Cover

title | : | US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy : Truman, Secret Warfare and the CIA, 1945-53 Studies in Intelligence Series
author | : | Corke, Sarah-Jane.
publisher | : | Taylor & Francis Routledge
isbn10 | asin | : | 0415420776
print isbn13 | : | 9780415420778
ebook isbn13 | : | 9780203016305
language | : | English
subject |  | Truman, Harry S.,--1884-1972, Cold War, National security--United States--History--20th century, Espionage, American--History--20th century, Intelligence service--United States--History--20th century, United States--Foreign relations--1945-1953.
publication date | : | 2008
lcc | : | JK468.I6C656 2008eb
ddc | : | 327.1273009/044
subject | : | Truman, Harry S.,--1884-1972, Cold War, National security--United States--History--20th century, Espionage, American--History--20th century, Intelligence service--United States--History--20th century, United States--Foreign relations--1945-1953.

Page i

US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy

Based on recently declassified documents, this book provides the first examination of the Truman Administration’s decision to employ covert operations in the Cold War. Although covert operations were an integral part of America’s arsenal during the late 1940s and early 1950s, the majority of these operations were ill conceived, unrealistic and ultimately doomed to failure. In this volume, the author looks at three central questions: Why were these types of operations adopted? Why were they conducted in such a haphazard manner? And, why, once it became clear that they were not working, did the administration fail to abandon them?

In responding to these questions the author suggests that the operational debacle which occurred was directly linked to the Truman Administration’s inability to reconcile policy, strategy and operations successfully, and to agree on a consistent course of action for waging the Cold War. This ensured that they wasted time, effort, money and manpower on covert operations designed to challenge Soviet hegemony, which had little or no real chance of success. The book will be of great interest to students of US Foreign Policy, Cold War History, Intelligence and International History in general.

Sarah-Jane Corke is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.

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Studies in intelligence series

General editors: Richard J. Aldrich and Christopher Andrew

ISSN: 1368–9916

British Military Intelligence in the Palestine Campaign 1914–1918

Yigal Sheffy

British Military Intelligence in the Crimean War, 1854–1856

Stephen M. Harris

Signals Intelligence in World War II

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Knowing Your Friends

Intelligence inside alliances and coalitions from 1914 to the Cold War

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Eternal Vigilance

50 years of the CIA

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Nothing Sacred

Nazi espionage against the Vatican, 1939–1945

David Alvarez and Revd. Robert A. Graham

Intelligence Investigations

How Ultra changed history

Ralph Bennett

Intelligence Analysis and Assessment

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TET 1968

Understanding the surprise

Ronnie E. Ford

Intelligence and Imperial Defence

British Intelligence and the defence of the Indian Empire 1904–1924

Richard J. Popplewell

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Edited by Wesley K. Wark

The Australian Security Intelligence Organization

An unofficial history

Frank Cain

Policing Politics

Security intelligence and the liberal democratic state

Peter Gill

From Information to Intrigue

Studies in Secret Service based on the Swedish experience 1939–45

C.G. McKay

Page iii

Dieppe Revisited

A documentary investigation

John Campbell

More Instructions From the Centre

Christopher and Oleg Gordievsky

Controlling Intelligence

Edited by Glenn P. Hastedt

Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence

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Security and Intelligence in a Changing World

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Sir David Hunt K.C.M.G., O.B.E. (reprint)

Intelligence and Military Operations

Edited by Michael I. Handel

Leaders and Intelligence

Edited by Michael I. Handel

War, Strategy and Intelligence

Michael I. Handel

Strategic and Operational Deception in the Second World War

Edited by Michael I. Handel

Codebreaker in the Far East

Alan Stripp

Intelligence for Peace

Edited by Hesi Carmel

Intelligence Services in the Information Age

Michael Herman

Espionage and the Roots of the Cold War

The conspiratorial heritage

David McKnight

Swedish Signal Intelligence 1900–1945

C.G. McKay and Bengt Beckman

The Norwegian Intelligence Service 1945–1970

Olav Riste

Secret Intelligence in the Twentieth Century

Edited by Heike Bungert, Jan G. Heitmann and Michael Wala

The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War

Calling the tune?

Hugh Wilford

Our Man in Yugoslavia

The story of a Secret Service operative

Sebastian Ritchie

Understanding Intelligence in the Twenty-first Century

Journeys in shadows

Len Scott and Peter Jackson

MI6 and the Machinery of Spying

Philip H.J. Davies

Twenty-first Century Intelligence

Edited by Wesley Wark

Intelligence and Strategy

Selected essays

John Robert Ferris

Page iv

The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War

The state–private network

Edited by Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford

Peacekeeping Intelligence

New players, extended boundaries

Edited by David Carment and Martin Rudner

Special Operations Executive

A new instrument of war

Edited by Mark Seaman

Mussolini’s Propaganda Abroad

Subversion in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, 1935–1940

Manuela A. Williams

The Politics and Strategy of Clandestine War

Special operations executive, 1940–1946

Neville Wylie

Britain’s Secret War Against Japan, 1937–1945

Douglas Ford

US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy

Truman, secret warfare and the CIA, 1945–53

Sarah-Jane Corke

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US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy

Truman, secret warfare and the CIA, 1945–53

Sarah-Jane Corke

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Page vi

First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

© 2008 Sarah-Jane Corke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Corke, Sarah-Jane.
US covert operations and Cold War strategy: Truman, secret warfare, and
the CIA, 1945–1953/by Sarah-Jane Corke.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Espionage, American–History–20th century. 2. Intelligence
service–United States–History–20th century. 3. National security–United
States–History–20th century. 4. Cold War. 5. Truman, Harry S.,
1884–1972. 6. United States–Foreign relations–1945–1953. I. Title.
JK468.I6C656 2007
327.1273009’044–dc22
2007003132

ISBN 0-203-01630-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-42077-6 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-01630-0 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-42077-8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-01630-5 (ebk)

Page vii

Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

Introduction

1

1

Dancing on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel

10

2

A strategic monstrosity

28

3

The inauguration of political warfare

45

4

An elucidation of imponderables that defy close analysis

64

5

A clinical experiment

82

6

A few martyrs

101

7

Ye strategic concept for ye cold warre

119

8

The War of the Potomac

138

Conclusion

156

Notes

163

Bibliography

221

Index

233

Page viii

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is never a lone project, no matter how alone you are when completing it. It is always a conversation with other authors. More often than not it is a one-way dialogue, but it is a dialogue nonetheless. I have had some wonderful “conversations” over the years with a number of thoughtful and provoking scholars. Although they may not recognize their impact on my work, I want to thank Bruce Cumings, John Lewis Gaddis, Keith Jenkins, Frank Ninkovich, Peter Novick, and Mark Poster for their thoughtful histories and commentaries. Their published work was always intellectually stimulating, aggressive and prodding. Sometimes their voices were hard to understand, angry, and unrelenting, yet, in the end, I believe they helped make me a better historian.

This book is my contribution to the ongoing discussion. It could never have been completed, however, without the help I received from a number archivists along the way. I am deeply indebted to David Haight from the Eisenhower Library, who was relentless in his pursuit of documents, which I absolutely had to take a look at, if not for this project then the next. His energy and wealth of knowledge made my job a lot easier. I would also like to thank Dan Link from the Mudd Library, Larry MacDonald, Ken Schlesinger and John Taylor from the National Archives in Washington. Finally, I wanted to gratefully acknowledge the support I received from the staff at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. Liz, Randy, Ray, Sam, and especially Dennis Bilger, who will be sorely missed, made me feel as though I was not only a valued researcher but a friend as well.

I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received from the Social Science Research Council of Canada, the Truman Institute, the Government of Canada’s Department of National Defense, the University of New Brunswick, and Dalhousie University for their generous funding over the last decade. In particular, I want to single out the Strategic Defense Forum and the Military and Strategic Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick. This book could never have been undertaken at a Canadian University without their monetary contributions.

Since beginning this project I have published three articles that were derived from the information contained in this manuscript. I would like to thank the Journal of Conflict Studies for their permission to include “The Inauguration of Political Warfare,” which includes much of the information contained in Chapter 3.

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I would also like to thank Intelligence and National Security for allowing me to publish some of the historiographical discussion I offered in “History, Historians and the Naming of Cold War Strategy: A Postmodern Reflection on Strategic Thinking During the Truman Administration.” Finally, I would like to thank the Journal of Strategic Studies for permission to include some of the information which I included in my article “Bridging the Gap: Containment, Covert Action and the Search for the Missing Link in American Cold War Policy.”

Over the years a number of friends and colleagues have read and commented on various conference papers taken from this project and chapter drafts. I would like to thank John Bingham, Christopher Bell, Hart Caplan, Bruce Cumings, Tom Deligiannis, Mike Dravis, Carol Fink, Raymond Garthoff, Walter Hixson, Sheila Kerr, Melvyn Leffler, Frederick Logevall, Scott Lucas, Lianne McTavish, James Marchio, Tim Naftali, Ken Osgood, Christian Ostermann, Hayden Peake, Bruce Pickering, Shirley Tillotson, Steve Turner, Richard Wiggers, Wesley Wark, and Randall Woods for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Saimir Lloja and his niece Llilana Lloja for their help in bringing this project to fruition. Saimir read and commented on Chapter 5 and sent me a number of articles on American covert operations in Albania. His niece Lili translated them for me. Saimir also reminded me that the men I am writing about are not just words on a page, but real people. They had mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, wives and friends. Their dreams were genuine and they deserve to be taken seriously.

In addition to those who read various chapter drafts, a number of people in various capacities made their way through the whole dissertation and a large part of the manuscript. First, I would like to thank my dissertation advisors David Charters and Andrew Johnston, my external examiner Anna Nelson and my dissertation committee Mark Milner and Peter Kent for their support and friendship over the years. I have a number of fond memories of my time at the University of New Brunswick. Since completing the dissertation, however, a number of friends and colleagues contributed to the manuscript’s development into a book. I would like to thank Frank Ninkovich, Gregory Mitrovich, Chester Pach, Robert McMahon, David Sutherland, Tom Zeiler, and the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions and comments. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge two friends who proofread the whole manuscript, with nary a complaint. Lynn Mills and John Logan Burrow were both instrumental in bringing this book to completion. I would also like to thank my editors Richard Aldrich, Andrew Humphrys and Katie Gordon. Richard Aldrich, in particular, went above and beyond the call of duty. His continued support was instrumental in bringing this project to fruition.

I also want to acknowledge the love and support I received from my family over the years. My sister Jennifer and my birth mother Mary Carol Tatar were there for me in so many different ways. I would also like to thank my husband David MaGee who has been my rock, my constant companion, my lover, my best friend, and my greatest supporter; because of your love Dave, I know I am truly blessed. This book, however, is dedicated to my mother and father, Reginald and Annabelle Corke, who were always “the wind beneath my wings.”

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Page 1

Introduction

Covert operations and national strategy

On 22 December 1963 one of the first public critiques of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), signed by Harry S. Truman, appeared in The Washington Post. Although there has since been some controversy over who really wrote the article, its publication under Truman’s by-line and copyright does indicate that the former president had become disenchanted with American covert operations overseas.¹ In the article, the aging president suggested that the time had come to take another look at the Central Intelligence Agency’s mandate because it had “become an operational and at times a policymaking arm of the government.” He acknowledged that this had “led to trouble and may have compounded [American] difficulties in several explosive ways.” He went on to add, “with all the nonsense put out by communist propaganda about ‘Yankee imperialism,’ ‘exploitive capitalism,’ [and] ‘war mongering monopolists,’ … the last thing [the US] needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.”²

Apparently Truman was not the only retired government official to feel this way. Less than a week after the editorial appeared, the former President received a congratulatory letter from Sydney Souers who, in 1946, had served as Truman’s first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Souers wrote that he was glad that his commander and chief had “publicly criticized” Allen Dulles – DCI under Eisenhower, and Director of Plans (D/P) within the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) during Truman’s presidency – for causing “the C.I.A. to wander far from the original goal.” Truman replied to his old friend, that he was happy the article “rang a bell” with him.³

Truman’s editorial also touched off a firestorm within the CIA; so much so that Allen Dulles crafted a letter to Truman reminding him that it was under his presidency that the CIA had developed its covert action capability. Although it remains unclear whether this letter was ever sent, Dulles followed it up with a visit to the former president’s home on 17 April 1964. His trip to Independence, Missouri occurred two and a half years after President John F. Kennedy had asked him for his resignation, for his role in the Bay of Pigs debacle.⁴ Throughout their visit Truman and Dulles reminisced about post-1945 operations in the

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Philippines, Europe and the Far East. During their conversation Dulles emphasized the role that Truman had played in setting these campaigns in motion. The former DCI also showed the Washington Post article to Truman and suggested that perhaps the article had misrepresented the president’s position. According to Dulles, Truman agreed at this point that the article was inaccurate.⁵ Four days later, in a memorandum to the General Counsel of the CIA, Dulles summarized his interpretation of the ex-president’s reaction. He wrote, “at no time did Mr. Truman appear to express other than complete agreement with the viewpoint I expressed, and several times he said he would see what he would do about [the story].”⁶ Yet Truman never offered a public clarification of his position.

The president was caught in a very difficult situation. For over four years, during his second term in office, his administration tried systematically to weaken Soviet power and influence throughout the world. However, the majority of these operations were unsuccessful. In fact, Soviet control over its satellites was stronger in 1953, when Truman left office, than it was when he was re-elected in 1948, the year the first campaigns were officially sanctioned by the government. Given his administration’s lack-luster performance, in this area, it is no surprise that he hesitated to call attention to these activities.

The most infamous covert operation that took place during Truman’s presidency was code-named “Operation Valuable.” Between 1949 and 1952 the United States and Britain attempted to destabilize the Albanian government controlled by Enver Hoxha.⁷ Unfortunately, of the hundreds of men who took part, only a very few survived to tell their story. When journalist Nicholas Bethal finally brought the debacle to light, in The Great Betrayal, it became clear that the Albanian operation had been a tragedy of enormous proportions.⁸ British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted as much a few years ago when he publicly conceded that the debacle was one of the greatest failures in the history of British intelligence.⁹

Although, to this day, the campaign remains the only known attempt by the CIA to overthrow a Soviet satellite by using a paramilitary force, similar covert operations designed to compromise Soviet-backed governments also took place throughout Eastern Europe and Asia during Truman’s second term in office. Unfortunately, the information available on these initiatives remains sketchy at best.¹⁰ The campaigns most frequently discussed in the literature are those that took place in Poland, the Ukraine and the three Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. During these years, however, OPC was also active in the Philippines, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Korea, Tibet and China.¹¹ Yet, none of these operations were successful and countless men and women, loyal to the western cause, lost their lives.¹² As a State Department official lamented, “[w]hat did we offer these people? We did not have the means for really supporting a revolt, which may break out. I think we’re responsible for the loss of some good, patriotic people from those countries because we gave them money and instructions.”¹³

Given the numerous problems that plagued early American covert operations we are left with a number of questions. Why were these operations undertaken

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in the first place? Why, once the decision had been made to execute them, were they conducted in an irresponsible manner? And finally, why did the Truman Administration continue to fund the operations once it became clear that they were not succeeding? Unfortunately, providing a comprehensive answer to these questions has been hampered by the CIA’s refusal to acknowledge that these campaigns even took place. Nevertheless, over the years a number of operations personnel, journalists and scholars have attempted to compile a list of reasons to explain the CIA’s dismal record. The majority of these writers have seized upon the fact that Harold “Kim” Philby, the British Secret Intelligence Service’s (SIS) liaison in Washington, was a Soviet spy.

