CIA video briefing for Reagan: Moscow summit, 1988 

There was someone in the CIA whose job was to find and get a mood music for the Moscow city montage.

"The in-flight movie, Mr President, will be Space Balls."

I must say, Mr. Reagan had a great travel agent.

I picture the president not paying attention to these playing in background and then having a personal agent brief him again when he’s over there

Must be a real fun job to put these together

I really look forward to these summary briefings every time I travel.

Impressive that this was produced probably on a very short timeline as changes to the presidential schedule could occur at any moment up until the start of the trip. Without laptops, editing software, digital filming equipment or high speed internet.

Kinda insane this made it to RU-vid I'm sure it was 'classified' for years

8:30 "Red Square is longer than 4 football fields" -- Murica

Wait, so they made this well shot, well edited and well-scored video for just one guy?

That "Moscow b-roll and music" sequence was superb.

I'm struck by how rigidly these expeditions were scheduled. I guess I shouldn't be.

I assume that this was redacted/edited from its original form. There's no reference to anything remotely sensitive/classified or that couldn't have been gleaned from basic public sources.

9:07 I'd bet real money that's Ron Reagan (his son) making that report... had to chuckle a little at that

Now the briefing is a set of Wikipedia and TikTok links.

I wonder what the KGB in-flight movie was like?

I like listening to this when I shower in the morning and pretend I'm important

This could have been a two page report… I do wonder how they put this together and the timeline of its production.

This is truly an excellent piece of history to see and helped me learn a little about the beautiful city of Moscow! Thank you for sharing. ❤

Man I wish I had this for every flight I take

At 1:23 you can see MS Estonia, which at the time was named Viking Sally.

My taxes were well spent.

The schedule sounds exhausting.

How times have changed😢

Only one year later, cracks were showing in the Berlin Wall.

Thanks 4 uploading!!

These videos for Reagan are funny. I thought it's enough a sheet of paper with a report on the topic. No, they made a whole short movie with video montage and audio effects and even put a Russian song into it. At 8:33 "Red Square is longer than 4 football fields" - and this is in a report from the CIA to a president of the US. Ha Ha Ha! )))

Seems more of a job for the State Department.

It's great. I wonder if they still do this kind of videos for the presidents. Much better than just a written itinerary or a powerpoint. Definitely worth the effort - I would definitely want them if I was a head of state!

9:15 American Reporter says "one of the most fascinating but for Americans often confusing countries" rofl

This is incredible

@17:46 I didn't realize that England used to be so far south in the Atlantic Ocean. London was right across from Miami back then!

What was the song used during the montage of Moscow?

Interesting !!! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

Of all the things I've come to expect from the CIA, this was among the least expected. Should probably have seen this coming in one way or another, though, considering I did see bits of "Burn After Reading".

2:15 That's either Eduard Khil or Vladimir Troshin. My dedushka used to play their records. Been a long time since I've heard that

11:14 a young Gary Kasparov?

You can tell that Moscow Station had a deep love for the city

what was the production turn around for these briefings

The river freezes solid..... Imagine being one of the first humans setting camp there and thinking 'yeah, this will work nicely'..... A combination of stupidity and desperation is needed.

Love the map

The Moscow footage montage is SO GREAT & (kinda) accurate!! The CIA is scary!!

Some shots are from Tbilisi

I wonder who narrated this?

I wonder if any of the kids that Mrs Reagan visited are still around. It would be interesting to hear from them when the war is over

It's so odd to see a politician, and not a mafia style thug, in power in the Kremlin.

11:14 Is that Garry Kasparov on the left?

I thought "they really made a video about the visit?" Then i remebered, this is a visit to moscow during the cold war, so having a breifing video is probably a good idea to make sure that the president has an idea of what it looks like, what to do, and when to do it, as well as gain some idea of the history and tidbits about the soviet union

meeting with embassy staff = meeting with SPOOKS

This video is so informative.. there is almost no need to actually go. (Apart from the INF Treaty meeting)😁

All that effort to make this video and they couldn't even give the narrator the correct pronunciation to a single name

@picsnportraits This feels like some Sleepcore material.

Bro was so deep into dementia he had to have a Rick Steves style film made for him to understand what was happening.

3:05 Mmmmmh, that green Klash Kalav looks delicious

The good ole days

nancy had all the fun parts of this trip.

If your name ends with in it take

Imagine a Millennial President. They’ll use a VR headset in the MetaVerse to prepare for diplomatic meetings. The Holodeck is almost here 🫠

Busy trip

I will?

Metal gear solid videos

2:32 Is that a young borat?

why the information is so basic/ encyclopedic?

"The Supreme Soviet" should be the name for a huge fcuking robot w/ lazors like an evil Liberty Prime

Wow, can I get AI to make one of these for my next trip??!

I crave AI to do this for me as I obsess over having complete control and understanding of what will happen in an unfamiliar place.

During this time, Finland remained a neutral country, and Ukraine and Russia were one country.

10:08 "at the Moscow open window trade convention!"

Maybe Blinden and oh wait never mind…

Such optimism. And now Putin is throwing it all away. 😢

They should have had Don Pardo narrate this.

Was this the last time an US President visited the USSR? Bush and Gorbachev did meet to discuss the reunification of Germany with France and Great Britains leaders who's names elude me was it Thatcher?! Oh well... Time to visit Wikipedia.

I want to see the CIA briefings for Trump: "Man, woman, chairs, camera, TV."

