Roland Lajoie, army general on the frontlines of the Cold War, dies at the age of 87

Major General Roland Lajoie, who played a leading role behind the geopolitical scenes in coordinating U.S.-Soviet relations during the final decade of the Cold War, and who later oversaw the destruction of hundreds of nuclear weapons belonged to the former Soviet Republics, died October 28 in Manchester, NH. He was 87.

His daughter Renee Lajoie (pronounced la-JOY) Newell said the death, at a hospital, was the result of complications from heart surgery.

General Lajoie’s position on the front lines of the US-Soviet confrontation was a mix of soldier and peacemaker, diplomat and spy. Fluent in both Russian and French, he served several times as an army attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and, in the late 1970s, headed the U.S. Army Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, which trained officers in the U.S.-Soviet Union. relationships.

His official role in Moscow was to represent the military in American relations with the Soviets. But he also pushed the boundaries: during military parades, he stood on the roof of the American embassy and tried to photograph the Soviets’ fearsome SS-20 intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

In 1983, as a colonel, he took command of the US Military Liaison Mission, a secretive fourteen-man team that, under a 1947 agreement with Moscow, could move through East Germany in relative freedom, observing what it could do. the war preparations of the Soviet bloc.

Members of the unit piled into Land Rovers in West Berlin in the morning and staggered into East Berlin over the Glienicke Bridge, a rickety structure where the Americans in 1962 traded Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy, for Francis Gary Powers, whose U. -Two spy planes had been shot down by the Soviets.

Once in East Germany, Colonel Lajoie and his team played cat-and-mouse games with the minders tasked with tracking them down. The Soviets and East Germans would do everything they could to keep them away from militarily important locations, even going so far as to temporarily detain them.

The situation came to a tragic end in 1985. Colonel Lajoie was returning from a family outing when he learned that a Soviet guard had shot and killed one of his men, Major Arthur D. Nicholson, who had been observing a Soviet tank depot. 160 kilometers northwest of Berlin.

Colonel Lajoie rushed to the location but was locked out by Soviet and East German officers. They blamed Major Nicholson for trespassing, even though the facility was on a list of locations he could visit; the guard said he had aimed at the major’s feet, a claim Major Nicholson’s driver disputed.

A few months later, when Colonel Lajoie was again in East Germany, a Soviet truck hit his jeep while he was sitting in the back seat. His head flew forward and he broke his eye socket. Soviet officials said it was an accident, but he suspected something else.

Ultimately, officials apologized for Major Nicholson’s death, but insisted it had been an accident. The colonel, who considered Major Nicholson both a friend and a colleague, carried the death with him for the rest of his life – not out of guilt, but as a reminder of the terrible nature of the Cold War.

“It was the entire Soviet system, now thankfully gone, that had Nick’s blood on his hands,” he wrote in an unpublished 2012 account of the incident provided by his daughter. The U.S. military considered Major Nicholson the last American fatality of the Cold War.

Colonel Lajoie left the mission in 1986 to become an Army Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In 1988, he was assigned to build and direct the On-Site Inspection Agency, a military unit charged with verifying the Soviet Union’s compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned missiles with launch capabilities between 310 and 620 miles.

By then, as a brigadier general, he was once again traveling the Soviet bloc in search of weapons. But this time his opponents welcomed him and literally opened the doors to places where he once faced death threats.

At one point, during an inspection at a missile range called Kapustin Yar, near Volgograd, southwestern Russia, a sudden rainstorm forced him and his Soviet counterpart to take shelter in the spent shell of an SS-20, the same weapon he ever had. obsessively monitored, and now destroyed under the treaty.

“Ten years ago, if I came within a hundred miles, I would have been shot,” he told USA Today in 1988.

He retired from the army in 1994 as a major general. Immediately thereafter, he took over one of the last tasks of the Cold War: helping the former Soviet states secure and destroy their vast and then unstable nuclear arsenals.

Under the auspices of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act, he led hundreds of technicians and officers to Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and other countries to help dismantle weapons, secure their warheads and, in many cases, convert the nuclear cores into civilian reactor fuel.

Roland Lajoie was born on August 11, 1936 in Nashua, NH, near the state’s southern border. His parents, Ernest and Alice (Bechard) Lajoie, were French Canadian immigrants, and Roland grew up speaking French at home. His father worked in a textile factory and his family was so poor that, General Lajoie later joked, his parents could not afford a middle name for him.

He was the youngest of eight children, and after he graduated from high school, his siblings pooled their money to send him to the University of New Hampshire. He graduated in 1958 with a degree in government and immediately entered the Army as a second lieutenant.

He served two tours in Vietnam as an intelligence officer and earned a master’s degree in Russian history from the University of Colorado in 1971.

He married JoAnn Sinbaldi in 1961. Along with their daughter Renee, his wife survives him, as does another daughter, Michelle Detwiler; a son, Christopher; a sister, Madeleine Lajoie; and four grandchildren.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton appointed General Lajoie to head a joint commission with the Russians to search for American soldiers missing on Russian soil, especially those who had fought in World War II. In 2000, they found the remains of seven American pilots whose bomber crashed over the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East in 1944.

General Lajoie will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. One of his last requests was to be buried close to the grave of his old friend, Major Nicholson.