Nicknamed “Kim,” after the central character in Rudyard Kipling’s famous novel of the same name, Philby, like his namesake, became a spy in the 1930s while he attended Trinity College at Cambridge University. His service to Moscow escalated after he joined the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). He rose quickly through the ranks of MI6 and in December of 1949 he was appointed the SIS liaison officer on the Anglo-American team charged with overseeing covert operations. Philby met with the American team in charge of developing and executing the Albanian operation a number of times. In this position he had direct access to a number of operational details, including, some scholars believe, the exact timing of some of the paramilitary landings.¹⁴ He eventually came under suspicion, and was removed from Operation Valuable in 1951, after two other members of the so-called Cambridge Comintern – Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean – defected to the Soviet Union. However, for reasons that still remain unclear, he was publicly cleared of all charges in 1955.¹⁵ Eight years later he defected to Russia, taking all of his secrets with him. Although Philby fails to take credit for unraveling this operation in his memoirs, his Soviet handler, Yuri Modin has suggested that Kim’s intelligence was indeed passed on to the Albanian government in Tirana.¹⁶

Other scholars have argued that even without Philby’s warning there is ample evidence to suggest that the Soviets were aware that the Americans were training Albanian refugees in Greece. Indeed, by 1950 American plans were being broadcast across a number of East European, Albanian and Greek radio stations.¹⁷ Thus, they have concluded that the operations were blown before they got underway because of the lax security surrounding their implementation. For example, The US News and World Report first alerted the public to Operation Valuable in 1948 and The New York Times discussed the operation in 1949.¹⁸ Although historians remain divided, on the extent to which these factors played a role in undermining early American covert operations, I believe the question is not only irrelevant but actually obscures the larger issues at stake.¹⁹ By focusing our attention on spies and counter-intelligence we have overlooked the magnitude of the strategic miscalculation made by the Truman Administration during the first years of the Cold War.

The same argument can be leveled against those authors who have chronicled the numerous operational and tactical problems that plagued the campaigns. Over the years a number of academics and practitioners have suggested that

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early covert operations failed because they were “hastily thrown together,” and “ill thought out.”²⁰ According to Harry Rositzke, who played a critical role in the development of these activities, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was forced to execute these campaigns before they had the necessary resources in place. He writes, that, by 1949 the “mood in the White House and Pentagon was uptight and urgent.” As a result, his unit felt it had to “do something, whatever the cost.”²¹ When OPC first attempted to liberate Albania, for example, OPC had only been up and running for a little over a year. At the time it had only three hundred employees and a budget of $4.7 million dollars. Yet it existed “almost on a war footing” constantly overwhelmed by those who wanted it to “do absolutely everything.”²²

James McCargar agrees with Rositzke. McCargar ran the American operation in Albania until the spring of 1950. He argues that the central tenet governing operational planning was “the doctrine of immediate results, immediately arrived at.”²³ It should not be surprising, he suggests, that given the haste with which the missions were planned, they were “marred with mishaps on the ground even before [they] took off.”²⁴ Some of the more egregious errors highlighted include: housing commandos in concentration camps, failing to give adequate training to those who were about to be parachuted into Eastern Europe, dropping supplies on the wrong town, and in one case, dropping commandos in the wrong country!²⁵

Yet, while all of these factors make for an interesting, if not a slightly humorous tale, they do not tell the whole story. In particular they fail to account for the role played by the executive branch, the National Security Council, the Department of State and the Department of Defense in the development and execution of these campaigns. By neglecting these voices, scholars studying these operations have failed to address the two most important components of a successful covert operation: policy and strategy.²⁶ This gap in our understanding has been further reinforced by the “traditional” histories of the Cold War, which have downplayed the persistence of American interventionism behind the Iron Curtain.²⁷

This book attempts to address the gap in the historiography. In the process it seeks to offer a more nuanced appreciation of American strategic thinking during the Truman administration. In the following pages I argue that early American covert operations were compromised primarily by the persistent inability of the administration as a whole to reconcile policy and operations successfully and to agree on a consistent course of action for waging the Cold War. Despite the numerous assertions to the contrary in the existing literature, I maintain the United States simply did not have a coherent foreign policy during these years. Nor did it develop and maintain an integrated strategy on which covert operations could be based. As a result, time and effort, money and manpower, were wasted on activities that had little real chance of success. Five factors contributed to the administration’s failure to develop a sound strategy. First and foremost, American national security policy was articulated in broad and ambiguous terms. This allowed policymakers to interpret its language differently. Second, with no

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government body in place to translate policy into strategy, each department and agency could, and did, pursue its own agenda with little or no regard for a coordinated effort. As a result, a myriad of competing and conflicting “strategic visions” emerged within the administration.²⁸ Thus, between 1948 and 1952 a number of strategies were pursued inconsistently, at times in tandem and at times independently of each other. As a result, during the first years of the Cold War, American strategy was fragmented, inconsistent and chaotic.

It is important to note, however, that the range of interpretation was not limitless. American Cold War policy toward the Soviet Union, as defined by the National Security Council (NSC) included certain implicit boundaries that were adhered to. From 1948 until 1953, for example, the NSC consistently articulated two objectives, which were the retraction of Soviet power and influence, and a radical modification of Soviet behavior in the international environment.²⁹ Yet, while these objectives gave US policy a degree of coherence, they did not correspond with the public myth of “containment” that was growing both in and outside of the government. Nor did they illuminate either the ultimate goal of American foreign policy or the means by which these goals could be achieved. Until 1952, NSC policy papers also failed to rank these goals against other objectives, such as avoiding war or holding the western alliance together. Thus the limits placed on the types of operations undertaken, the resources employed and the funds expended, in order to achieve these objectives, remained undefined.³⁰

This was important, because without a consensus on these key questions the intersection of these two factors, broad policy statements and the lack of a strategy for fighting the Cold War, allowed those interested in pursuing a more aggressive and expansionist foreign policy to select from the ambiguities embedded within the national policy papers what they needed to further what can only be characterized as deeply flawed operations behind the Iron Curtain. Despite the serious nature of these problems, however, they were not the only countervailing forces at work during this period. In accounting for the operational failure it must be recognized that the Cold War bureaucracy also hampered the execution of covert operations.

Although the Truman Administration spent a great amount of time and energy trying to come up with a workable policy-process for waging the Cold War they failed to achieve this objective.³¹ Key decision-makers believed that all of their policy problems could be resolved if they could just develop a better process. This was the rationale behind passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and creation of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) in 1951.³² Yet, despite these attempts to create institutional mechanisms to simplify and coordinate American national security policy, the reverse actually occurred. The bureaucratic machinery put in place between 1947 and 1952 had the unintended consequence of further removing the planning, development and implementation of covert operations from broader questions of national policy. This ensured that American psychological warriors had an unprecedented degree of autonomy.

These three factors alone, however, would not have been sufficient to produce the operational debacle that occurred during these years. Without the

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operational will to exploit the political and policy loopholes that existed, the situation would never have evolved as it did. In the immediate postwar years psychological warriors developed their own internally driven rationale for the expansion of these operations. Driven in part by bureaucratic imperatives and a maverick operational culture, William Donovan’s legacy was the fourth factor at work during this period. According to in-house CIA historian Thomas Troy, Donovan was “a man of unlimited imagination and gall, afraid of nobody and nothing.”³³ Over the course of World War II his personal philosophy evolved into an operational ethos that governed the organization and expansion of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). When the service was disbanded by presidential order in 1945, the Donovan Tradition survived, became institutionalized, and was passed down to the Central Intelligence Agency through the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). It emerged unscathed and was solidified within the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination.

The situation became increasingly complicated in 1952 when this operational culture became politicized as those interested in pursuing more aggressive operations turned to Republican leaders for the political and strategic support they were not getting from the President or the State Department. In the run up to the election of 1952, Dwight Eisenhower and his foreign policy spokesperson John Foster Dulles capitalized on the psychological warriors’ dissatisfaction with existing policy statements and the administration’s inability to decide on a strategy for waging the Cold War. Claiming “liberation” to be a valid strategic alternative, to the “passive” and “reactive” policy of “containment,” Eisenhower and Dulles were thus able to seize the initiative from the embattled Democrats. This “ideology” then manifested itself into a set of operational traditions that continued to haunt the CIA well into the Reagan Presidency.³⁴

The combination of Donovan’s legacy, together with a flawed bureaucratic process, provided covert operators with an unprecedented degree of autonomy. Without the requisite political and strategic guidance forthcoming, those responsible for subversive activities were able to design and execute operations behind the Iron Curtain as they saw fit. It was not until policymakers came face to face with the implications of the dramatic escalation in covert operations called for in the aftermath of the release of NSC 68 and the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, that the administration began to recognize the error of their ways.

The Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) was set up in 1951 to devise a strategy for waging the Cold War. Its mandate was also to “provide for the more effective planning, coordination and conduct within the framework of approved national policies or psychological operations.”³⁵ It was hoped that the board would help bridge the gap which had developed between policy and operations – aspirations and capabilities – or liberation and containment. However, the heated debates which ultimately erupted in and around the PSB, over which strategy to pursue at what time, became public enough for New York Times journalist Anthony Leverio to label it “the war of the Potomac.”³⁶ The controversy was finally narrowed down to the question of whether American strategy should

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focus on bolstering the strength of the western world, or conversely, on challenging Communist and/or Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and Russia. Within a very short period of time these disparate strategic visions became politicized and the “War of the Potomac” began in earnest.

The first vision, labeled “containment,” was subsequently attributed to Harry Truman and the Democratic presidential candidate, Adlai Stephenson. The second strategic vision, named “liberation,” was said to be an integral part of Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican platform. The irony, however, was that both strategies contained the same conflicting core, as similar strategic tendencies were present in varying degrees within each political community. The inability to resolve the situation in a timely manner was the direct result of the bureaucratic rivalries and turf wars that dominated these years, and more importantly by a lack of leadership at the presidential level. The fifth and final factor that worked against the development of a coherent Cold War strategy was the ineffectiveness of President Truman and his national security staff. Given their inability to resolve the ideological, political and bureaucratic disputes that raged between 1948 and 1952, strategic convergence had to wait until after Dwight Eisenhower entered the White House.³⁷

Although, over the years, scholars have alluded to the “inadequacy of integrated strategic planning” in the American Cold War effort, until recently documentary evidence has not been available to support this thesis.³⁸ In the last decade and a half, however, the CIA has declassified part of its historical archives – a by-product of the Gates Commission on Openness.³⁹ The release of this new information allows us to begin to reassess the story of American covert operations in the Cold War.⁴⁰ Taking advantage of the resources now available, a number of historians have offered a new interpretation of these years. In the process they have begun to challenge the so-called containment consensus constructed, in large part, by George Kennan and historian John Lewis Gaddis.⁴¹

Highlighting the contradiction between the objectives of the psychological warriors and the traditional narratives of the Cold War, a new generation of scholars has emerged to challenge the conventional characterizations of US foreign policy.⁴² Indeed, “containment” is now argued to be an extremely misleading description of both the means and the objectives pursued during this period.⁴³ Instead, historians have seized upon a number of alternative labels to name American Cold War strategy. The majority of these accounts privilege “liberation” or “rollback.”⁴⁴ However, “Titoism,” “wedge strategy” and/or “a preponderance of power” have also been used.⁴⁵ Yet, in their race to create a new discourse I believe that these historians have overlooked the defining feature of these years: the Truman Administration simply did not have a coherent plan for waging the Cold War. Therefore, by characterizing American policy within such inflexible language, I maintain that these scholars have misrepresented American strategy as it unfolded during the initial years of the American-Soviet rivalry.

Missing from the ongoing debate is a narrative that allows for a multiplicity of strategic visions while at the same time highlighting the inherent contradictions

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present at the time.⁴⁶ Throughout this book, I suggest that the Truman Administration’s Cold War policy is best conceptualized as an aggregate of competing strategic visions, each of which came equipped with its own political, ideological and bureaucratic agenda that prevents reconciliation under one heading or another.⁴⁷ I believe American strategy existed within a core set of ideas that had an element of consistency, yet it changed over time, often in an unpredictable fashion that precludes synthesis or labeling. My goal, therefore, has been to construct a history that accentuates the inconsistency and discontinuity of US Cold War policy during these years. This entails highlighting the different strategic visions that existed while resisting the tendency toward an overreaching grand narrative.⁴⁸ Indeed, it is precisely this element in the existing scholarship that I believe is misleading. The degree to which I have been successful in this endeavor, I will leave for you the reader, to judge.

By this point you may be somewhat perplexed by the lack of attention given to international events in the construction of my argument as I have outlined it above. Although external forces – or the Soviet threat – is argued by many scholars to be the defining feature in the development of American Cold War policy, when it comes to understanding the inability of the Truman Administration to develop a coherent strategy, I believe and maintain throughout this book, that internal factors – ideology, partisan politics, personality and bureaucratic politics – took precedence over geopolitical considerations. In this history, I use international events merely to highlight the Truman Administration’s inability to develop an effective program for waging the Cold War. Now, of course, I am by no means suggesting that American strategy was developed in a vacuum. The American-Soviet rivalry did provide the context for shaping American Cold War policy. However, context is always defined by perception – and perception owes more to intangible factors than any reality that may or may not exist.⁴⁹ As historian Bruce Cumings maintains:

world events do not cause crises, so much as detonate raw material at home; and after the explosion, what we call ‘foreign policy transition’ is the output of that domestic conflict, the events of the rest of the world still remaining basically an abstraction.⁵⁰

Before turning to the story itself, I want to further elaborate on my objectives in this book. It is important for you to understand that my goal was never to write a history of the Cold War. Others have and will continue to do a better job of telling that [hi]story than I.⁵¹ Second, at no time in the pages that follow will I explicitly deal with the question of responsibility. Who started the Cold War or who was more responsible for the way it unfolded, are not questions I am interested in, nor are they ones I am capable of answering in any objective fashion. In order to avoid getting bogged down in these facile debates I have made the decision to tell this history of US covert operations by relying primarily, albeit not solely, on the American documentary record that is now available. While there is still a great deal that we do not know about these early covert operations

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I do believe that there are now enough documents available, on the American side, to begin to push the boundaries of the old arguments. However, to incorporate Soviet records, to play with ideas about what the Soviets were doing, or not doing and why, would require much more of a political commitment than I am willing to make without a significant increase in the available records from the Russian archives. I am by no means suggesting that when all of the documents are released we will then be able to write the history of early American covert operations. Instead, I simply wish to acknowledge the limitations of my own research. My primary goal throughout this project was never to write a complete account of these years but rather to construct an innovative and provocative argument that will stimulate debate on the methods used by scholars to historicize American national security strategy. In this context, as in all others, I hope that my work is viewed as neither definitive nor totally comprehensive.

Having made my goals explicit, all that is left for me to do, before turning to my interpretation of the events that unfolded during these years, is to acknowledge my biases, as I am aware of them. My position as a postmodern Canadian woman living in a world of uncertainty, ambiguity and war, has influenced both how I have read the documents that are available and how I have constructed the story that unfolds in the following pages.⁵² I want to acknowledge that my limited gaze, from north of the 49th parallel, helped inspire me to write a history that falls well within the “revisionist” school of Cold War historiography. My only hope is that it honors, in some small way, the best of that tradition.

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1
Dancing on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel

It is necessary to come to terms with the history of psychological warfare during World War II before discussing Cold War covert operations, in order to understand how and why these operations failed. As Arthur Darling, the CIA’s first in-house historian concluded in 1950, “the seeds of controversy over how the US intelligence community should be planned, managed and operated were planted even before the end of World War II.”¹ Indeed, the gap that developed between policy and operations – aspirations and capabilities – liberation and containment, was rooted in the Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) wartime experience. It was also during these years that American psychological warriors learned to function without adequate strategic guidance. In its place they developed their own maverick operational culture which reflected the philosophy of one man – William “Wild Bill” Donovan – the legendary Republican lawyer hired by President Franklin Roosevelt to oversee the development of the wartime intelligence service.

