A Cold War Crusader: Andrew Eiva’s Ethnic Anti-Communist Dream

Abstract

Andrew Eiva, an ardently anti-Soviet, right-wing lobbyist in Washington DC during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s and the final stages of Soviet Lithuania in the early 1990s, was a true believer, a pro-US Cold War crusader. A clear example of an ethnic anti-communist, Eiva’s goal was to free Lithuania from Russian-imposed communist control, and he saw the Soviet-Afghan War as a means to that end. Andrew Eiva represents a strand of thinking (and acting) within US foreign policy circles at odds with (to the right of) official policy, presaging the tensions between the political right in the US and the CIA (especially) and other governmental organizations in recent years. Based on material Eiva wrote as a lobbyist, Western media accounts, and clandestine reports about him in the files of the Lithuanian KGB, this article shows that his ideologically driven lobbying efforts affected foreign policymaking in the US in the last decade of the Cold War as well as how his actions were reported and perceived in the USSR (within the KGB machinery).