring activities. SALT II prohibited the use of telemetry encryption if it impeded verification compliance with provisions of the treaty.
STRATEGIC ARMS REDUCTION TREATY (START). The first agreement, START I, signed in 1991 by President George H. W. Bush and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, reduced the number of U. S. and Soviet ballistic missiles by about one-third and one-half, respectively. Because of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, implementation was delayed until 1994 when agreements were reached with former Soviet republics. The second agreement, START II, signed in 1993 by President George H. W. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin, proposed more intense reduction in strategic warheads than START I, but could be implemented only after START I targets were met. The Russian parliament eventually ratified START II, and the U. S. Senate ratified START
II in January 1996.
The two sides agreed in late 1990s to negotiate START III, which would address Russian concerns with START II. The goal of START
III is further to reduce the strategic arsenals of each party to a level of 2,000 to 2,500 deployed strategic nuclear warheads. This lower level supposedly is to assist Russia in avoiding a massive missile buildup in order to maintain the high START II ceilings. Presidents William J. Clinton and Boris Yeltsin also agreed to negotiate the problem of nuclear warheads, not just delivery systems. Doing so would mean that intelligence verification would extend to warheads removed from downloaded carriers, or even the dismantling of those warheads.
STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (SDI). The SDI was a plan for a ground - and space-based laser armed antiballistic missile (ABM) system that would have created a shield for U. S. land-based missiles. President Ronald Reagan announced the plan on 23 March 1983, and his administration poured substantial sums of money into the program, administered by the Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). Although there was considerable research under the project’s auspices, congressional and public opposition to it—on the grounds that the concept would have meant scrubbing some key arms control agreements at significant financial and reputation costs — essentially derailed the program. President George H. W. Bush discontinued plans to deploy the SDI when he came to office in 1989. However, the introduction of the SDI into the volatile mix of the Cold War probably was the catalyst for such crises as the 1983 Soviet war scare and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Succeeding administrations have recommended modified versions of the SDI at the theater level, such as the high altitude theater defense program President George W. Bush authorized on coming to office in 2001.
STRATEGIC SUPPORT BRANCH. Established in 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) created the Strategic Support Branch on the orders of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to boost the Defense Department’s espionage capabilities by deploying small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators, and technical specialists alongside the military’s special operations forces. According to insiders, the Strategic Support Branch was established to lessen the Defense Department’s dependence on human intelligence (HUMINT) supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In addition, the idea behind the Branch was to give combat forces more and better information about their enemy on the battlefield and to find new tools that could be used to penetrate and destroy nonstate groups, such as terrorist organizations, that pose threats to U. S. global interests. In a memorandum to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in late 2001, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld reportedly indicated that the units would focus on emerging target countries, such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Georgia. According to press reports, the units have been operating within Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places for more than two years.
STUDEMAN, WILLIAM O. (1940- ). A lifelong intelligence officer, Admiral Studeman was appointed deputy director of central intelligence (DDCI) in 1992 after a distinguished career as an intelligence officer in the navy. Between 1992 and 1995, Studeman served as deputy to Directors of Central Intelligence (DCI) Robert M. Gates, R. James Woolsey Jr., and John Mark Deutch and served twice for extended periods as the acting director of central intelligence.
Between 1988 and 1992, Admiral Studeman was director of the National Security Agency (NSA), and, in 1985-1988, director of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). In addition, he has held posts ranging from vice chief of naval operations and officer in charge of the Atlantic Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Center to commanding officer of the Navy Operational Intelligence Center and assistant chief of staff for sixth fleet intelligence.
SUCCESS (OPERATION). Operation Success was a covert action by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1954 to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala. Arbenz was elected in 1950 on a platform of land reform, and soon after his election, he expropriated the lands of the United Fruit Company, the largest employer in Guatemala at the time, which magnified calls in Washington for his ouster by painting him as a communist and a Soviet sympathizer. The CIA set up training camps in Nicaragua, planted Soviet weaponry in Guatemala, and broadcast alarming reports of massive defections within the Guatemalan army. Operation Success groomed a “liberator” and fomented subversion within the Guatemalan army by propaganda, sabotage, and commando raids. Expecting an invasion, Arbenz requested Soviet help, thus giving the CIA the pretext for intervention. Arbenz resigned on 2 June 1954 and took sanctuary in the Mexican Embassy. Following the coup, the CIA undertook a follow-up covert action, Operation History, to gather and exploit the documents of the Guatemalan Communist Party. Arbenz’s overthrow ushered in a decades-long period of successive dictatorships and human rights abuses.
SVRR (Sluzhba Vneshney Rasvedki Rossii). The SVRR is the external intelligence service of the Russian Federation and a direct successor of the Soviet KGB. The SVRR’s sister agency, the FSB, also a direct successor of the KGB, focuses primarily on domestic intelligence and security. The SVRR handled many of the American spies in the 1990s, including Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.
World History