I believe that Donovan’s philosophy consisted of a number of interrelated principles, which eventually evolved into an operational ethos that governed the organization and development of the OSS. It served as a unifying force that allowed for the development of an operational culture that guided the actions of psychological warriors, and later covert operators, both domestically (within the bureaucracy itself) and abroad. By the time the service was disbanded, the Donovan Tradition had become an integral part of OSS’s operational culture. It was passed down to the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) through the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) and Office of Special Operations (OSO).

Characterized by one of his subordinates as “the sort of guy who thought nothing of parachuting into France, blowing up a bridge, pissing in Luftwaffe gas tanks, then dancing on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel with a German spy,” Donovan’s strengths were also his weaknesses. Nicknamed “Wild Bill,”² because of the prowess he exhibited while playing football at Columbia, Donovan’s exploits are well known.³ Less frequently discussed, however, are the philosophical roots of his actions. At its core, I believe, his way of life was rooted in a partisan predisposition, which reflected a particular strain of Republican foreign policy that emerged during the Progressive era.⁴ Donovan was a classical liberal, albeit one with strong internationalist tendencies.⁵ As a child,

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his hero was Theodore Roosevelt.⁶ As an adult, his progressive inclinations predisposed him to reject his party’s isolationist stance and instead adopt a peculiarly Republican manifestation of internationalism that was both interventionist and unilateralist.

Donovan also had a strong belief in American exceptionalism, popular among those schooled at the turn of the century, as well as a robust anti-communism that can, in part, be attributed to his religious upbringing.⁷ He believed that he had a moral obligation to help make the world a better place and assumed that he had the “manifest destiny” to do so.⁸ Bill Donovan was an idealist. Yet his moral code was informed more by normative ethics than philosophical idealism.⁹ In this sense, and in this sense only, his philosophy was more “modern” than “Victorian.” When it came to making tough decisions “there [was] no shilly-shallying about morality.”¹⁰ As a shadow warrior his world was colored grey.

During World War I he received the Medal of Honor for what was later characterized as his “reckless bravery” on the battlefield.¹¹ It was during these early years that he developed a reputation for working outside the traditional lines of command, thumbing his nose at authority, conducting unorthodox operations and employing unconventional methods. After World War I ended he remained active on the international stage, taking part in a number of clandestine operations in Russia, Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans and Asia.¹² However, the exact nature of these activities remains a mystery. According to one historian, Donovan “went to a great many places he had no business going, on errands no one asked him to perform.”¹³ As a result, scholars have been divided on what he was doing during these years, and for whom he was doing it. Some suggest that he was working for a private intelligence network, within the United States. Others believe he was working for British intelligence. Whichever the case, these extra-curricular activities were significant for two reasons. First, they gave him certain credentials that not many others at the time had. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they also set the standard for how he approached psychological operations during the war. They predisposed him to the benefits of working outside the traditional bureaucratic structure.

Donovan first met Franklin Roosevelt at Columbia Law School. Despite their political differences they remained cordial after graduation, as both set out to build their respective careers. In 1929, only months before the stock market crashed, Donovan, together with three other men, established the law firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton and Irvine. By the time the Great Depression had ended he had become a millionaire. Not satisfied with the humdrum life of a corporate lawyer, however, during the thirties he began to cultivate a number of important Republican luminaries with strong connections to the Roosevelt Administration. As Donovan worked on his political connections Hitler planned for war.

Beginning in the spring of 1940 Nazi forces moved aggressively across Europe. Within weeks, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium fell to the Blitzkrieg. In a little over a month German troops reached the English Channel.

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Although over a quarter of a million British and French soldiers were able to escape the onslaught, it was small consolation as within days Hitler began planning for an invasion of the British Isles.¹⁴ During the summer of 1940 it became increasingly unclear whether Great Britain would survive. American public opinion on the question of intervention was divided. And when continued support for the British came under fire from a number of high profile figures, including the American Ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy, Roosevelt decided to reach outside his own government to secure information. On the advice of Henry Stimson he turned to Bill Donovan. By the time the war in Europe broke out Donovan appeared to be exactly what the President needed. He was the right man, at the right time, with the right skills.

Not surprisingly, the two men immediately hit it off, in part because of the president’s own fascination with unconventional operations. It has been said that during his early political career, “Roosevelt showed a greater interest in intelligence than any president since Washington in the Revolutionary War.”¹⁵ His attraction to clandestine operations was even passed down to his children. His son Jimmy joined Donovan’s outfit in August of 1941 as a liaison officer. And as Life magazine editorialized at the time, “to get Jimmy Roosevelt into your show is as good as a seat at the White House breakfast table.”¹⁶

Aside from his interest in unorthodox operations Roosevelt and Donovan shared another similarity. The President was also notorious for his lackadaisical bureaucratic style. Roosevelt’s decision to approach Donovan, a Republican insider, was indicative of his unorthodox approach to decision-making. And the circumstances surrounding Donovan’s appointment reinforced the lack of structure within the administration.¹⁷ The combination of these two factors – Roosevelt’s fascination with intrigue and his penchant for avoiding the traditional bureaucracy – were evident early on and had repercussions that extended well into the postwar era.

On 3 July 1940 the President asked Donovan to travel to Europe on his behalf. Donovan’s job was to determine whether England could survive Hitler’s air assault. He was also asked to investigate reports of German subversion in Europe.¹⁸ By all accounts the mission was a success. Not only was Donovan able to report that Britain could and would survive the air war, he was able to develop extensive contacts within the British intelligence services. In London Donovan was given the type of high-level access to key decision-makers that was rarely granted to outsiders and when he returned to Washington he immediately began to lobby the President for a wartime intelligence service, based largely on the British model. Although at this point Donovan had no formal status within the American government, his triumph overseas and the relationships that he developed with both the President and British Prime Minister Churchill helped pave the way for his appointment as Coordinator of Information (COI) in July of 1941, six months before the US officially entered the war against Germany, Japan and Italy.

Donovan accepted his new mission on three conditions: he would report only to the president, secret funds would be made available and all government

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departments would be instructed to give him whatever he wanted.¹⁹ Although Roosevelt agreed to these demands, over the course of the war the President’s advisors carefully limited Donovan’s access to the oval office. Moreover, he never received the cooperation he wanted from the other government agencies. He did, however, have almost unlimited access to unvouchered funds. The potent combination of his own personality, the weak bureaucratic structure that housed the COI, and his unrestricted access to funds meant that Donovan had great freedom to maneuver.

According to in-house CIA historian Thomas Troy he operated on the “oil slick principle, whereby he gave his subordinates only general instructions and told them to carve out their own areas” of responsibility.²⁰ Implicit in Donovan’s style was also an overwhelming faith in individual initiative or “derring-do.” As Michael Burke, the agent who led the American paramilitary operation in Albania, reminisced in his memoirs, the OSS “invited individual initiative. The great attraction was [the] absence of regimentation, the loose structure, the flexibility to try almost anything.”²¹ The emphasis on individual initiative also encouraged the use of methods once considered unorthodox or unconventional. Psychological warfare, as covert operations were termed at the time, fitted neatly into this category. However, it was Donovan’s widely reported exploits that secured him the reputation as a “cowboy” and his tendency to “freewheel” which ultimately came to define his way of doing business.²² The problems caused by his conduct were made worse because he encouraged similar behavior among his own subordinates, often arguing that he would rather have a “young lieutenant with the guts to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.”²³ As a result, according to one historian, “insubordination became a way of life” for Donovan’s men.²⁴

Donovan achieved even greater power because the COI’s mandate was vague. As Edward Lilly has pointed out, Donovan’s directive was “cloaked in indefiniteness.”²⁵ Even his title was ambiguous. This type of linguistic artifice was thought to be necessary because, prior to World War II, many Americans still viewed propaganda as “a horrid and sinister word [and] a really un-American activity.”²⁶ As a result, it was necessary that these types of activities be “cloaked in the subterfuge of agency titles.” Apparently, the term “psychological warfare” was also “intentionally dreamed up to conceal” the types of activities employed under its banner. Since both the COI’s directive and the term psychological warfare remained undefined, the types of activities that fell under its responsibilities also remained unclear. For example, while the COI was originally set up to coordinate information, the presidential order governing the organization also charged the agency with conducting “such supplementary activities as may facilitate the securing of information important for national security not now available to the government.”²⁷ Such ambiguous language gave Donovan the flexibility he needed to expand his mandate beyond the collection of information to the execution of psychological and guerrilla warfare activities behind enemy lines, all without explicit official approval or authorization.²⁸

These problems were compounded because Donovan rarely sought or

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received policy guidance. As I suggested earlier, implicit in the Donovan Tradition was a strong distrust of bureaucracy. During World War II, the COI under Donovan’s direction was able to maintain a degree of independence from the government’s bureaucracy, its customs and its values.²⁹ According to Edward Lilly, it functioned without central leadership, control or integration with other methods of obtaining national objectives.”³⁰ As the head of COI’s propaganda division, Robert Sherwood, argued in 1942:

if we could not get anybody to tell us what US government policy was, in particular instances, we would have to assume responsibility ourselves, for saying what it was. We did so. After a few weeks of this improvisation, the State Department woke up with a start to the realization that one of Donovan’s impertinent little offices was making policy for it.³¹

The central issue, as Adolf Berle had pointed out to Under Secretary of State Sumner Wells, a year earlier, was that the line between propaganda and policy was often blurred because it was very easy to “make foreign policy … with propaganda.”³² To make matters worse, according to the Assistant Secretary of State, Breckinridge Long, the COI’s propaganda division often “followed a policy widely divergent from the official policy,” which over the course of the war caused a number of problems abroad.³³ Within a very short period of time, the COI became an autonomous agency that answered to no one but the aging President. Not surprisingly, as the COI’s power expanded, a number of interagency jurisdictional conflicts resulted.³⁴ This in turn created a great deal of animosity within the State and War Departments which ensured that the COI would be further distanced from the policy-process.³⁵

Given Donovan’s management style, the ambiguous charter that governed his operations and the tendency of his staff to avoid the traditional corridors of power, it is not surprising that during its brief history the COI was “harassed and badgered by the Army, Navy and State Department, who temporarily forgot their internecine animosities and joined together in an attempt to strangle this unwanted newcomer at birth.”³⁶ In due course they were successful and on 13 June 1942 COI was divided into two separate organizations. The Office of War Information (OWI) was banished to the State Department and subsequently tasked with conducting information activities. A second organization, renamed the Office of Strategic Services, was placed under the auspices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). It was charged with conducting intelligence activities and “related activities” – a well-known euphemism for psychological operations.

Ten days later, its functions were enshrined in a JCS mandate that authorized the OSS to undertake “psychological warfare” operations. “Psychological warfare” was defined as “propaganda, economic warfare, sabotage, guerrilla warfare, counter-espionage, contact with underground groups in enemy-controlled territory and contact with foreign nationality groups in the United States.” Everything from radio broadcasting, printing newspapers and the dropping of airborne leaflets over occupied areas to sabotage and paramilitary opera-

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tions was sanctioned by the new mandate. Thus, although the JCS had intended to limit Donovan’s freedom of action, the types of activities included under the rubric of psychological warfare were so broad that Donovan was able to continue to conduct operations as he saw fit. Indeed, according to Harry Rositzke, “no intelligence agency in modern history was more free-wheeling and heterodox than Donovan’s OSS.”³⁷

Psychological warfare divisions were eventually established in all major theatres of operations.³⁸ However, throughout the war they were hampered by the lack of long-range objectives and policy guidance. Although it was hoped that State and the JCS would provide the necessary direction, hitherto absent, for both new organizations the only control exercised was the occasional veto. Both the State Department and the JCS argued that they could veto any operation at anytime, without justification, if they believed the operation undermined American policy.³⁹ However, since neither department was kept adequately informed of ongoing operations, a number of questionable procedures were put in place.

The situation never improved and psychological warfare planning was characterized by the military as both “difficult” and “inadequate.”⁴⁰ Significantly, it was not until the final months of the war that a weekly, national propaganda directive was developed and circulated.⁴¹ Not surprisingly, over the course of World War II a number of American operations were set in place that either contradicted or undermined allied policy. However, it was not until the Nazi threat diminished and the Red Army began to flex its muscles in Eastern Europe that the disjunction between policy and operations began to jeopardize Roosevelt’s vision of postwar accommodation with the Soviets.⁴²

In late 1944 the OSS became involved in a number of clandestine operations in Central and South-Eastern Europe.⁴³ In one instance, in 1944, Donovan sent one of his agents, Frank Wisner, to Bucharest to collect intelligence on America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union.⁴⁴ And yet only a year earlier the President had “virtually” banned the OSS from undertaking field operations designed to gather intelligence on the Russians. Roosevelt’s decree had the support of the State Department, which worried that in the Balkan countries, the OSS might find itself caught in the middle of an Anglo-Soviet rift.⁴⁵ Wisner’s orders clearly contradicted the wishes of both the President and the Department of State, however Donovan was convinced that the US government would eventually need reliable information on the Soviets and he saw it as his duty to accomplish this goal, with or without the requisite approval.⁴⁶ By the winter of 1944 Donovan was already fighting the Cold War.⁴⁷

Although it is not clear whether this was the first time Frank Wisner counter-manded a State Department order it would certainly not be the last. Born in 1920 Wisner’s upbringing, like that of Donovan’s, was steeped in Victorian culture and what his parents termed “moral uplift.”⁴⁸ It quickly became apparent that young Frank would seize his destiny and help to make the world a better place. During World War II he joined the OSS and, after spending much of the war in North Africa, he was eventually sent to Romania. In keeping with Donovan’s management style his station there was subsequently characterized as an

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“independent and self-sustaining unit – able to get on with only a minimum of housekeeping from above.”⁴⁹ Although Wisner remained in Eastern Europe for only six months, from August of 1944 to March of 1945, the time he spent there left an indelible mark. During this period Soviet forces occupied Bucharest and in the process arrested or deported many of Wisner’s friends and colleagues. According to those who knew him best he never got over the time he spent there. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr., one of the leading “orthodox” historians of his day (and an OSS veteran) pointed out, after the war Wisner became obsessed with communism. Schlesinger concluded that while he himself had no expectation of good relations with the Soviet Union after the war, “Frank was a little excessive, even for me.”⁵⁰

Not surprisingly, over the course of the war, a number of individuals within the foreign policy establishment came to the conclusion that Donovan had to be “controlled” and the OSS “managed” in some way.⁵¹ However, at the time, neither the State Department nor the military were able to exert much control over the organization or its legendary leader. With the death of Roosevelt in April of 1945 there were very few people left in Washington to whom Donovan could turn to for support and, although he lobbied extensively for continuation of the OSS in the postwar world, his efforts were for naught and in August of 1945 a White House committee ordered it disbanded. The traditional explanation has always been that the new president, Harry S. Truman, simply did not think that a foreign intelligence capability would be necessary in the postwar world.⁵² However, recently declassified documents paint a different picture. They indicate that Truman’s goal was not so much the abolition of the service as it was the removal of William Donovan and his way of “doing business.”⁵³ For example, the same day that the President signed the Executive Order abolishing the OSS, he sent a letter to Secretary of State, James Byrnes, instructing him to begin deliberations on a new intelligence service.⁵⁴ The Secretaries of War and Navy were also considering a JCS study on the same topic. It was subsequently sent to the Department of State for comment. Apparently State was also flirting with the idea of a foreign intelligence capability.

