Hidden history January 14, 2021
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Anyone hear of this before? I came across it while checking out something else.
Britain was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union in the winter of 1968 after Ministers became convinced that the Russian President, Leonid Brezhnev, was about to invade Romania. Secret documents released by the Public Record Office yesterday show that, in September 1968, Prime Minister Harold Wilson made detailed contingency plans for military intervention in eastern Europe.
And:
Minutes from meetings at the time record Defence Secretary Denis Healey telling Wilson that Britain could not ‘stand idly by’ if the Soviet Union continued its expansion. A telex from Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, made public for the first time, shows that towards the end of 1968, Britain believed that Soviet tanks were about to enter Romania. Intelligence sources even put a date – 22 November – on the invasion Tony Benn, who as Minister of Technology visited President Ceausescu in June 1968 and remained in contact with Romanian ministers, said last night: ‘I had no idea these discussions were going on. But there was a lot of Cold War panic at the time.’
That was a few months after the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968
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Bizarre. It’s almost Boy’s Own stuff, the talk of sending in crack troops and aiding guerillas in Jugoslavia, like the JNA wouldn’t have had any agency in the situation itself. This in the wake of Suez a decade and a bit earlier, when the Brits were handed their arse by the actual global superpowers. Presumably the US got wind of this and told Healey to cop on.
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