AN AMERICAN HERO AND DEAR FRIEND IS GONE

Alex Alexiev 1941-2019

A true American hero, great champion of freedom, known to TTPers for his many articles over the years, and one of my dearest friends for 37 years, Alex Alexiev, suffered a sudden massive heart attack on Sunday morning, July 28, and passed from this Earth.

It is hard to cope with the loss of such a friend, such an extraordinary man.  Let me tell you about him.

[Note: We are running Alex’s final article, written a few days ago, as a companion piece: Trade War with China? No, It’s Worse!  He had no idea it would be his last.]

He was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, son of Rayko Alexiev, the most prominent Bulgarian intellectual of the day, and his wife Vessela Alexieva.  Rayko was a writer, artist, satirist, and publisher of the most popular newspaper in Sofia, Cricket (Kрикет).  He despised Nazis and Communists, Hitler and Stalin, equally.

In 1937 at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge,  Cricket ran Rayko’s cartoon making sardonic fun of Stalin with his pipe, and above his head the hammer& sickle red star, a severed head upon each of its rays – Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev – with Stalin saying in the caption: ‘Don’t hurry, go one by one, there is a place for everybody.’

On September 6, 1944, the Soviet Red Army invaded Bulgaria.  Three days later on September 9 at Stalin’s instructions, Rayko was arrested by goons of the NKVD secret police at a café that was the intellectual center of Sofia.  He was never seen alive again.  He died on November 18, having been unspeakably tortured and beaten to death – Stalin’s revenge for a cartoon.

Alex’s mother, a beloved actress with the stage name of Madame A, told the story of her husband’s horrific last days in a series of interviews in the 1990s you can read here.  She never told Alex what happened when he was a child, but grew up hating the stifling oppression of Communism – which thoroughly solidified when his mother finally revealed his father’s fate when he was 13.

He planned his escape well.  He became fluent in several foreign languages, such as German, French, and English, as a student in the Department of Philology at the University of Sofia.  He became so good at soccer he was able to join the Bulgarian national team with its travel privileges.

With his friend and teammate Simon, they planned to defect while playing in West Germany.  It was 1963. Alex made it, Simon was caught.  After Simon was punished and thought to be rehabilitated, Alex was able to establish surreptitious contact with him.  “I’m coming back in to get you out,” was the message.

When Alex saved enough money to bribe his way back into Bulgaria, and bribe his and Simon’s way out to freedom, that’s just what Alex did.  That’s sheer heroism in anyone’s book.

Alex’s dream, however, was not to stay in West Germany but to come to America, Freedom’s Promised Land.  He arrived on our shores in 1965, and headed for what was then the Golden State.  He started post-graduate studies at UCLA, supporting himself driving all over LA delivering daily copies of the New York Times.

There were not a lot of subscribers back then – everyone read the LA Times – and almost all were individual wealthy homeowners.  So it got his attention that he delivered 10 copies to one single place, something called the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica.

The more Alex learned about RAND (acronym for Research and Development), a private non-profit with deep connections to the Pentagon and Langley, the more he knew this is where he belonged.

So he got his graduate degree in international relations at UCLA, became a proud US citizen, had a number of meetings with RAND honchos, and one sunny day in 1977 showed up at the RAND personnel entrance gate.  The guard hadn’t seen him in a while but remembered him as a likeable newspaper boy.  “Got some New York Times newspapers for us, Alex?” he asked.

Alex smiled back.  “No, I’m coming here to work.  I’m now a RAND Senior Analyst for Soviet Affairs,” he announced.

He soon gained a reputation at the fabled think tank for extraordinary intelligence, deep insight into how Soviet Marxist minds worked, and extremely thorough research analysis on how the Kremlin functioned.  He was also marvelously easy to get along with – he had a wry and dry sense of humor that once it got going you couldn’t stop laughing.

Yet it wasn’t until 1982 that I met him.  With Ronald Reagan in the White House and old friends of mine from our Youth for Reagan days in the Gipper’s original campaign for California Governor in 1966 there with him, I had become interested in Soviet vulnerabilities.

My theory was that the Soviet Union was Humpty-Dumpty, that if the centrifugal forces within it could ever be maximized enough to break it apart, it could never be put back together again.