Although none of these proposals dealt explicitly with psychological warfare – and were instead a call for the coordination of intelligence information – there were a number of people within the administration who also believed that it was in the American national interest to maintain an unconventional warfare capability. This high-level support resulted in the creation of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) in late 1945.⁵⁵ Coming to terms with the SSU is critical to understanding how psychological warfare operations developed during the Cold War. According to Lilly, it provided the “strand on which postwar covert operations were attached.”⁵⁶ It also kept the Donovan Tradition alive, paving the way for the emergence of an autonomous postwar operational agency.

Truman’s executive order to abolish the OSS gave Donovan just under two weeks to shut down operations. The job of overseeing the process fell to the Bureau of the Budget, which in 1945 served as a “presidential ‘secretariat’ for monitoring the activities of the entire executive establishment.”⁵⁷ The director of

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the Budget Bureau was Harold Smith. Smith and Donovan had sparred repeatedly over the cost of psychological warfare operations during the course of the war.⁵⁸ Yet, despite their animosity, in a completely arbitrary move, with no presidential approval or knowledge, a Budget Bureau staffer suggested to Donald Stone, the Bureau’s Assistant Director for Administrative Management, that the War Department might “ease the transition” by keeping certain components of OSS functioning “for the time being.”⁵⁹

On 24 September 1945, Stone presented this idea to John J. McCloy, the assistant Secretary of War, a Republican and a close friend of Donovan’s. Two days later, McCloy, acting on his own initiative and outside the normal bureaucratic lines, ordered OSS Deputy Director for Intelligence, Brigadier General John Magruder, to create two new offices – Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-Intelligence (X-2) – within a newly designated Strategic Services Unit.⁶⁰ At the time McCloy made it clear that his staff was too small to exercise detailed supervision and that the SSU was to remain under Magruder’s personal control. He did, however, add that any policy questions should be directed to his office.⁶¹ McCloy also ordered Magruder to preserve “those functions and facilities” he deemed valuable for the postwar world, while at the same time liquidating all unnecessary operations.⁶²

Given his close connection with Donovan, you might find it somewhat surprising that Magruder was appointed the first director of SSU. However, apparently his wife’s contacts were more important than her husband’s. According to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Magruder’s wife and her family were very active in the “proper” social circles. As a result “Mac” had important support within the State Department.⁶³

Born in 1887, Magruder attended the Virginia Military Institute where his peers remembered him as 30 percent brains, 69 percent appetite and 1 percent sentiment.⁶⁴ He had joined the army in 1910 and spent two years in the Philippines and one year, 1918, in France. After World War I ended he moved on to China where he served as a military attaché to the General Staff. His job was to report on the state of communist–nationalist relations during the initial years of the civil war. By his own admission, he was soon considered an expert on China.⁶⁵ His experiences there had a profound effect on how he viewed the postwar world as he developed an almost palatable hatred of the communists.⁶⁶

In 1938 he was appointed Chief of the Intelligence Division within the War Department. Five years later he became the Deputy Director of Intelligence within OSS where he oversaw the conduct of espionage and counter-espionage operations, maintained contact with underground organizations throughout Europe, and collected and disseminated information that could be used in psychological warfare operations against the Axis powers. During this period his department “functioned in a vacuum” with no policy direction from above. This meant that he could develop operations as he saw fit as there was never any formal oversight of his office’s activities. As a result his office functioned as a “law unto itself.”⁶⁷ Like Donovan, Magruder also gave his staff a certain degree

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of independence. One needs to look no further than the wartime career of Allan Dulles, the man that the CIA’s in-house historian, Michael Warner, has characterized as “the best” SI station chief, for evidence of this.

Although Dulles is most famous for his postwar career, which culminated in his appointment to DCI under Eisenhower, he also played an important role in a number of intelligence operations during World War II and the immediate postwar period. However, even today Dulles remains somewhat of an enigma, despite the voluminous amount of information available on him.⁶⁸ On the one hand he shared many characteristics with Donovan – both men were competitive, shared a mutual disdain for bureaucracies and had reputations for insubordination. They both came from families with strong religious traditions – Dulles’ father was a Presbyterian Minister, Donovan’s family was Irish Catholic. Although both men also eventually rejected their religious upbringing, according to Wayne Jackson, author of the in-house history of the CIA during Dulles’ tenure, the Dulles’ were a family noted for their “evangelical zeal.” Allen, like his brother John Foster Dulles, viewed the Cold War as a “missionary’s fight for truth and virtue against the powers of darkness.”⁶⁹

Yet, despite these similarities there were some differences. While both men belonged to the new group of Republican internationalists, Donovan’s hero was Teddy Roosevelt while Dulles lionized Woodrow Wilson.⁷⁰ Dulles’ uncle, Robert Lansing, had served as Wilson’s Secretary of State and Allen, along with his brother Foster, had attended the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1918 as members of the American Commission to Negotiate the Peace. Despite their minor political differences, both men were part of a new generation of Republican internationalists. Both believed strongly in the universal application of American ideals and both intended to play a role in the expansion of these ideas. Moreover, neither Donovan nor Dulles put much faith in bureaucracies.

They met for the first time at a Republican convention in 1940 and their professional association continued through the Council of Foreign Relations. They also belonged to the same country club, where they played the occasional game of tennis. In February of 1942 Dulles was approached by one of Donovan’s confidants, David Bruce, and asked to undertake a top secret job in New York City that included securing intelligence from the city’s émigré community and organizing anti-Nazi networks.⁷¹ Eight months later Dulles moved to Switzerland where, until 1945, he headed the OSS station in Bern. During these three years his office was shut off from the rest of the world and he learned to work with only minimal guidance from his superiors. Although he initially cleared his operations with Donovan, as the war went on he made more and more decisions on his own. As he put it, “if a man tells too much or asks too often for instructions, he is likely to get some he doesn’t relish, and what is worse he may find headquarters trying to take over the whole conduct of the operation.”⁷² When World War II ended Dulles returned to the law career he had left behind. However, the life of a corporate lawyer was not to his liking and, in 1948, he returned to the great game. No doubt, similar to Michael Burke who went on to head America’s covert operation in Albania, Dulles probably found Washington,

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“too distant from the action [and] too confining a lifestyle.” He, like Burke, wanted to “touch the ball.”⁷³

Yet in 1945 Dulles had decided not to serve in the SSU because of its unpredictable status. Described recently by Richard Helms as a “bastard organization with an unpredictable life expectancy,”⁷⁴ the SSU was located on the second floor of the former OSS complex on East Street. Only four months after it had been set up its budget was estimated at $12,000,000, roughly equivalent to that of the COI.⁷⁵ It inherited a substantial amount of unvouchered funds, a list of foreign liaison contacts and a number of files from the OSS. Also, as I suggested earlier, the experience of the Strategic Services Unit is vital for understanding that the links between the OSS and the CIA were not as tenuous as had been previously thought. The traditional argument is that the SSU was set up either as a “liquidating body” or a “holding operation” designed to retain an intelligence collection capability, while at the same time shutting down all unnecessary activities.⁷⁶ All psychological, political and paramilitary operations were once thought to have fallen into this latter category. However, the history of what happened to these operations during the years 1945 through 1947 is somewhat more complicated than either designation would suggest. New evidence suggests the SSU played a crucial role in developing a postwar covert operational capability, but it did so in an arbitrary and ad hoc manner. It received no political guidance, nor did it function under any clear mechanism of oversight. Moreover, the men and women who staffed the SSU embodied a maverick operational culture that reflected that of the OSS. It was in this fertile, yet unsupervised, environment that the American covert operation tradition took root.

As head of SSU, Magruder simply picked up where Wild Bill had left off. He divided the unit into five branches: Secret Intelligence (SI) Counter-Intelligence (X-2), Operational Auxiliaries, Services, and Personnel and Staff Divisions. The first twelve people he selected to staff SI and X-2 offices all came from the Morale and Special Operations divisions within OSS.⁷⁷ During World War II the Special Operations Branch conducted sabotage operations, and supported underground resistance forces, while Morale Operations developed psychological warfare projects designed to subvert the enemy’s morale. The latter included subversive operations and the use of black propaganda. All of these activities would eventually become an integral part of the CIA’s arsenal. Moreover, although the Morale Division was considered “too dangerous” to maintain in the postwar world, “a cadre of secret operations people were slotted into secret intelligence positions with the assumption that they would revive (these operations) if necessary.”⁷⁸ Ostensibly, their job was to monitor foreign developments, offer additional and specialized guidance on intelligence reports, and to maintain files on operational and technical skills needed for future subversive propaganda, sabotage and guerrilla activity.⁷⁹

SI was originally charged with obtaining intelligence. Its mandate was to collect intelligence, prepare reports and disseminate information. At the end of World War II its officers were primarily interested in securing information of a

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technical or political character. This included atomic energy.⁸⁰ In order to accomplish these tasks, its offices were divided into area and country desks but three specialized sections – economic, technical and propaganda – were also set up to deal with problems of a more general scope. Although during its first years of operation SSU faced a number of problems, a number of operations were initiated in Germany, Austria and Greece. Intelligence liaison offices were also maintained in France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Apparently SSU activities in these countries were “slight,” with a total of five SSU agents in France, eleven in the Near East and one in Africa.⁸¹ Conversely, X-2 was the only “operating American counter-espionage organization with coordinated coverage in both military and non-military areas outside of the Western hemisphere.” Its job was to maintain information on all foreign intelligence services, prevent operations by these organizations that were inimical to US interests, while at the same time protecting ongoing American clandestine operations. In order to accomplish these tasks X-2 ran a number of agents and double agents.⁸² Like SI it was also divided into geographical desks – its first targets were German and Japanese agents. However, “extensive semi-overt operations” were also conducted in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, South East Asia and China. These operations were considered semi-overt because the covers had been blown for the majority of SSU agents during the war. Clandestine operations, “of true value,” were established in seven countries of the Near East and four Northern African countries. X-2 employed five sleeper agents in the Near East under scientific and commercial cover and had seven dormant covert agents in Africa, with an additional man stationed in Algiers. SSU also continued to maintain contact with a number of foreign intelligence services.⁸³ Operations conducted by X-2 and SI, were facilitated by the Auxiliary Branch, which handled ciphers and other tradecraft necessities such as wireless communication and documentation. The Services Branch handled the money.

Within the SSU it was up to Magruder to decide what operational techniques were to be preserved and in October of 1945 maintaining a paramilitary capability appears to have been uppermost in his mind.⁸⁴ He wrote to McCloy that one of the major problems he faced was how to “reduce these activities” while at the same time ensuring that “the necessary elements and assets for the paramilitary branches will not be lost.” In order to “preserve the capabilities for sabotage, support for underground forces, [and] clandestine subversion of enemy morale” Magruder incorporated personnel with these skills into the Strategic Services Unit.⁸⁵ His shop also provided a safe haven for several experts on partisan warfare and “specialized propaganda work,” in case their skills would be needed in the future.⁸⁶

Not surprisingly, given its ambiguous mandate and its questionable activities, everything was done to keep these activities under wrap. Magruder continually reminded his staff “to be discreet” because there were a lot of people who did not like what they were doing and “the less said about it the better.”⁸⁷ As a result, like the OSS, the SSU did everything in its power to stay out of the State Department’s way. The State Department, for its part, wanted as little to do with

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the unit as possible.⁸⁸ This meant that Magruder received very little policy guidance and, for all intents and purposes, his unit functioned in a political and strategic vacuum that discouraged long term planning.⁸⁹ As a result, during his first months in office Magruder received a number of complaints from his agents, highlighting the lack of policy guidance. The extent of this problem was stressed by the Fortier Committee, which was set up by President Truman in early 1946, to report on the state of postwar intelligence. In their final report the committee recommended that the SSU should be more “closely supervised, pruned and rebuilt, (and) should function under specific directives in selected and clearly defined fields.” They concluded “closer integration of directives, guidance and coordination of SSU in Washington and the field,” are essential.⁹⁰

Despite the lack of support during its brief seven-month existence – September of 1945 to March of 1946 – the SSU went about its business while State and Defense argued over the establishment of a postwar intelligence establishment. In January 1946 an agreement was finally reached and plans for a new intelligence agency were put in motion. By the spring of 1946, however, Magruder had decided to resign from the unit because of crippling arthritis attacks. General William Quinn replaced him. Nicknamed “Buffalo Bill,” Quinn was also a career army officer when he first came to the attention of Donovan. In 1944 Quinn was appointed to the post of intelligence officer for Lt. General Alexander M. Patch, commander of the 7th Army. At the time Quinn was told that he should get his intelligence briefings from the British General, Kenneth Strong, however, he quickly became convinced that Strong was not giving appropriate attention to OSS material and, as a result, he set up his own surreptitious liaison with the OSS detachment in North Africa. Although he was subsequently ordered to “cease and desist in going directly to, speaking to, or communicating in any way with the OSS detachment in North Africa,” Quinn’s commanding officer eventually supported his initiative and he continued his liaison with OSS.⁹¹

A few months later he received a message from Donovan congratulating him on his work.⁹² Shortly thereafter, in mid-September 1945, on Donovan’s recommendation, Quinn was seconded to the SSU. On 1 October 1945 he became Magruder’s executive officer and a few months later, when Magruder retired, Quinn emerged as the unit’s second director. It was Col. Charles McCarthy, the military assistant for the Assistant Secretary for the Army, who was charged with informing Quinn of his new duties. However, when McCarthy failed to provide any detailed instructions, Quinn was forced to ask just what his orders were. After a degree of hemming and hawing McCarthy eventually replied, “just do what General Magruder was doing … preserve the assets of the OSS and eliminate its liabilities.” As Quinn concluded, never before had he “received such broad instructions.”⁹³

From April through October 1946 the SSU, under Quinn’s leadership, expanded and successfully conducted secret intelligence “collection” operations in a number of places, including London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Greece, Cairo, Chunking, Calcutta, New Delhi and Rangoon.⁹⁴ Eventually, however, Quinn “got the feeling” that something should be done about the Russians.⁹⁵ Determining Russian intentions, policies and capabilities then became the number one

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priority for the SSU.⁹⁶ In the spring of 1946 Quinn created the Special Projects Division for the Soviet Union (SPD/S), to accomplish this.⁹⁷ It was tasked with contacting Finnish, Baltic and Polish resistance groups across Europe, but the purpose of these contacts, however, remains unclear. During this period any operations conducted were considered “a post-war improvisation” and they were not coordinated with other government agencies.⁹⁸

Harry Rositzke headed the special projects division within SSU. According to him, until March of 1948 his unit existed in a state of “benign neglect.” The organization had “no legal authority” and no one gave them any guidance.⁹⁹ As a result, there is very little information on what was being done. It received millions in unvouchered funds and payments were made to field stations on “a prorata basis, no questions normally asked unless” the project went over $100,000.¹⁰⁰ The lack of oversight is also important because in 1947 this section went on to provide the operational nucleus for the Soviet Operating Division within the CIA’s Office of Special Operations. It was this unit that designed and executed the initial operations behind the Iron Curtain. As Burton Hersh argues, in one of the best accounts of early American covert operations to-date, “these semi-feudal arrangements gave rise to … intelligence barons … mysterious, mission-orientated professionals who held themselves accountable to nobody [and were] unconcerned with limitations.” Often he concludes they were more powerful than the ambassador himself.¹⁰¹

