In a recent national security group discussion I was asked what Americans can expect of a regime that sees itself in an existential war. It reminded me how too few people study history, and that most (if not all) security professionals entering the workforce these days looks at the Cold War as if it was when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
With that in mind, some members of Congress have just this week launched 1960s-sounding baseless attacks claiming “Communism” in children’s programming commonly known as Sesame Street.
Committee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican members accused the networks of brainwashing viewers and children with a “communist” agenda…
Was a brontosaurus elected into office? Do not underestimate the return of a Nixon, or a McCarthy, given it’s unclear that their old saws ever really entirely went away.
So what should we expect these nut jobs of ghosts long past will do when they start acting as if Communism is around every corner and under every rock? What happens if a Black man crosses their path?
Cultural battles are always going to be a messy target, of course. Our expectations must look towards the even more dramatic and dangerous resource competition fights related to technological superiority.
I say people should plan for what’s happened in the past. Look at 1960 for a sense of what American hawks were up to before they were reigned back in a decade later (by Senator Church and President Carter).
To be fair, I’m talking about the shadows of the Cold War. A disturbing pattern aligns from certain “accidents” across the global chessboard of 1960-1961, not evidence sufficient to claim proof. These are shadows by design. We’re talking CIA, after all.
First: February 1960, Adriano Olivetti dies suddenly from a heart attack on a train to Switzerland. The visionary Italian industrialist had just purchased Underwood in America and was developing the world’s first transistorized computer, with plans to potentially share technology with Communist nations. 
Here’s a typical insight to be found in Meryle Secrest’s book “The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti“.
The move to contact Russia and China has to be seen as a political miscalculation of major proportions on Adriano’s part. If he still thought that Allen Dulles and the CIA were kindly disposed toward him and his ideas, he was deluding himself. After the abysmal showing of Comunità in the 1958 elections, Adriano Olivetti went from being a possible ally to a Socialist whose party had allied itself with the Communists. That loss of influence could well have led to a series of well-coordinated and highly sophisticated efforts to stop him and his company in its tracks. Whatever the cost.
Second: January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, is assassinated. Declassified documents have revealed CIA “involvement” in Belgians ruthlessly killing him, motivated to block Soviet influence in resource-rich Congo, home to uranium and other strategic minerals.
Third: September 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane “mysteriously” crashes (shot down) in Northern Rhodesia while on a Congo peace mission. Evidence suggests it was not an accident, as the U.S. continues to block investigations.
Fourth: November 1961, Mario Tchou, head of Olivetti’s groundbreaking electronics lab, dies in a suspicious car crash. He had been planning meetings with Chinese officials about computer technology. Secrest again:
The accident is reminiscent of a similar, so-called accident involving a truck that took the life of a famous American general. This was, for many years, also judged to have been the fault of his driver. The case is the death of General George Patton at the end of World War II in December 1945. Like Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou, General Patton had formidable enemies.
Resource Control as a Parallel
These targeted killings reflected the same facets of American war planning applied in two different battlefields.
Physical resources in Africa were demanded by Western powers. America was determined to maintain control of Congo’s vast reserves of uranium, copper, and cobalt by any means necessary. Mining was seen as critical for weapons and industrial dominance. Lumumba was perceived to threaten this access; Hammarskjöld threatened the narrative. The French even deposed the Congo’s next leader when he dared to suggest European military control over the country wasn’t wanted by them.
Technological resources arguably, and far less controversially, faced a similar fate. Olivetti’s breakthrough computing technology represented a different kind of strategic resource. Its potential transfer to Communist nations would have undermined American technological superiority at a pivotal moment in the computer revolution. Secrest concludes:
The problem is as valid today as it was during the height of the Cold War, and for the same reason. Of China’s theft of intellectual property, The Economist recently observed that what is at issue are ‘the core information technologies. They are the basis for the manufacture, networking and destructive power of advanced weapons systems.’ A country with the most sophisticated solutions establishes ‘an unassailable advantage.’
By 1964, Olivetti’s electronics division had been dismantled through an engineered and artificial financial crisis. It had hallmarks of the Western-aligned leadership installed in mineral-rich African nations.
Different continents, different resources, same playbook of asserting violent control through civilian assassinations to destroy targets of America’s most extreme politicians.
