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Tags: Arnaud de Borchgrave | Dick Scaife
OPINION

Anti-Communist Crusader Scaife Was a Great American and Dear Friend

Arnaud de Borchgrave By Friday, 04 July 2014 07:52 PM EDT Current | Bio | Archive

Courage is that thing nobody can teach you. It is what motivated Dick Scaife in his crusade against global Communism and the quality I admired most and that brought us together at the height of the Cold War.

Beginning in 1961, as the Soviet Union erected the Berlin Wall, Mr. Scaife and I became friends. Our viewpoints on what the anti-Communist crusade would require for the next generation or two meshed perfectly. Our friendship deepened when I resigned from a 30-year career at Newsweek, most of those years as Newsweek’s Chief Foreign Correspondent, to coauthor with Robert Moss, "The Spike," a novel based on facts about Soviet disinformation.

Dick Scaife and I bonded with his crusade against the evils of Communism, both in the Soviet Union and around the world. I would visit Dick, usually for a weekend at Ligonier outside Pittsburgh, where we held long discussions about the ideological battle that dominated so much of the latter half of the 20th century, and how best to sharpen it for his newspaper, The Pittsburgh Tribune.

Dick Scaife’s contribution to the collapse of Communism and of the Soviet empire is incalculable. And I am very proud of the role I played with Dick’s support and encouragement in the defeat of the evil empire.

As the Cold War drew to a close with the crushing defeat of the Soviet Union and its satellites, I concluded that I didn’t wish to spend the balance of my life editing The Washington Times. Ambassador David Abshire came to have lunch with me at the newspaper. He told me that he would very much appreciate it if I joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) as a senior scholar to conduct a study in whatever subject I wished.

When I asked him who the donor would be for my chair at CSIS, he said it was anonymous from one of my admirers. I accepted. And it didn’t take me long to discover that my principal backer was my dear friend of very long standing, Dick Scaife.

With Dick’s ongoing generous support, we launched a series of CSIS studies that reverberated around the world – e.g., CYBERCRIME, CYBERTERRORISM, CYBERWARFARE – AVERTING AN ELECTRONIC WATERLOO. This was released on Capitol Hill by Senator Sam Nunn in 1996, or ten years ahead of its time.

We also did a global study on RUSSIAN ORGANIZED CRIME; on GLOBAL ORGANIZED CRIME; on THE NUCLEAR BLACK MARKET; and many other topics that dominated the post-Soviet Union landscape.

I hired Tom Sanderson as my deputy 12 years ago and he has turned out to be a rare gem whose tremendous work all over the world has been focused on Transnational Terrorism, or “Al Qaeda and its Associated Movements.” Tom and I, thanks again to the generous backing of Dick Scaife, have scoured the world and brought back intelligence that stunned even the CIA and FBI.

Tom and I work closely in perfect tune with each other – again all thanks to Dick Scaife. Whatever we do together will always be in memory of a great American who played a key role on the battlements of Freedom.

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deBorchgrave
Courage is that thing nobody can teach you. It is what motivated Dick Scaife in his crusade against global Communism and the quality I admired most and that brought us together at the height of the Cold War.
Arnaud de Borchgrave, Dick Scaife
525
2014-52-04
Friday, 04 July 2014 07:52 PM
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