Robert Joyce, Donald Galloway, Thomas Cassidy, John Bross, Frank Wisner and Richard Helms, all veterans of the OSS who went on to shape the postwar intelligence community, also gained valuable experience in the SSU.¹⁰² In early 1946, Richard Helms was appointed the head of Foreign Branch M, one of SSU’s seven geographical branches. His job was to oversee operations in Central Europe – Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. His office was tasked with seven responsibilities, including: preserving essential OSS functions and assets in Central Europe; reducing personnel and building a cadre of qualified staff; reporting on Soviet policies in the Soviet occupied zones in Germany and Austria; monitoring and penetrating Soviet intelligence in the Allied occupied areas of Germany and Austria; reporting on Soviet activities in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia; maintaining liaisons with allied intelligence agencies throughout Central Europe; and being prepared to occasionally “cope with other, more nearly ad hoc requirements.”¹⁰³

After his stint in SSU Helms moved over to the CIA, eventually becoming one of the longest serving directors of the agency. Unfortunately, the most “extensive phase of illegal domestic spying” occurred under his tenure. Helms career finally ended, in 1977, when he was prosecuted for lying to Congress about the CIA’s attempt to overthrow Salvador Allende, the President of Chile.¹⁰⁴ He eventually pleaded nolo contendere and was fined $2,000 and sentenced to two years in jail; the sentence was subsequently suspended. After the trial ended he announced that he would wear his conviction like a “badge of honor.”¹⁰⁵

Unfortunately, the full history of the Strategic Services Unit has yet to be written and it remains unclear to this day the extent to which the unit partici-

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pated in psychological warfare operations.¹⁰⁶ Although the majority of the available documents suggest that by November of 1945 the United States had ceased to conduct these types of activities, there is some anecdotal evidence to imply that operations continued until at least 1952.¹⁰⁷ Indeed, on 1 November 1950, three years after it was to have been shut down the Assistant Director for Special Operations was charged with “maintaining the functions of the Strategic Services Unit until it could be liquidated.” Although the primary job of any remaining SSU personnel appeared to be handling requests for information, the CIA was unwilling to shut down its offices in February of 1952.¹⁰⁸

The combination of SSU’s vaguely worded mandate, together with Quinn’s ambiguous responsibilities and the lingering effects of Donovan’s legacy, all suggest that it may have done more than simply collect information. Given the OSS’s history of “freewheeling,” the secret nature of the operations themselves, the ambiguous mandate within which the SSU functioned, and the lack of oversight during this period, one can only conclude, as did Anne Karalekas, in her 1976 report to the Church Committee, that it is “impossible to determine conclusively” whether all psychological warfare operations were terminated during these years.¹⁰⁹

In January 1946 the Central Intelligence Group was established by presidential directive. It was to be headed by a Director of Central Intelligence responsible to a National Intelligence Authority (NIA), which consisted of an independent presidential representative and the secretaries of State, War, and Navy. Unfortunately the bureaucratic quagmire, which resulted, allowed each intelligence agency to pursue its own interests, without any attempt at central coordination. As Burton Hersh points out, “[t]his left questionable activities much harder to pin down.”¹¹⁰

The first director of the CIG was Rear Admiral Sydney William Souers, whom the President often referred to as “his personal snooper.”¹¹¹ An old friend of the President’s from Missouri, Souers was fifty-three when he took the job. He did so as a personal favor to Truman. Souers believed his position was temporary and he told the President that he intended to serve only until a permanent director could be found. In fact he resigned six months later. Although Souers’ stint at the CIG was brief he played an instrumental role in carving out a space for a nascent postwar intelligence agency. Moreover, it was during his tenure, and on his advice, that Truman created the Fortier Committee to examine the emerging postwar intelligence framework. Under the direction of Brigadier General Louis Fortier, this Committee played the key role in ensuring that the SSU and its ongoing activities were eventually incorporated into the CIG.

Air Force Lieutenant Hoyt S. Vandenberg, whom Richard Helms once described as the personification of an Air Force General – lean and handsome to the point of glamour – replaced Souers in June of 1946.¹¹² Vandenberg was the nephew of Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg. Souers had recommended Vandenberg to Truman because of his political connections, which Souers believed would be of some help when it came to getting congressional support for an independent intelligence agency.¹¹³ It is also interesting to note that Senator Vandenberg’s home state, Michigan, had a large number of refugees

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from Eastern Europe and he had been pushing for a more active policy in this area since 1945.¹¹⁴

During his tenure as DCI, Hoyt Vandenberg dramatically altered the structure and mandate of the CIG and paved the way for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency a year later. Although the CIG was set up to coordinate intelligence among existing government departments, he quickly retained an intelligence collection capability for the fledgling agency.¹¹⁵ For almost a quarter of a year, however, it remained unclear what would happen to the SSU. Would it be transferred to the CIG, to G-2 (army intelligence), maintained as an independent agency and “go underground,” or shut down altogether?¹¹⁶ During its short existence it had made a number of enemies, including the Army, FBI and the State Department. It was also accused of harboring communists, “criminals … lock pickers and counterfeiters.”¹¹⁷

Finally, in March 1946, on the recommendation of Fortier, and with the support of Vandenberg, it was decided that the SSU would be transferred to the CIG.¹¹⁸ All of SSU’s operations were subsequently moved to the CIG’s Office of Special Operations (OSO), and Col. Donald Galloway replaced William Quinn as the Assistant Director of Special Operations. Quinn returned to the military where he remained in active service until 1964, the year his reputation was tarnished after he was publicly charged with providing secret intelligence to Republican Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater and Quinn had been friends throughout their lives and although the charges eventually proved to be false, Quinn’s military career was effectively over.

Not surprisingly, Quinn’s replacement, Thomas Galloway, was also one of William Donovan’s most trusted aids. At the time, the SSU employed 400 people in the field, 260 in Washington and another 1,432 in its auxiliary and service groups. All of these people were terminated on the condition that a number of them would be rehired by the OSO in the coming weeks.¹¹⁹ On 19 October 1946, SSU as an institution, ceased to exist.¹²⁰ Donovan’s legacy, however, remained intact and continued unabated.

Although it is impossible to directly link the events that were unfolding in Europe and the Near East to the decision to transfer the SSU to the CIG, 1946 was a critical year in the evolution of the Cold War.¹²¹ Between the summer of 1944 and the end of 1946 American policymakers became increasingly suspicious of Soviet moves in Europe. Although the East European countries had never been at the forefront of US national security interests, a majority of historians have since concluded that Soviet intransigence in this theatre was one of the primary causes of the Cold War. Poland was clearly the precipitating factor.¹²² The Katyn Forest Massacre, the Soviet response to the Warsaw Uprising, the arrest of the representatives of the Polish Government-In-Exile and the Home Army in Moscow, as well as the premature recognition of the Lublin Government by Stalin, all contributed to growing apprehension in Washington. Soviet moves in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Germany also helped fuel a sense of unease among American policymakers. In February of 1946 Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, in separate speeches thousands of

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miles apart, suggested that the world was now divided into two hostile camps. Moreover the Iranian crisis in March of 1946 and the communist threat to Turkey, which peaked in the summer, also had a dramatic impact on the Truman administration wherein attitudes toward the Soviet Union began to harden.

No doubt in response to these events, the Fortier Committee recommended that the new operations unit within OSO immediately concentrate on the “current activities of the Soviet Union and the preparation of plans for long-term penetration … of the key institutions of the Soviet Union and its satellites….”¹²³ As a result, the first plans for waging World War II were drawn up in 1946; blueprints for the first covert paramilitary operations in the Balkans and an atomic strike on the Soviet Union were also drafted.¹²⁴ Unfortunately, to date there is very little information available on the psychological warfare operations planned by the SSU once they became part of the OSO.

The traditional argument has always been that they were suspended in 1945 and that American psychological warfare operations began anew only after the passage of NSC 4/a. However, over the last two decades scholars have begun to uncover a number of interesting stories that suggest OSO continued to conduct operations. According to historian Eduard Mark, for example, in July of 1946 the Joint Chiefs of Staff approached Donald Galloway, the new head of OSO, and asked him to help organize an underground army in Romania that could be employed in the event of hostilities with the Soviet Union. In August 1946 the OSO also began collecting intelligence on armed underground movements in the Soviet bloc. The next month two members of the OSO met with members of the Romanian National Peasant Party and discussed the possibility of organizing a partisan party. By 30 September the US had a detailed plan for an armed underground force, to be employed in the event of war with the Russians. These guerilla units had pledged to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines should war break out. Apparently these operations drew to a close in 1947 and many of the Romanian operatives were subsequently taken out of the country.¹²⁵ Although there remains very little available information on these activities, it is clear the tradition of keeping these operations insulated from policy continued. During this period, Galloway instructed his staff to have “minimal contact” with both the State Department and the military.¹²⁶ Thus, the Donovan Tradition persisted and the OSO continued to operate without political or strategic guidance.

Aside from the operations being carried out by OSO, there were also a number of ad hoc organizations, with links to both the State Department and the US military, conducting psychological warfare operations in Europe. The first countries targeted by these “independent” groups were France and Hungary. Although there is no evidence that directly ties these operations to OSO a number of high ranking American officials with close contacts within intelligence circles did take part. Thus the tradition of keeping operations isolated from the traditional corridors of power continued. It was journalist Trevor Barnes who first exposed American operations in France.¹²⁷

The communist party in France was a powerful force in the country at the end of World War II.¹²⁸ Between the summer of 1945 and the summer of 1946

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they had gained control of the major labor unions and called for strikes in both the coal and transportation industries. Their goal was to disrupt the government’s plan to take part in the European Recovery Program.¹²⁹ It is important to remember that France did not have a postwar constitution until October of 1946. Moreover, the election of the First President of the Fourth Republic was not scheduled until January of 1947. The uncertainty that gripped the lives of the average French citizen provided fertile ground for the growth of the communist party and, the deteriorating economic situation helped ensure that by the fall of 1946 the communists were thought to be powerful enough to win a general election. For example, in November of 1946, the Central Intelligence Group argued that the “communists now have sufficient strength to seize power in France whenever they may deem it desirable to do so.”¹³⁰ In order to prevent this from happening, Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett, James Forrestal and another bi-partisan appointment and FDR holdover, Secretary of War Robert Patterson,¹³¹ together “with a number of prominent citizens with access to private funds, immediately began bribing French union representatives and business leaders” in an attempt to end the strikes that were paralyzing the country.¹³²

Although the United States had signed an agreement with the French government that stipulated there would be no gathering of intelligence on French citizens from within France, by the time the SSU was transferred to the OSO a number of undercover networks using American businesses were operational.¹³³ According to historian Richard Aldrich, eventually Paris “became a testing ground for all sorts of Anglo-American psychological operations, including ‘blip-verts,’ or short subliminal messages, which were slipped into film material.”¹³⁴ While some of these activities were coordinated with the knowledge of the French Government, many were not. Apparently this was the accepted norm at the time. For example, the Fortier Committee had recommended only a few months earlier that any postwar operations overseas “must be completely disguised … and kept from the knowledge of all other powers, including our formal allies.”¹³⁵ This trend went on to become an integral part of OSO and later CIA operational culture. For example, in February of 1952, the National Security Council’s Secretary, James Webb, asked the then Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Beddle Smith, whether the US government would alert the French government about operations about to be undertaken on French soil. Smith responded:

No. That is one of the weaknesses in putting all of these things in there when you are dealing with a sovereign state. However, we can indeed carry that too far … and MSA (Mutual Security Agency) would be perfectly justified saying, if they wanted to be awfully cold-blooded and ornery about it, when the French start paying off some of our bills, then they are justified in asking certain questions.¹³⁶

Early American psychological operations in France eventually succeeded in undermining communist strength in the country. Similar campaigns in Hungary

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and Romania, where US objectives were much more murky, did not achieve the same results. In large part, these operations were hampered by the Truman Administration’s inability to reach a consensus on what these operations were designed to achieve. While the objective in France was to stem communist influence, American efforts in Hungary and Romania were much more complicated. Indeed, prior to 1984, there was no single, mainstream school of thought within the administration on how to respond to Soviet actions in Eastern Europe. As a result, any operations that took place in these countries did so in a political and strategic vacuum, irrespective of national policy considerations.

Although Frank Wisner had left Romania in 1945, psychological warfare operations continued until 1947. According to journalist Peter Grose, at least fourteen major operations took place in 1946.¹³⁷ American operations in Hungary, at least initially, were under the control of a little known organization, referred to as the POND. Brigadier General Haynes Kroner of the US Army set up the POND within the Army General Staff in April of 1942. Colonel John V. “Frenchy” Gromback, Director of the Secret Intelligence Branch within the War Department, headed it.¹³⁸ Its operational goal was to lay the foundation for a “perpetual,” “farseeing,” “instant” postwar secret intelligence service that was separate and apart from Donovan’s organization. During World War II it executed a number of its own psychological warfare operations. When the war ended Gromback shifted his agency’s attention to the situation unfolding in Eastern Europe. According to journalist Peter Grose, at this point the POND became a “safe haven for the true-believing right-wingers of Washington.”¹³⁹ It survived demobilization through a “back-alley anomaly” and it was “overseen in a general way by SWNCC.”¹⁴⁰

In the spring of 1946, James McCargar was sent to Hungary. As a Foreign Service officer, McCargar served two masters: the State Department and the POND.¹⁴¹ His primary mission in Hungary was Operation Safehaven, which was designed to uncover Nazi personnel and assets outside Germany. However, as the communists consolidated their hold on the country he found himself in a somewhat awkward position when he was asked to help secure American support for an underground resistance network dedicated to the removal of the Soviet-backed government. Although McCargar personally supported this objective he received no response from Washington on how to respond to these overtures.¹⁴² Indeed, by the end of 1946, it was by no means clear that the Truman Administration would oppose Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe.¹⁴³ Eventually, McCargar decided to take matters into his own hands and he developed an underground network designed, at least initially, to keep Hungary “independent.” He conceded in his memoirs, however, that there was never any “policy support for this objective.”¹⁴⁴ “In such circumstances,” he reminisced, “all that could be done was to read between the lines … and to do some careful guess work on the basis of known official diplomatic policy.”¹⁴⁵ Yet until the summer of 1949, there was no official statement of American policy toward Eastern Europe. McCargar was on his own in Hungary and hundreds of lives hung in the balance.¹⁴⁶

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2
A strategic monstrosity

Parallel, but completely independent from the development of McCargar’s actions in Hungary, additional momentum for conducting unorthodox warfare came from the military establishment. On 5 March 1946, the same month that the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) was transferred to the OSO, Secretary of War Robert Patterson, suggested to Secretary of Defense, and another Republican insider, James Forrestal, that a group of qualified civilian and military individuals begin to assess the benefits of psychological warfare during World War II.¹ What prompted Patterson’s request remains unclear, however, three days earlier the Soviet government had announced its refusal to withdraw the remnants of its wartime forces from Northern Iran. On 22 March, Forrestal agreed to Patterson’s request on the condition that the State Department’s Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs was brought into the project. The job was subsequently handed over to the State–War–Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC). SWNCC had been organized in World War II to facilitate interagency coordination between the State Department and the military. In 1948 its name was changed to SANNAC when the Air Force was created.

In December 1946, informal discussions between Patterson, Forrestal and Secretary of State James Byrnes began.² Over the next five months this “ad hoc” group worked to formulate an “activist” agenda for waging the Cold War.³ In April 1947 they organized a special subcommittee within SWNCC to “plan, guide, co-ordinate and execute the American psychological warfare effort until a national organization was established.”⁴ One month later, a day before Secretary of State George Marshall announced the European Recovery Program (or the Marshall Plan) at Harvard University, the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee (SSEC) was formed to plan for psychological warfare during times of war or threat of war. One representative from the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), one from the State Department and two from the War Department, staffed what was still considered an “ad hoc” committee.⁵

Despite the tenuous nature of their position, however, these men believed that “psychological warfare was an essential factor in the achievement of national aims.”⁶ Their goal was to see that it became an integral part of the American Cold War effort. According to Congressional Staffer Anne Karalekas, author of the Church Committee’s report on intelligence, by 1947 “the fact that the United

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States would engage in covert operations was a given; what remained unresolved were decisions about the organizational arrangements and actual implementation.”⁷ The SSEC was set up to address these questions and it was here that the link between the bureaucratic conflicts, which began in World War II and those that dominated policy planning in the Cold War, found their nexus.

