IDEAS
Playing the long game by talking with your worst enemies
How to set the stage for peace and international cooperation — even when it seems impossible.
By John Marks
October 7, 2024
The year was 1989, and I was having dinner at a Holiday Inn overlooking the ocean in Santa Monica, Calif. At the table were some strange bedfellows: William Colby, former director of the CIA; Ray Cline, former CIA deputy director; Feodor Sherbak, former deputy director of the KGB’s Internal Security Directorate; Valentin Zvezdenkov, the KGB’s former chief of counterterrorism and former station chief in Cuba; and Igor Beliaev, a political observer with the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta.
It was remarkable that these longtime American and Soviet adversaries were meeting with one another, or for that matter, with me. After all, I was the author of two books that had revealed numerous abuses committed by the CIA. I had even written about how one of my dinner companions, Colby, had headed the CIA’s notorious Phoenix and Counterterror programs in Vietnam, each of which featured widespread torture and assassination. Subsequently, I had confronted Colby in front of 1,000 people at a Washington event at which he was guest of honor.
But then, 15 years later, here he was participating in a project that I had organized to promote Soviet-American cooperation against terrorism.
Activists usually define themselves by what they oppose. In my case, I had actively worked against the Vietnam War and what I considered abuses committed by the CIA. But eventually I became aware of other ways of working in the world. I began to see grays in issues that had once seemed to be either black or white. Instead of throwing monkey wrenches into the old system, I wanted to help build a new one.
In today’s highly polarized world, constructive collaborations may seem harder than ever, but they can happen. And they are crucial. When conflicts — even the most difficult ones like today’s war between Russia and Ukraine — eventually come to a close, it’s often because of quiet efforts that began long before to build understanding and allow eventual cooperation to take root.
I was part of such quiet efforts with Search for Common Ground, the nonprofit organization I founded and led for 32 years.
For instance, in 2009 my colleagues and I sponsored unofficial and confidential meetings in Europe and New York between former US Secretary of Defense William Perry and Ali Akbar Salehi, then head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. Both men had access to top-level officials in their home countries. We never learned what Salehi reported to Iranian policymakers, but we heard directly from Perry that he told President Obama that nuclear agreements between the two countries were possible. This seems to have been a key step in moving the United States into nuclear talks with Iran.
The gathering of former CIA and KGB officials in Santa Monica was an earlier example of international cooperation resulting from groundwork laid over many years. It also suggests that the United States and Russia can still find ways to cooperate today.
The 1989 meeting in Santa Monica, from left: Igor Beliaev of Literaturnaya Gazeta; Feodor Sherbak, former first deputy director of the KGB's Internal Security Directorate; William Colby, former CIA director; Ray Cline, former CIA deputy director; Natalie Latter, interpreter; the author, John Marks of Search for Common Ground; Valentin Zvezdenkov, the KGB's former director of counterterrorism, KGB; and Oleg Proudkov of Literaturnaya Gazeta. (Courtesy of John Marks)
Although our main goal in Santa Monica was to see whether the CIA and KGB could collaborate to fight terrorism, I had a larger vision too: to transform how the world dealt with conflict. I wanted to move the superpowers away from adversarial, win-lose approaches toward nonadversarial, win-win problem-solving.
Terrorism was not a front-burner issue in either country in those pre 9/11 days, which meant it seemed susceptible to an unofficial approach led by nongovernmental organizations. To this end, I formed a partnership with Literaturnaya Gazeta, a leading Soviet publication, and together we set up the US-Soviet Task Force to Prevent Terrorism. We held the first meeting in Moscow in January 1989 and convened experts from both countries.
Participants initially feared being duped by the other side, but we used an expert facilitator, Marguerite Millhauser (now Miriam Millhauser Castle), to help establish trust. She guided us in finding a way to frame the issue. Instead of trying to define who specifically was a terrorist (as opposed to a “freedom fighter”), participants agreed that specific acts, such as airplane hijacking, hostage-taking, and attacking children, always constituted terrorism. Participants were unanimous that deeds such as these should be considered criminal, regardless of the politics of the perpetrators. So blowing up a civilian airplane was never acceptable — no matter how noble the motivating cause. Once our participants adopted this approach, they made 30 specific recommendations of tactics and techniques to prevent forbidden acts.
After the Moscow meeting ended, our recommendations were reported directly to the White House and the Kremlin, and the two governments began working-level meetings to deal with terrorism. Our next step was to bring into our process former intelligence officials who had hands-on operational experience in counterterrorism.
Despite my past history as a CIA basher, I was able to recruit former CIA director William Colby and former deputy director Ray Cline, and the Soviets brought in Feodor Sherbak and Valentin Zvezdenkov, both retired high-level KGB generals. In an unprecedented move, the KGB men agreed to come to Santa Monica to hold friendly talks with their American counterparts. At the meeting, the former CIA and KGB men agreed that both sides needed to protect their intelligence sources and methods, but that their countries could still find ways to exchange intelligence that would aid the other in preventing terrorism. They took their recommendations back home.
The KGB immediately accepted what had been agreed on, but William Webster, the CIA director, refused on the grounds that the KGB was a heavy-handed secret police agency, as opposed to the CIA, which he said was an intelligence agency.
That is where things stood for a year until an unexpected event occurred. In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and America’s national security establishment began to prepare for the Gulf War. The US government suddenly had a great need for intelligence on Iraq, and it had few assets there — but the KGB had many more. The CIA was now under pressure from the White House to seek help from the Soviets. In October 1990, the CIA’s Webster told The Associated Press that his agency and the KGB were sharing intelligence about terrorist threats against both countries and that on several occasions, US information had been “pivotal” to preventive action taken by the Soviets. I never found out what, if anything, the KGB provided in return.
It will probably never be known to what extent our US-Soviet Task Force contributed to this cooperation. If the task force had not existed, probably a similar liaison channel would have been set up by necessity. Nevertheless, it can be said that the possibility of such cooperation had not been raised seriously before the task force got involved and that our recommendations for intelligence exchanges between the CIA and the KGB were eventually accepted. Even today, at a time of very bad relations between the United States and Russia, cooperation to prevent terrorism has not disappeared, and there still seems to be in place a duty to warn the other of an impending attack. Thus, in March 2024, the Biden administration said it passed intelligence to the Russians that a major act of terrorism was imminent — although the Russians later maintained the warning was so vague as to be useless.
Russia under Vladimir Putin is today a repressive power that has invaded Ukraine and that persistently abuses human rights. Still, as the late Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin declared, “You don’t make peace with friends.”
The fact is that Russia and the United States each possess nuclear weapons that could destroy the other. While the differences between the two countries cannot and should not be ignored, speaking as an American, I believe that the security of the United States would be enhanced if a few areas of cooperation could be found. Possibilities might include cooperation in preserving the environment, in demilitarizing the Arctic, and in avoiding attacks on civilian infrastructure. These issues all would be in the American national interest — as well as in the Russian.
In all likelihood, cooperation of this sort would diminish the chances that escalatory actions would get out of hand, and it might even contribute to a future in which US-Russian relations would be more positive.
John Marks was the founder and longtime president of Search for Common Ground. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is called “From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship.”
John Marks
Founder and Managing Director, Confluence International
Founder, Search for Common Ground and Common Ground Productions
Visiting Scholar in Peacebuilding & Social Entrepreneurship, Leiden University
Anne Frankstraat 45
1018 DM Amsterdam
+31 6 38503841
Author of From Vision to Action: Remaking the World through Social Entrepreneurship