Interesting video. Before this time very little was seen in videos of the USSR, in the west. I found that when I arrived for a tourist visit in 1976, after reading everything published in the US on the country, that everything I knew was wrong. We had been told for decades of how poor and desperate everyone was, virtual slaves but in reality there was more poverty, racism and illiteracy in the US at the time, There was really no homelessness or lack of education opportunities. I really enjoyed the visit, particularly Leningrad. Moscow was clean, safe and polite, and the people well dressed, parks and buildings in excellent repair. So this video if shown in to the general public might have dispelled some of the misconceptions that still make up the believe about Russia. More disinformation is being spewed by the press about Russia now than in the USSR period so less is known than ever by the general public. If more Americans had passports(only 18% do now) and visited other countries politicians and those with agendas would have a harder time getting people worked up and marching off to war. If the people had not been lied to we never would have allowed factions to get us into Vietnam, Iraq or a dozen other wars of choice in the last 60 years.

This sounds like the guy from Unsolved Mysteries

2:32 "სოიუზპეჩატი" this is Georgian alphabet, so is this Moscow or Tbilisi?)))

17:46 A map of Europe if Britain 🇬🇧 & Russia 🇷🇺 had nukes 💣💥 during the Napoleonic wars

That footage of Russia is basically yelling "yes, Mr. President, Russia does suck"

Is this what Nancy did with Henry? Wow... 2:08 pm CST Aug. 16, 2024 Co-President Charity Collen "Lovejoy" Crouse It is that important to have a supportive first spouse.

Don't think this is authentic. Narrator sounds Hollywood but so was Reagan

Message for satan

Can't imagine this being true.

moscow nights "moskovskie vechera" in russian

Cold War was over by this point.😅

Ah 1988. America's last great year before decline and the Soviet Union's last great year as well. I have been telling people this for more than 20 years.

They spoke to him like a child because he was senile--especially at the tail end of his presidency.

I can't wait for the videos made for Trump to get declassified

And who are the people who make the PRESIDENT do this shit 😂

“KGB Honor Guard”, lolz

finland is a place when you finish an era

Midnight sun in Helsinki? 🤔 Would think the CIA knew where the polar circle is...

This makes me laugh. Did Reagan really need half of the information in here?

I refuse to believe this is real. I'm not the biggest fan of Reagan, he was alright, perhaps he was the man for the time given the other choices, but I think his legacy is far overstated. However, Reagan may not have been as great as some would say, he also most definitely was not a blithering idiot. I refuse to believe he needed to be told such basic facts about nations as important as the Soviet Union, and Finland, one of the few gateways to the Eastern Bloc. Don't get me wrong, could this be a travel-prep, and itinerary video produced by his staffers for him to watch on the plane to Helsinki to help familiarize him with important landmarks so he would know about the architecture and whatnot, and be able to tell where he was at within each respective city. However, CIA briefing this is not. The CIA briefing would be letting him know things like what negotiating tactics, concessions, and demands they Soviets would make during the summit, teaching him some Russian phrases to breakout, letting him know what to expect from the KGB should they be keeping an eye on things, or if they actually cooperated with the Secret Service to protect him they'd be briefing him on their role, and more than likely providing him some background knowledge of the liaison officer, etc. That's what you'd find in a CIA briefing video, this is literally just an itinerary with a bit of info, and history about each city, each venue, and an overview of each event, and that's it. This seriously looks like something his secretarial, and travel staff intended for him to pop in a vhs player on Air Force One once they got within 45 minutes of Helsinki. If this is all the CIA had to tell him in prep for a summit inside the Soviet Union then they must have been incompetent, and completely clueless, and its a miracle we ever survived the cold war, I'm surprised they didn't mistake Chernobyl for an attempt to nuke Honolulu, geez. This just cannot be a CIA briefing video, I refuse to believe it, there's not even one single attempt to prep him for, or give him a strategic advantage at the negotiating table... You know... The reason they were having the damn summit in the first place. Good god, people will slap a click bait title on anything. Its like... Its like video rape. You just raped me with this shit. I sat through this travelogue of Finland, and Russia waiting for something interesting, something like "Mr. President we believe General Secretary Gorbachev is prepared to offer 'x' but he's going to ask for 'y.' Now, that's off the table, however, we'd advise you to offer him 'z' as a gesture of faith, and goodwill, if he would consider dropping his demand for 'y' and accepting 'n' instead." but no, nothing cool like that which would actually give insight into how the summit played out behind closed doors, nope, just a presidential travelogue. I sat through your damn video, you got the view, your damned click bait title worked. I hope you feel validated now, you rapist.

Reagan wasn't a good reader, was he?

Presidents got a million things to do and they play a whole damn song of Russian nonsense 🤦🏻‍♂️🤣

....so he did the voice? My tax dollars paid for this? What if he had to say something top secret for a video then decided to blabbermouth to his bros at the actors club about his secret acting gig?

CIA: "Mr. President..you will do x..followed by y.." What happens if he doesn't do x, y? W-w-what happens if he doesn't do x, y?

Why does it sound like a movie for a child? Did his dementia set in already or was he really just dumb?

To show the degeneration of U.S. academic quality and its mainstreaming, listen to the part of the Kremlin, "where the Bolsheviks returned the capital after SEIZING power," the idea that the Bolsheviks didn't conduct a revoluiton but instead created some kind of coup of workers, was a much denigrated fringe idea until think tanks and court historians in the 1980s mainstreamed the idea through power of grants and social pressure. This also had an affect on the morale of the USSR, where Gorbachev read such a book by the U.S. on the Gulag (a very flawed book, based on extravagant estimates now discredited by the opening of the Soviet archives) and cited it in his memoirs as an impetus to destroy the Soviet system through hierarchial market reforms. P.S. I showed this video to my Ukrainian friend and she cried at the lost, secure way of life compared to modern Ukraine.