Although the group was initially able to complete an historical study of psychological operations, as soon as it turned its attention to questions of postwar doctrine and organization, the bureaucratic battle lines formed. Despite the fact that the military had ostensibly controlled psychological warfare operations during World War II, the State Department was no longer willing to agree to such an arrangement. George Kennan, the new director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff (S/P), had come to believe that the military’s control over psychological planning during peacetime would effectively undercut his department’s traditional role in the development of foreign policy. As a result, he became determined to have these operations put under his command. In order to ensure this eventuality he set about trying to sabotage the work done by the special committee.⁸ In the end, Kennan was successful because the chair of the ad hoc group was often held by Frank Wisner.

Wisner had quit his job as the Strategic Services Unit SI station chief in Germany out of sheer frustration and returned to his law practice in 1946. Bored by the life of a corporate lawyer, however, Wisner left his law practice in the spring of 1947 and returned to government service. On advice from Allen Dulles, who told him to find some innocuous place in the government until a new postwar operational group could be set up, he accepted the number two position in the State Department’s Office of Occupied Territories.⁹ Given his background in psychological warfare, it is not surprising that he was quickly seconded to the special committee.¹⁰ However, Wisner’s appointment as State’s representative meant that Kennan was able to control the direction of the discussions. In the “hostile environment” that developed, the group did produce a number of papers. However, they could only be used for “informational purposes” and could not be cited or used as approved SWNCC positions.¹¹

Most importantly, however, the heated debates, which ultimately erupted within this forum, foreshadowed things to come. In February of 1948, for example, months before the Department of State, the National Security Council or the Psychological Strategy Board began to wrestle with this question, a better part of a day was spent trying to differentiate between “national policy” and “national objectives.” According to one witness, the meeting degenerated into “a philosophical discussion of metaphysical concepts, which ended up with no one impressed.”¹² In the end this question was left unresolved. Had this “philosophical” question been dealt with at this time it might have been possible for the administration to avoid the controversy that developed over American strategy over the next few years. In the meantime, James McCargar did his best to deal with the situation that was unfolding in Hungary.

He was not alone. Across Eastern Europe embassy personnel, psychological warriors and Ambassadors tried to make sense of American policy toward

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Eastern Europe. Although studies dealing with American foreign policy toward this part of the world are limited, from them one can easily conclude that American postwar objectives were uncertain.¹³ There is an uneasy consensus among Western orthodox, realist and post-revisionist historians that Soviet intransigence in Eastern Europe was one of the primary causes of the Cold War, but scholars remain divided on a number of key questions, including the nature of US objectives in this theater.¹⁴ Implicit in the historical question lies an important point: American postwar objectives were ambiguous. It was precisely this lack of clarity that facilitated the emergence of diverging strategic visions within the Truman Administration. Between 1945 and 1947 policymakers and operations personnel came to very different conclusions as to how the United States should respond to the communist threat. These disparate visions were never reconciled and, as a result, an important divide began to take form within the administration.

Part of the problem can be traced back to the discrepancy that developed between the public statements and the private actions of key policy makers throughout the course of World War II. During the war, the leaders of the Grand Alliance publicly articulated a series of long-term goals that seemingly reflected the traditional American values of individualism, self-determination and free trade. The Atlantic Charter, the United Nations Declaration and the Declaration on Liberated Europe all contained these principles and their inclusion seemed to imply that the postwar order would be based on these ideals. According to one historian, the principles espoused in the Atlantic Charter were particularly important because they “were not simply abstract ideas but goals desired by the United States because they were thought to be compatible with American interests, which were also deemed consonant with the interests of world peace and prosperity.”¹⁵ Yet these agreements rested, in no small part, on the willingness of all of the Great Powers to abide by them. And more often than not the principles espoused were in direct contradiction to traditional Russian, British and indeed, American security interests.¹⁶ Both Stalin and Churchill, as well as many of those within the Roosevelt Administration, still favored the “old diplomacy,” which relied on spheres of influence and power politics in order to maintain the balance of power.¹⁷ Thus, despite the “Wilsonian” rhetoric espoused by the leaders of the Grand Alliance, historians have chronicled the degree to which public pronouncements were countered by private conversations which clearly undermined the spirit, if not the letter of these agreements.¹⁸

Underlying the diplomatic principles embraced by the wartime leaders were important differences. These differences, which underscored a disparity in visions for the postwar world, first appeared over the future of Eastern Europe. Roosevelt’s bureaucratic style, the event of his death in April of 1945, and the manner in which his successor came to power, only complicated the story. The historiographical debate over Roosevelt’s frame of mind at the time of his death is fraught with controversy. There are two schools of thought – the “orthodox” view holds that the President was already in the process of changing his opinion regarding cooperation with the Soviets and that Truman merely continued this

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trend.¹⁹ Conversely, the “revisionists” argue that Roosevelt would have continued his policy of accommodation and that Truman radically altered his intended course.²⁰ This historical controversy is important because it underscores the uncertainty that surrounded Roosevelt’s wartime policy toward the Soviet Union. Either by design or default and probably a bit of both, the President had created an amorphous foreign policy that seemingly provided for all contingencies.²¹

The inconsistency that characterized American actions in these years was further reinforced because Roosevelt’s successor, Harry S. Truman, had been isolated during his brief tenure as Vice President. As a result, Truman had no knowledge of the Yalta Accords or any of the subtle nuances built into them. Furthermore, his inexperience in foreign affairs forced him to rely heavily on those around him. On the question of what to do with Eastern Europe there was no unified voice. As historian Daniel Yergin has argued, by 1945 two schools of thought had emerged within the administration and American policy continued to vacillate, depending on who had the President’s ear.²² One example of this vacillation was the contrast between Truman’s harsh language in his interview with Molotov immediately after FDR’s death and his subsequent decision to send the very ill Harry Hopkins to Moscow in an attempt to reconcile with Stalin.²³

It was the administration’s response to events in Eastern Europe, however, which highlighted the complete lack of unanimity within the government. The controversy began in the summer of 1945, when according to John Campbell (a State Department specialist on Eastern Europe), Secretary of State James Byrnes made free elections in Romania and Bulgaria the centerpiece of his agenda.²⁴ When it became apparent, however, that Stalin was not going to honor his pledge to hold free elections in these countries, Byrnes announced that the US would not recognize the governments of Hungary, Romania, or Bulgaria until they were made more representative of the population. Five months later, for reasons that still remain unclear, he retracted his decision at the Council of Foreign Ministers Conference in Moscow, and agreed to recognize the governments. These contradictory signals make clear that, as the war came to a close, the United States had no clear idea of what it wanted to accomplish in this area of the world.²⁵

This trend was further reinforced by the conflicting analysis provided by the State Department in late 1945. Between 1945 and 1947 the State Department’s advice to the President vacillated between those willing to seek accommodation with the Soviets and those determined to oppose the expansion of communist influence. In one of the first briefing papers on Soviet foreign policy, Charles Bohlen, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, argued that the United States should not acquiesce to the establishment of a Soviet sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe, and henceforth American economic aid to the East should be tied to Soviet cooperation in this area.²⁶ However, less than one week later, Cloyce K. Houston, Chief of the Division of South European Affairs, submitted a second report that took a much more conciliatory tone and advocated

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supporting Soviet objectives in Eastern Europe. Ironically, there was no substantive criticism of Houston’s position from Bohlen or anyone else at the State Department. As historian Robert Messer has argued, the State Department had “no single mainstream of thought regarding American–Soviet policy.”²⁷

To further complicate the picture, a third report was presented to the President in December 1945. Authored by Bohlen and Gerald T. Robinson, the USSR Division Chief, its central thesis was that American atomic superiority provided a substantial edge over the severely weakened Soviet Union and therefore the US would not face a serious threat from Russia in the immediate future. However, they argued, by 1950 the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union would be of critical importance. Thus, at this time the US had the option of undertaking two alternative policies. “Policy A” was “a moderately and deliberately reassuring policy,” geared toward the “long term stabilization of American–Russian relations.” Conversely, “Policy B” advocated developing “a maximum alignment of power against the Soviet Union.” Bohlen and Robinson advocated the first course of action.²⁸

The Bohlen–Robinson report captured the division that was becoming manifest with the administration over how best to respond to Russian provocations. As John Lewis Gaddis has argued, there was only a narrow range of alternatives open to policy-makers during this period, and because there was no convincing explanation of Soviet behavior, it was difficult to prescribe a consistent course of action.²⁹ Beginning in 1946, however, the attitude of many in the administration began to solidify around Policy B, thanks largely to the influence of those who were serving overseas. During the closing days of the war, the American embassy in Moscow deluged Washington with a number of dire warnings detailing Soviet aggression. Ambassador Averell Harriman’s cables between 1943 and 1946 changed from stressing the need to maintain a functioning wartime alliance to the difficulties in prolonging cooperation in the face of Soviet expansionism.³⁰ Moreover, George Kennan, who was at the time the chargé d’affaires in the Moscow Embassy, wrote a “Long Telegram,” in February of 1946, which had a revolutionary effect on the beleaguered group of policy makers searching for a way to rationalize Soviet actions in Europe. According to historian Frank Costigliola, Kennan’s analysis “converted the confusing pattern of Soviet advances and retreats, in 1945 and 1946, into an easy-to-understand, though frightening story of a pathologically driven force bent on world domination.”³¹

Despite the widespread acclaim accredited to it, in the end his diatribe failed to provide a coherent basis on which American postwar policy could be laid.³² Although the telegram consisted of five parts, only the last section provided any discussion of how the administration should respond to perceived Soviet provocations. In the telegram, Kennan stressed that American policymakers should analyze the Soviet threat, educate the public to this threat and promote the health and vigor of American society, but also, that they should have the “courage and self confidence to cling to [American] methods and conceptions of society.”³³ As Dean Acheson concluded in his memoirs, Kennan’s prescription “to be good of heart, to look at our own special ideas and economic health, to

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present a good face to the world, all of which the government was trying to do, were of no help.”³⁴ Acheson’s words of caution however, were not enough to stop scholars from debating the political and strategic implications of Kennan’s memo.

Initially, historians argued that it laid the groundwork for a strategy of “containment.”³⁵ More recently, a new generation of scholars has suggested that the long telegram held the seeds for a strategy of “liberation.”³⁶ The historical debate emphasizes how diffuse Kennan’s thinking in 1946 actually was. Indeed it was precisely his lack of clarity that has allowed policymakers and historians to use the Long Telegram as a prism through which a spectrum of meanings could be discerned. The situation did not improve and historians still wrestle with what Kennan’s policy prescriptions actually were.

When Walter Bedell Smith replaced Harriman as American Ambassador in Moscow, in May 1946, his cables continued to buttress Kennan and Harriman’s uncompromising position.³⁷ Indeed, all of these memoranda were important because they provided momentum for a new hardline position that was developing within the administration. This shift in thinking was further reinforced by the West European governments, who deluged Washington with dire warnings about Soviet behavior in Eastern Europe during the closing days of the war.³⁸ Although the British government had never set aside its suspicions of the Soviet Union, by 1946 it is clear that it too was taking a more forceful position. Kennan’s British counter-part in Moscow, Frank Roberts, sent a similar telegram to the Foreign Office outlining his concerns, one month after the Long Telegram reached Washington. There was a remarkable similarity in the views held by the two men.³⁹ Furthermore, Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, given less than a month later, in Truman’s home state, also reinforced the changing political climate. Despite the shift in the public and private rhetoric, however, it is important to recognize that the Truman Administration still had “no especial policy in regard to the Soviet Union.”⁴⁰

The failure to develop a coherent policy had come to a head, a month earlier, when the Soviet Union began to flex its muscles in Iran.⁴¹ During World War II the British, Americans and Soviets had all stationed troops in Iran. Given the vast oil reserves in the country, when the war ended, neither the British nor the Soviets were eager to withdraw. The Iranian government wanted both countries to leave immediately and threatened to take its case to the United Nations. The United States initially waffled on this question. Worried that they might offend the British, the administration was once again divided on how they should respond.⁴² It was not until March of 1946, when the Soviet government announced that it had no intention of withdrawing its forces and instead began to deploy additional men into the area that Truman began to look seriously at the situation.⁴³ Soviet actions eventually encouraged the administration to support the Iranian grievance at the United Nations. In response the Soviet Union withdrew its forces.

This did not signal the end of the crisis, however, as the US still faced three additional problems: the growth of the Tudeh Party, a mass-based political

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movement with leftist inclinations; the leftist orientation of the Prime Minister of Iran, Quvam; and tribal uprisings in the province of Azerbaijan. Senior policymakers viewed all three of these issues as the result of growing Soviet influence in the area. According to Secretary of War Robert Patterson, Soviet actions in Iran threatened US access to Middle Eastern oil. This, he argued, would be prejudicial to long-term American interests in the world.⁴⁴ The Joint Chiefs of Staff went even further, warning that war with the Soviet Union was a definite possibility in the near future and as a result, Iran was an important strategic asset. Therefore the Chiefs advocated the use of military force to remove communist influence from the area.⁴⁵ In light of the deteriorating situation, American Ambassador to Iran, George Allen, warned Prime Minister Quvam that any further Iranian conciliation to the Soviets would be viewed in a similar light as the agreements reached between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the days leading up to World War II.⁴⁶ Allen’s tone signified the changing landscape in Washington.

Largely in response to these events, Truman asked his Special Assistant, Clark Clifford, whom he had once characterized as “a nice boy” destined “to go places,” to summarize the state of American–Soviet relations.⁴⁷ Soviet intransigence in Eastern Europe, China, Germany, Trieste and Iran had all served to solidify the emerging anti-Communist reflex that was beginning to dominate discussions. Yet the administration still had no coherent statement of policy with respect to the Soviet Union. The Clifford report, which was written primarily by Clifford’s assistant, George Elsey, was designed in part to correct this. Yet the President’s reaction to the report ensured that American policy remained undefined. Picking up where Kennan left off, a month earlier, Clifford and Elsey took as their basic premise that the Soviet Union represented a new threat to American security that would have to be dealt with. As a result they argued that it was “a matter of the highest national security” that the administration develop “an integrated policy and a coherent strategy to resist the Soviet Union.”⁴⁸ Working their way toward this, they suggested that American objectives should be to stabilize the world, to prevent the Soviets from further expansion, and to convince the Russian leaders that it was in their best interest to cooperate with the United States. Until this occurred, however, Clifford and Elsey suggested that the US should “restrain” the Soviets from further expansion, by military force if necessary. However, they added an important caveat: at no time should the United States pursue any course of action which could be seen as “aggressive,” because this would undermine programs designed to foster trust between the two countries.⁴⁹ They never made it clear, however, how the US should “restrain” the Soviet Union without taking “aggressive action.”

Despite the qualifications Elsey and Clifford had written into the analysis Truman was so alarmed by its conclusions that, immediately after reading the report, he collected all of its copies and placed them in his safe where they stayed until he left office. At the time, he worried that if the report ever became public it could possibly lead to World War III. Truman did not mention the report’s existence in either his diaries or in his memoirs, its existence only came

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to light in 1966 when Clifford brought it up with journalist Arthur Krock, who was in the process of completing his own memoirs.⁵⁰ Despite the fact that Truman buried the report in 1946, it was important because it illustrated three important characteristics of this period: the poor state of decision-making within the government, the lack of consensus over how to respond to perceived Soviet machinations and the general shift to a new, but as yet undefined policy.

