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seemed to tilt the balance of power within the Carter Administration away from Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, who stressed reaching
agreements with Moscow, and toward Brzezinski, who favored “linkage” between progress toward bilateral accords and Soviet behavior
in the Third World. The charges and countercharges between Washington and Moscow, along with disagreements on other areas such as
human rights, the Middle East (where the Kremlin accused Washington of backing off an agreed-approach in favor of backing a bilateral
Egyptian-Israeli accord), and relations with China, helped stall progress in the SALT II negotiations and generally embitter U.S.-Soviet
relations in the first half of 1978. Thus was it said that SALT, or more generally detente, “lies buried in the sands of Ogaden.”
Exploring why the U.S.-Soviet detente of the mid-1970s was side-tracked by such seemingly obscure and peripheral issues as the
regional crisis in the Horn of Africa was one purpose of the “Carter-Brezhnev Project.” Spearheaded by Dr. James G. Blight of the
Center for Foreign Policy Development at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, the Carter-
Brezhnev Project gathered scholars, former Soviet and American officials, and newly-released documentation for a series of oral history
conferences to examine the reasons behind the collapse of detente, and whether those events suggested any lessons for current and future
Russian-American relations. Among the scholarly organizations supporting the Project’s efforts to obtain fresh evidence from American,
Russian, and other archives were the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute and declassified documents
repository based at George Washington University, and the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP), based at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In this issue of the CWIHP Bulletin, we are pleased to present a sampling of the Russian and East German documents on the 1977-
78 Horn of Africa Crisis that were gathered for the Carter-Brezhnev conference on U.S.-Soviet rivalry in the Third World, held in Ft.
Lauderdale, Florida, on 23-26 March 1995. (A much smaller selection was included in a briefing book assembled by the National
Security Archive and CWIHP for use during the conference.)
Both the Russian and East German documents were obtained and translated via the collective efforts of the National Security
Archive, CWIHP, and the CFPD. Most of the Russian documents printed below emanated from the Center for the Storage of Contempo-
rary Documentation (TsKhSD in its Russian acronym), the repository for the post-1952 records of the Central Committee of the Commu-
nist Party of the Soviet Union (CC CPSU), located in the former Central Committee headquarters in Old Square in Moscow; some
additional documents came from the Archive of the President, Russian Federation (APRF); all were specially declassified by Russian
authorities for the Carter-Brezhnev Project. For their assistance in working out the details of locating and obtaining these materials,
CWIHP would like to thank N.G. Tomilina, Director of TsKhSD, and her staff, and Vladislav M. Zubok and Malcolm Byrne of the
National Security Archive.
The East German documents printed below are drawn from a larger collection obtained from the East Berlin-based archive of the
former ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), and translated from German, by
Christian F. Ostermann, a researcher based at the National Security Archive and the incoming CWIHP Associate Director. These East
German documents include reports of communications with Soviet and Cuban officials—including a lengthy excerpt from the transcript
of an April 1977 conversation between East German leader Erich Honecker and visiting Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who had recently
attempted a mediation effort between Somalia and Ethiopia—and accounts of an abortive East German effort in 1978 to mediate the
ongoing dispute between the central Ethiopian government and the separatist Eritrean guerrilla movement. As with the conflict between
Ethiopia and Somalia, both contestants in the Ethiopia-Eritrea clash professed allegiance to socialism, and Moscow hoped to subsume
their differences in order to consolidate an anti-Western bloc on the Horn of Africa.
All of the photocopied Russian and East German documents printed below, and many other, still-untranslated East-bloc documents
(as well as declassified U.S. government documents) concerning the Horn Crisis, are on file and available for scholarly research at the
National Security Archive. The Archive is located on the 7th floor of the Gelman Library, 2130 H St. NW, Washington, DC 20037, and
can be reached at (202) 994-7000 (telephone); (202) 994-7005 (fax); and nsarchiv@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu (e-mail).
To assess the significance of these materials for understanding the Horn of Africa Crisis, the CWIHP Bulletin has solicited commen-
taries from three scholars: Ermias Abebe, an Ethiopian-born scholar who obtained his Master’s degree at Moscow State University and
recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, has completed a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy in the Third World in
the 1970s, using Russian, American, and Ethiopian sources; Paul B. Henze, author of The Horn of Africa from War to Peace (Macmillan,
1991) and during the Carter Administration a staff member of the National Security Council, and currently a researcher affiliated with
the Washington, D.C.-office of the Rand Corporation; and Christian F. Ostermann, currently completing a dissertation for the Univer-
sity of Hamburg on U.S.-East German relations in the 1950s, is a researcher based at the National Security Archive and the incoming
CWIHP Associate Director. Their commentaries begin below, preceding the section of translated East-bloc documents.
In the future, CWIHP hopes to organize additional activities, including a scholarly conference or workshop, to gather further
sources and perspectives on the international history of the Horn of Africa Crisis. These would include still-missing pieces of the puzzle
from the Russian and American archives, materials from the region such as Ethiopia and Somalia, and, if possible, Cuban records that
could clarify Havana’s actions and motivations during the crisis.
—James G. Hershberg
THE HORN, THE COLD WAR,
AND DOCUMENTS FROM THE
FORMER EAST-BLOC:
AN ETHIOPIAN VIEW
by Ermias Abebe
The materials presented here as
part of a collection of recently declas-
sified documents from the former East-
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