So when I read a Letter to the Editor of the LA Times by the leader of something called The Baltic-American Freedom League, I wrote to the editor asking to be put in touch with him.  It wasn’t long before I got an invitation to a conference-seminar of people from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – the “Baltics” all on the Baltic Sea – whose countries had not just been colonized by the USSR like Eastern Europe but incorporated within its borders.

There was a panel of four speakers, one of whom had this deep voice and to whom everyone deferred as he was amazingly knowledgeable.  I asked the leader who invited me about him.  “That’s Alexiev,” he whispered.  “He’s the master, the best there is.”

So when the Q&A turned into a discussion of how much resentment was building in various Soviet vassals, and noting that he was from Bulgaria, I raised my hand.  “How different from other Soviet colonies is Bulgaria, as it has looked upon Russia as its fellow Christian liberator from the Moslem Ottoman Empire?”

He gave me a sharp where-did-you-come-from? look, and didn’t take his eyes off me as he replied, “That’s a good question.”  After his answer and the conference ended, we got to talking and hit it off right away.  He wasn’t only a super-smart boffin, he was cool, just a neat guy you’d want to have a cup of coffee with.  He invited me to visit him at his office at RAND.

It wasn’t long before every Tuesday at 11am, after I’d drive down the PCH (Pacific Coast Highway) from my apartment in Malibu, we’d get together in his office and over coffee talk about how to screw the Soviet Union.  That was the start of a deep friendship that lasted for 37 years, only ending day before yesterday.

It seems like yesterday when he stayed at our home with Rebel and me last spring, carrying on all night as we polished off a bottle of Tito’s vodka.  (We both loved it that the best vodka there is not Russian nor French, but American, made in Texas.)

It’s very hard to describe how purely enjoyable being with Alex was.  He was a Renaissance Man, so skilled and overwhelmingly knowledgeable on so many things – from music, art, history, how the Pentagon and CIA really worked, how the Kremlin really works, how to hunt and fish and survive in the wild, to so very much more.

He was a man of reason with such penetrating insight and logic it was very hard to refute.  At the same time he was abundantly passionate about freedom, about America’s founding values and principles enabling more freedom and more prosperity than the world had ever seen.  He loved America so much, and was so proud that he had worked for decades with Pentagon icons like Andy Marshall to protect his adopted country.

He had real courage.  Once in the early 90s when pre-Giuliani Manhattan was a cesspool of filth and crime, a taxi had to drop him off at night a block away from his hotel due to construction.  In a suit and tie carrying a briefcase, and not a large man, it was asking for a mugging.  Within a minute or so, these two hoods were next to him, asking with menace, “What’s in the case, man?”

Alex looked right them, kept right on walking his steady pace, and in his deep stentorian voice, simply said flatly, “You don’t want to know.”  Poof – they vanished into the darkness.

He never ever kowtowed to anyone powerful.  In 1988, he attended a briefing at Langley held by then-CIA Deputy Director Bobby Gates and the agency’s chief Soviet analyst.  They proceeded to deliver a dog-and-pony show arguing how strong the Soviet economy was.

Alex wasn’t buying it for a millisecond.  “Every year for decades,” he told them, “Pravda announces awards for the oblasts, of which there are 133 in the Soviet Union, that met their economic priorities and quotas for the year.  This year, for the very first time, not one single oblast was awarded.  Every one failed.  Your analysis is fatally flawed.”  And it was.

Being with him was so stimulating, so intellectually exciting, yet so much undiluted fun at the same.  Your mind was racing on nitro fuel yet it was one belly laugh after another.

And now to realize he is gone – gone from the Earth forever – is very hard to cope with.  It was such a privilege to have known him, to be his friend.

Yet we are all mortal.  Every one of us will be gone from this Earth forever someday – and since that someday may come at any time, now may be a good time to let someone whose friendship you treasure know how much their existence means to you.

Thanks for existing, Alex.  Thanks for your love and patriotism for America, thanks for all you did to protect her, thanks for your genius and all you taught me, thanks for your friendship and all the marvelous times we had over so many years, thanks for being a hero to me.

My favorite picture of Alex is with Rebel during a dinner and I couldn’t resist capturing how happy we all were.  There was so much love of life in Alex, and he is glowing with it here.  What a man.  What a life.