No act better symbolized the shift in thinking, or the lack of consensus within policy circles up to this point, than the ousting of Commerce Secretary, Henry A. Wallace on 19 September 1946. Wallace was a holdover from Roosevelt’s administration, however, in 1944 FDR had demoted him from Vice President to Secretary of Commerce. After Roosevelt’s death, Truman had kept Wallace in his Cabinet because he did not want to alienate the liberal wing of the Democratic Party but the two men were never intimates, nor had the new President ever sympathized with what he perceived as Wallace’s naïve idealism.⁵¹ Between 1945 and 1946 any rapport between the two men deteriorated, culminating in Wallace’s resignation. He resigned because he believed that Truman had moved away from Roosevelt’s policy of accommodation with Russia.

Beginning in 1945, Wallace had begun to criticize publicly the administration for its new “get tough” policy with Russia. It was Secretary of State James Brynes who received the brunt of Wallace’s wrath. The hostility between Wallace and the State Department went back to 1942. During the war Wallace had publicly advocated a postwar view of the world, which included a policy of accommodation with the Soviet Union, one that many in the government had believed to be naïve. Assistant Secretary of State, Breckenridge Long, for example, often referred to Wallace as “one of the ‘Postwar Dream Boys.’” Wallace returned the State Department’s animosity arguing, “it was probably one of the weakest departments in the whole government.”⁵² The controversy between Brynes and Wallace reached a climax over American policy toward the Soviet Union. By 1946 Wallace had come to believe that communism was not a threat to the United States or to American policy abroad, unless the US failed to live up to its domestic and international commitments. Moreover, he did not think that any contest with the Russians could, or should, be resolved by military means. As he stated in a speech in April of 1947 “communism is an idea for ending poverty and exploitation. It can only be made superfluous by a better idea.”⁵³

Wallace had also come to believe that American actions, since VJ day, had suggested that the government was preparing “to win a war [with Russia] that [it] regards as inevitable.”⁵⁴ He found this very troubling and made this point in a letter he drafted to Truman in July of 1946.⁵⁵ The situation came to a head two months later as Wallace prepared to give a speech at Madison Square Gardens. In order to ensure that the President was aware of what he planned to say, the Commerce Secretary gave a copy of his speech to Truman.⁵⁶ On the night of 12 September 1946 in front of a crowd of over twenty thousand, Wallace stated that the United States had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe

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or the United States.” He then went on to suggest that the United States should abandon its get-tough policy with Russia.⁵⁷ Not surprisingly the speech caused a huge uproar. Although the President was on the record with reporters, stating that he saw no inconsistency between Wallace’s views and those of his Secretary of State, the press certainly did. They believed that Wallace’s speech was a significant departure from the course of action adopted by Brynes. For his part, the Secretary of State was livid and he made it clear to the President that he would resign if Wallace was not reigned in. When Truman failed to secure Wallace’s assurance that he would no longer comment on foreign affairs, he asked for his resignation. Wallace complied and on 20 September the President released a statement saying he had asked the Commerce Secretary to step aside because it was now clear that his views on foreign policy and those of the administration were fundamentally in conflict.⁵⁸

The firing of Henry Wallace was a significant, albeit often overlooked, event in the annals of Cold War history. It illustrates two important points. First, it highlights the lack of unanimity within the administration prior to 1947 over American postwar objectives vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Second, it also suggests that by the end of 1946 the government was determined to pursue a hard-line in their dealings with the Russians. What that line would look like, however, remained undefined. As Deborah Larson has written, at the end of 1946, “a year of drift and indecision, of waffling between confrontation and collaboration, Truman still had no new policy nor did he perceive any alternative to the present policies, except the unacceptable prospects of war.”⁵⁹

Yet 1947 was a critical year in the development of American–Soviet relations. Hungary, for example, was on the verge of explosion. Throughout the first months of 1947 those involved in the Hungarian resistance movement continually asked McCargar, if the United States would support them, if they fought back, now?⁶⁰ Washington’s failure to provide any guidance meant that McCargar was unable to take a position one way or the other. Nor could he offer any aid for their struggle against communists as they consolidated their hold on the country. Not only did American ambivalence damage the resistance movement during this critical year but it also damaged ongoing intelligence operations in the theatre as well. A number of Hungarians who were providing intelligence began to reconsider their contacts with the Americans.⁶¹ Eventually, after numerous queries and months of silence, McCargar finally received word in late 1947 from “a high ranking … presidential advisor” that the American people would not support any operations that led to war with Russia.”⁶²

All his work had been in vain and he was forced to close the operations he had set in motion. His remaining time in Hungary was spent trying to get those whom he had worked with out of the country as quickly as possible. But even in organizing this limited task he was continually frustrated by the lack of detailed instructions coming from Washington. Day after day he waited for word on how many people he would be allowed to bring across the border to safety.⁶³ Although he was eventually able to help seventy-four Hungarians escape to the West, and these men and women became “the nucleus of an émigré resistance

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movement that kept the idea of Hungarian democracy alive,”⁶⁴ he never really forgave his government for not doing more at the time.

The terrible irony of the Hungarian situation was that when the resistance movement in Hungary was at its strongest, the State Department was at its weakest. When the administration was finally ready to undertake operations in Hungary, the resistance movement had all but disappeared. More importantly, when the United States most needed information on events on the ground, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution they only had one agent inside the country.

The central problem, as journalist James Reston pointed out, was that the Truman Administration was never able to decide what the objectives of the Soviet Union were. As a result, American policy during this critical year was full of contradictions.⁶⁵ In 1947 the only unity among decision-makers was their belief that communist power represented a real threat to the security of the United States and that some type of action was warranted. As the year progressed, however, the President and his administration would be forced to respond to a number of international crises. How they reacted, which came to be labeled as a strategy of containment, provided the shaky foundation on which American Cold War objectives were laid.

The first problem to arise was the outbreak of the civil war in Greece. Although the United States had been aware of the growth of communist support in this country since the end of World War II, it was not until 21 February 1947, when the British formally announced their intention to withdraw support for the Greek government, that the US first began to develop a South European policy. In a very short period of time the majority of policymakers within the administration came to believe that the fall of Greece to communism “might eventually result in the loss of the whole Near and Middle East and Northern Africa.”⁶⁶ The decision to aid both Greece and Turkey was thus made very quickly. At a Cabinet meeting on 7 March, the same day as he was diagnosed with cardiac asthma, Truman made the decision to ask Congress for $250 million to stave off the perceived communist threat to these countries.

During a subsequent meeting with the Congressional leadership it was decided that the President should use this situation to go before the American people and alert them to the new dangers of the postwar world, while at the same time preparing them for the new hard line emerging within the administration. Not everyone agreed – George Elsey argued at the time that communist influence in Greece did not provide enough of a pretext for an all out foreign policy speech.⁶⁷ Elsey was in the minority, however, and on 12 March, President Truman went before Congress and asked the American people to help “support free peoples who [were] resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”⁶⁸ Unfortunately, in his speech Truman failed to distinguish just who should be helped and under what circumstances help should be provided.⁶⁹ Contradictory signals were again evident.

Although the Soviet Union was never mentioned in the speech, Truman’s language appeared to suggest that the United States was embarking on a new

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international campaign. Yet while the President’s rhetoric appeared to suggest a new global crusade to free the world from tyranny, immediately after its presentation key policymakers within the administration publicly began to limit the implications of the speech. They were not wholly successful and journalists continued to question the categorical nature of the President’s comments.⁷⁰ Indeed, according to McCargar, Truman’s speech raised expectations in Hungary that the United States would begin to provide aid to the resistance organizations.⁷¹ Newspapers encouraged these hopes when they pointed out that implicit in Truman’s speech was a new international agenda that clearly went beyond traditional American security interests.⁷² The New York Times, for example, argued that the new “Truman Doctrine” represented “a dramatic change” in American foreign policy.⁷³ Freda Kirchwey, writing in the Nation, went even further by suggesting that his speech “was a plain declaration of political war against Russia.”⁷⁴ The contradictory signals sent out by Truman and his advisors, in the wake of the President’s address, highlighted the controversy that was brewing over the nature of American Cold War policy. The situation was never clarified. Four years later, when the editors of Foreign Affairs Magazine surveyed its readers on the implications of the “containment policy,” there was still no agreement on which “free peoples” the United States should support.”⁷⁵

In June of 1947 the debate over America’s postwar role in the new international [dis]order took on a new dimension when the administration announced its intention to respond to the economic crisis that had engulfed Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Although traditionally billed as an attempt to prevent communism from spreading into Western Europe, a number of scholars have also pointed out that the ultimate goal of the European Recovery Program (ERP), announced in June of 1947, was to bring about the elimination of communist influence from Eastern Europe.⁷⁶ Historian Walter Hixson, for example, has argued that the so-called Marshall Plan, “was a capitalist offensive aimed at eroding the Soviet sphere of influence, and was a prelude to challenging Soviet authority in Russia itself.”⁷⁷ The duality of American strategy, which lay at the heart of the economic aid package, was also recognized by a number of government officials at the time. For example, Allen Dulles, who went on to become the Director of Plans within the CIA in 1949, believed that by providing economic aid to Western Europe the United States “would thus confront communism, not with arms or bombs, but with a restored economic life for the men and women of Western Europe. Thus we might have the chance of penetrating the artificial barrier, which now partitions Europe.”⁷⁸

Clearly divided on questions of objectives, it is not surprising that many in the administration were also unclear on the means required to achieve these goals. For example, although the Marshal Plan was offered to a majority of European countries, those in the State Department were initially at odds over whether to offer aid to countries within the Soviet sphere of interest.⁷⁹ For its part, the Joint Chiefs argued that financial incentives should not be given to Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland because the amount was not sufficient to “retain or regain freedom” from Soviet influence.⁸⁰ In 1947 the United States

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had only 4 percent of its foreign investment in Eastern Europe. Although this represented a 2 percent increase over the previous decade, it still had a negligible impact on East European economies.⁸¹ In the end, the State Department decided to offer the money to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe but to write into the plan enough qualifications that the Soviets would refuse to participate.

Today scholars are still debating both the extent to which the European Recovery Program had a positive impact on West European Recovery and the ultimate objectives of what was considered then as now one of the most altruistic strategies in US history.⁸² Given the ambiguity of the language employed, historians and the general public have been able to read into the administration’s rhetoric what they wished. Those who wanted to embrace a more aggressive policy understood that the Marshal Plan and the Truman Doctrine represented an initial course of action toward the liberation of those caught under the yoke of communism. Those who wanted to maintain the status quo were content to believe that these actions were designed solely to support the rebuilding of the West. Yet neither the Truman Doctrine nor the Marshall Plan made a distinction between the idea of stemming Soviet power and that of its removal. This is important because it suggests that contradictory impulses were evident in American thinking early on.

The conflation of these two competing and, I would argue, clashing strategic tendencies, became public in the summer of 1947, when Hamilton Fish Armstrong published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs. The article, written by George Kennan – originally under the pseudonym X, in order to ensure that the article was not confused as government policy – was subsequently discussed in every major newspaper and news magazine of the day. Because of a complex blend of simplicity and ambiguity that characterized much of the analysis – and the author’s subsequent coming out – as Kennan asserted in 1967:

the term containment was picked up and elevated, by common agreement of the press to the status of “doctrine,” which was then identified with the foreign policy of the [Truman] Administration. In this way there was established before our eyes, so to speak – one of those indestructible myths that are the bane of the historian.⁸³

Historical myths are of course important: they reinforce the ideals of a nation and for a number of different reasons Kennan’s language resonated with the American people.⁸⁴ “Containment” provided a simple and catchy, albeit largely erroneous, metaphor for American foreign policy in a complicated world. Much of its appeal stemmed from the fact that it seemed to reflect traditional American values. It implied that the US was merely responding to Soviet provocations, not aggressively challenging their legitimate national security interests. Yet as Kennan later acknowledged, the indiscriminate use of the term to characterize American policy during this period, “was merely another of those semantic vulgarizations to which our mass media are prone when they lack the patience to look at things carefully.”⁸⁵

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Despite his protests, over the last forty years the myth of “containment” has never completely lost its resonance. In fact between 1947 and 1989 it was unarguably the most common description of American Cold War policy and strategy, employed liberally by scholars, journalists, policy-makers and pundits alike.⁸⁶ Within the historical community, it was used indiscriminately by “orthodox,” “realist” and “post-revisionist” scholars, often without any corresponding attempt at definition.⁸⁷ Although the concept was eventually challenged by some of the “revisionist” historians, no systematic attempt was made to interpret its meaning or to separate its rhetoric from the American objectives outlined in policy papers at the time. Moreover, although these early revisionist histories played an important role in calling into question the containment consensus, they did so within the same modernist, positivist, and anti-relativist paradigm as did the orthodox and realist scholars before them.⁸⁸ In other words they argued that since American policy was not “containment” it must have been “liberation,” or even “rollback.”

The principal architect of the myth of containment was historian John Lewis Gaddis. If George Kennan is today characterized as the “father of containment,” Gaddis could be considered the concept’s “godfather.”⁸⁹ To date he has authored over a dozen works on the subject, including the award-winning Strategies of Containment, which was first published in 1982. A long awaited second edition, with a new cover resembling an American flag, was released in 2005.⁹⁰ According to Gaddis, his aim in Strategies of Containment, was to reinterpret American national security from a strategic perspective, by focusing on what he termed the “central preoccupation of postwar national security policy” which he argued was “the idea of containment.” He defined “containment” as a “dualistic strategy, either symmetrical or asymmetrical; defensive and fundamentally non-aggressive.”⁹¹ He surmised that, “containment implied no more concessions to the Soviets. The US would in effect ‘draw the line’ and defend all future targets of Soviet expansionism, but without attempts to ‘liberate’ areas under Moscow’s control.”⁹² He wrote that the policy of containment included three separate stages: restoration of the balance of power; reduction of the Soviet Union’s ability to project influence beyond its borders; and the modification, over time, of the Soviet concept of international relations with a view to facilitating negotiated settlement of outstanding differences. However, he went on to note that the Truman Administration failed to move beyond the first stage of this strategy.⁹³

Although Gaddis clearly left a window open for an activist agenda, his arguments were carefully framed to leave the reader with the feeling that these options were not seriously considered.⁹⁴ Yet, as Kennan acknowledged before his death, there were a number of individuals within the government who held a different strategic vision from his own, and instead lobbied for the “unconditional surrender” of Eastern Europe.⁹⁵ Gaddis avoided any discussion of these debates. Instead he constructed a history in which the development of American Cold War strategy was understood as a rational process, thereby presenting his readers with a single and coherent picture of the past.⁹⁶ Yet in the process of simplifying US strategy he also obscured an important part of the story. To

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paraphrase intellectual historian Mark Poster, in relying on “interpretive strategies” that privileged a discussion of the containment of the Soviet threat, while at the same time neglecting other “disruptive features,” such as the push for the liberation of the satellites and the rollback of Soviet power, Gaddis presented his readers with a portrait of the past in which American strategy was painted as fundamentally non-aggressive, and thus, morally acceptable to the American self-image.⁹⁷ This, of course, had profound consequences that Gaddis still prefers not to explore.⁹⁸

Despite these problems, his thesis remained the standard interpretation of American Cold War policy for a number of years. For modernists searching for single, broadly accepted meanings, containment became an integral part of the all-encompassing Cold War consensus. Although this paradigm showed its first signs of weakening in the 1960s, thus mirroring the decline of American consensus ideology as a whole, it was not until the early 1990s that its mystique finally began to erode. Over the last decade and a half, however, a new generation of scholars has emerged to challenge the hegemony of the containment consensus.⁹⁹ Beatrice Heuser, Walter Hixson, John Yurencko, Scott Lucas, Greg Mitrovich and Peter Grose have, in their own way, suggested that “containment” – which has been defined for mass consumption as, “the American effort, by military, political and economic means to resist communist expansion throughout the world”¹⁰⁰ – does not, in and of itself, reflect either the means or objectives pursued by the Truman administration. Although the definition of containment, presented above, is somewhat of a caricature and the majority of historians who have dealt with this subject recognize that “containment” was not a single idea, but rather a bundle of assumptions, my point is that by labeling US Cold War strategy in such a way, policy makers and historians have simplified a complex phenomenon to such an extent that there is very little correspondence between the word and the historical reality it purports to describe. The same argument can be leveled against those scholars who have sought to rename American strategy “rollback,” “liberation” or “Titoism.” American strategy was at once, all and none of the above.

In the article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Kennan made it clear that his goal was never to set out American Cold War policy or strategy. Rather his aim was to clarify Soviet objectives in the postwar world. It was within the context of explaining the nature of the Soviet threat to the American people that he offered a few limited policy prescriptions. Picking up on the themes implicit in the Clifford–Elsey report, the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Kennan recommended that the United States develop “a firm policy of containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter force at every point where they show signs of encroaching on a peaceful and stable world.”¹⁰¹ Yet, despite the public rallying around the idea of “containment,” which occurred in the aftermath of the article’s publication, Kennan’s proposal was not that simple. In a much less frequently quoted passage he added that, “the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must operate … and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find

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their outlet in either the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”¹⁰² However, he failed to clarify what measures he envisioned falling into this category or the degree to which these measures should be applied. Nor did he deal in any substantive way with the ultimate objectives of American Cold War policy. Thus, rather than outlining a coherent statement of policy or strategy, the article actually complicated the situation because it obliterated the distinction between what Kennan termed the “containment of the Soviet threat” and his subsequent suggestion that the US should “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” The result was a strategic vision that created a false dichotomy between two strategic tendencies.

Not surprisingly, just as today historians wrestle with the question of what Kennan meant by containment, so too did journalists and policymakers at the time.¹⁰³ Starting in 1947 there were sharply divergent views over just what “the containment of Russia” implied. The debate began only days after the article’s release. Although the National Week editorialized that American policy was to “seek by every available means to block or slow the expansion by Russia … [until Russia] will blow up internally,”¹⁰⁴ Ernest Lindley of the Washington Post was convinced that “the Western world not only can prevent Soviet-Communist expansion, but can influence developments both within Russia and the International Communist Movement.”¹⁰⁵ Moreover, while Newsweek told its readers that the course “X” had recommended significantly paralleled the Truman Doctrine, journalist Arthur Krock, writing in The New York Times, argued that Kennan’s analysis was a move away from “the get tough policy” the administration had been pursuing since the announcement of the Truman Doctrine.”¹⁰⁶

The controversy over the X article took on a new dimension when Walter Lippmann published his lengthy critique of it, in twelve installments, in the New York Herald Tribune. His essays were eventually republished in a small volume titled The Cold War. However, rather than clarifying what Kennan meant to say, Lippmann also compounded the problem by offering two readings of Kennan’s position. In the first columns to appear, Lippmann argued that the strategy outlined was essentially passive, reactive and defensive. He complained that, as a result, it forced the United States to respond to Soviet provocations all over the world, in the process allowing Stalin to set the agenda in the Cold War.¹⁰⁷ He concluded that the objective of containment was “nothing more substantial than the hope that in ten or fifteen years the Soviet power, will as a result of long frustration,” either break-up or mellow.¹⁰⁸ Yet, only a few weeks later, Lippmann also pointed out that the United States had a “debt of honor” to the “countless patriots” in Eastern Europe and that the Truman Administration did not want to accept any settlement that left Eastern Europe within the Soviet Bloc. As a result he wrote that US diplomacy was pursuing a three-pronged approach: preventing Russia from expanding her power, preventing her from consolidating it and “attempting to compel her to contradict it.”¹⁰⁹ However, Lippmann too failed to reconcile these two very different policy prescriptions. While one was passive and reactive, the other implied that the US should take the initiative and

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adopt an active policy designed to undermine Soviet power. The discrepancy between Lipmann’s initial understanding of Kennan’s strategy, evident in his early writings, and that exhibited in his latter article, begs the question: was he, like the rest of us, confused? Or did he simply change his mind as time went on. If he did change his mind, why? Did someone from inside the administration provide him with additional information? If so it would not have been the first time.¹¹⁰

Until his death, Kennan maintained that while he read Lippmann’s essays in 1948, and wrote a letter to the journalist in an attempt to clarify his position, he never sent the letter. Kennan’s response is, however, revealing. He wrote:

[y]ou choose to interpret “containment” … as beginning at the borders of the Soviet Union, and as committing us to an active campaign for the liberation of the satellite countries. It was never meant that way. By “containment” I meant hold Russian political expansion, as far as possible, at the point it had reached to date … We all knew that there was nothing we could do directly, at that time about the countries behind that line.¹¹¹

His letter to Lippmann went on to become his public position on the subject.¹¹² He never publicly acknowledged that liberation or rollback were in any way part of his Cold War strategy. In fact just the opposite. He eventually became a vocal critic of Eisenhower and Dulles’ foreign policy, labeled for political reasons in 1952, as “liberation.”¹¹³ Nor did he ever explain how his vision of “containment” outlined in the X article meshed with his thinking in NSC 20/4: US objectives toward the Soviet Union or NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects written only a year after the X article appeared. While he always maintained, that a retraction of Soviet power and influence must be accomplished by peaceful means, both papers provided the operational branch of the CIA with the rationale it needed to undertake covert operations designed to liberate Eastern Europe and roll back Soviet power.¹¹⁴

No doubt Kennan’s thinking on the subject in the summer of 1947 had yet to fully develop and I believe his views likely changed over time. He probably envisioned “containment,” at least initially, in defensive terms, as a response to perceived Soviet provocations in Eastern Europe. But by the spring of 1948, containment was almost certainly part of a much larger offensive strategy that included covert operations designed to encourage the Soviets to withdraw from Eastern Europe. In 1950 he acknowledged this in a press statement on foreign policy. He stated that he originally envisioned covert “activities” would be used to highlight “the natural embarrassments of power” that came with the Soviet empire. He hoped that eventually the Russians “would reconcile themselves to a certain retirement, at least from Eastern Germany and Central Europe as well.” However, the objective was to conduct operations that would leave a door open so the Soviets could retire without a drastic blow to their prestige. By the summer of 1948, he states that his views on covert operations had changed. He believed that during this year the Soviets became convinced that they had to

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hold on to Eastern Europe at all costs. The new Russian attitude, Kennan concluded, “boded no good (sic) for a policy that was based on the hope of gradual and peaceful retirement of Soviet power.”¹¹⁵ Unfortunately, it seems that he forgot to tell those involved in covert operations that he had a change of heart.

All of this is only a hypothesis, however, since there is additional evidence that undermines Kennan’s assertion that he changed his mind about covert operations in 1948. Indeed, during the summer and fall he continued to oversee both policy papers whose objectives clearly went beyond containment and covert operations designed to destabilize the Soviet satellites by force. Given that we will never really know what Kennan meant in the X article, it would seem that the more interesting question would be why did he feel it necessary to construct his strategic vision in such an awkward and ambiguous manner? After a great deal of thought I have come to the conclusion that Kennan’s strategic thinking probably reflected an element of “cultural modernism,” which privileged flexibility over stability and ambiguity over certainty. As he argued in 1953, during the immediate postwar years the United States was dealing with “an endlessly changing and largely unpredictable” environment. As a result, US strategy had to be “comparative and relative rather than absolute.”¹¹⁶ Although this argument would appear to contradict what other scholars have maintained was Kennan’s innate conservatism, it is important to remember that individual philosophies are rarely particularistic.

While Kennan favored relativism over absolutism in the formation of policy, Walter Lippmann, rejected this position. He argued, in the summer of 1947, that Kennan created “a strategic monstrosity.”¹¹⁷ I agree, Kennan’s complicated position juxtaposed competing strategic tendencies, however, it never completely reconciled them. This meant policymakers could read into his convoluted framework and extrapolate their own “strategic visions.” In the next chapter I will argue that the breakdown between policy and operations was reinforced because the bureaucratic machinery that was put in place to govern covert operations failed to function effectively. As a result, from 1947 through 1950, the operational branch of the CIA received very little guidance. In the end, covert operations were guided more by a maverick operational culture with a flair for operational and institutional independence than a coherent or unified strategy for waging the Cold War.

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3
The inauguration of political warfare

Under the National Security Act, the CIA was set up to coordinate, evaluate and disseminate intelligence information. In the summer of 1947 it remained unclear whether it would conduct “covert operations.” As political scientist Amy Zegart has recently pointed out these types of activities were never explicitly authorized by the National Security Act.¹ Scholars have long debated what role (if any) these operations were to have in the postwar era. Until recently the traditional argument has always been that when Truman established the CIA in 1947 he had not intended to include a psychological warfare capability. There were a number of individuals within the administration who believed it would not be necessary to carry out psychological operations in the postwar world. Moreover, when the Office of War Information was quietly transferred to the State Department, after World War II ended, Truman forgot to mention it to his first Secretary of State, James Brynes, who was traveling abroad.² This lapse in protocol was significant because it illustrated that these types of activities were not at the forefront of the President’s agenda.

During the first years of the Cold War, psychological operations existed, metaphorically at least, in the basement of the State Department, where they were overseen by officers who felt “embarrassed” by the addition of this job to their traditional duties.³ Moreover, as part of the demobilization campaign, Congress took direct aim at these tactics. According to Edward Lilly, the first in-house historian of these activities, the information program became the “perennial whipping boy” for many Congressmen during the immediate postwar years.⁴ Their animosity was so great that the SANACC sub-committee recommended, in 1948, that operations be put under the direction of a new secret organization with an innocuous title designed to shield it from prying eyes. One suggestion was the “Political Science Agency.”⁵

Still, as we have seen, there was a powerful group within the administration who lobbied for the extension of covert activities. In 1947 a number of high-ranking officials, including Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Director of Central Intelligence Sydney Souers, John Foster Dulles and American Ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, all petitioned the president for their continuation.⁶ It was George Kennan, the new director of the Policy Planning Staff, however, who played the critical role in the Truman Administration’s expansion

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of these operations.⁷ Yet, as I suggested in the last chapter, Kennan’s thinking on this question still remains open to debate. According to the director of the Policy Planning staff, when he first sanctioned the use of these operations he did so on the assumption that they would be used to “highlight the natural embarrassments of power” that came with the Soviet empire. He hoped that by exposing Soviet weakness Stalin would lose hope in the political conquests of Eastern Europe and reconcile himself to a “certain retirement, at least from eastern German and perhaps other regions of Eastern and Central Europe as well.” However, after 1948, as the Soviets became more and more determined to hold onto Eastern Europe, he came to the conclusion that covert operations were no longer practical.⁸

Kennan had a longstanding interest in intelligence. In the summer of 1942 he was sent to Portugal as Counselor of the Legation. However, his real job, as he told an audience at the National War College in 1947, was to coordinate American intelligence activities.⁹ What he actually accomplished between 1942 and 1946 remains a mystery. However the available evidence suggests that he continued to be active in this area. For example, in June of 1946, Director of Central Intelligence, Hoyt S. Vandenberg, appointed him as a “Special Consultant for Intelligence” for the Central Intelligence Group. And of the three copies made of NSC 4/a, in 1947, one of them went to him – the other two copies went to the President and to the DCI.

Despite his murky record in early psychological operations George Kennan did play a crucial role in the development of the United States political warfare capability in 1948. According to historian Doug Selvage, “it was Kennan and the Policy Planning Staff that provided the blueprint for OPC in terms of its chain of command and the geographical and political scope of its operations.”¹⁰ Yet both the operations personnel and the bureaucratic machinery he put in place insured that Donovan’s legacy continued unabated. Furthermore, Kennan’s reticence to develop either a coherent statement of national policy or a corresponding strategic doctrine actually widened the gap that existed between policy and operations. Eventually a chasm opened within Kennan’s already complicated strategic vision and a number of conflicting and contradictory strategic tendencies emerged. As a result, between the years 1949 and 1953 American psychological warriors were able to devise and implement operations as they wished with little or no coordination or oversight.

Although, in January of 1947, the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee had begun planning psychological operations and an operational nucleus existed in the Office of Special Operations, no official support existed within the government for the continuation of these activities. Both the SSU and the SSEC were the result of ad hoc decisions with no presidential approval. What was needed was presidential authorization, backed by congressional authority, to conduct operations in the postwar world. Today, scholars trace the official mandate back to section 102 of the National Security Act, which charged the CIA with “performing such functions and duties related to national security as the NSC may from time to time direct.”¹¹ Yet in 1947, it was by no means clear that this clause provided the CIA with a clear operational mandate.

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It was Secretary of Defense James Forrestal who first brought the matter up for discussion. In mid-1947 he asked the new Director of Central Intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, whether operations such as psychological warfare, sabotage, and support for underground resistance movements fell under the CIA’s purview, as defined by the National Security Act. Hillenkoetter initially responded in the negative. In the face of Forrestal’s continued prodding, however, Hillenkoetter turned to the CIA’s legal counsel, Lawrence Houston, for guidance. Houston agreed with the DCI that these operations should not be placed within the CIA. He argued that, despite the vague language employed in Section 102 of the CIA’s charter, black propaganda and other forms of special operations “would be an unwarranted extension” of the CIA’s mandate.¹² Houston’s legal opinion, which should have ended speculation that the CIA would control these types of activities, instead opened the issue for debate. The central question was if the CIA was not going to claim these activities, under whose auspices should they be placed?

In October 1947, one month after Huston released his brief, the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee forwarded its own report on psychological warfare to Under Secretary of State, Robert Lovett. The committee argued that in times of war and threat of war, psychological operations should either be under the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a reconstituted SANACC Committee, or under the NSC.¹³ Still smarting from their experience with the OSS during World War II, the military wanted to ensure that in the postwar world, psychological warfare operations remained under their control.¹⁴ This meant that they did not want to see these activities housed in either the State Department or the CIA.

Hillenkoetter’s Deputy Director, Donald Wright, kept the DCI informed of these developments. Despite the operational nucleus that existed within OSO, both Hillenkoetter and Wright agreed with the military that the CIA should not conduct these types of operations. However, they differed on where they should be located. Hillenkoetter believed that they should be under the command of the JCS while Wright thought they should be under the direction of the NSC.¹⁵ Their differences are important because they suggest that as late as the end of 1947 there was no consensus within the CIA, or the administration as a whole, over which government department should control and execute psychological warfare operations during the postwar world.

International events forced the issue to the forefront of the administration’s agenda in late 1947. During the second meeting of the National Security Council in November, the crisis in Italy took centre stage. On the verge of economic and political collapse, Italy was important to the United States only within the context of rising Soviet–American hostility. Otherwise, due to its political, economic and military weakness, it was considered a “strategic liability.”¹⁶ At the time the Christian Democratic Party, under Prime Minister Alcide de Gasperi, sat atop the Italian government. However, since the end of World War II the Communist Party had been actively exploiting the severe economic problems that had engulfed the country.¹⁷ As a result it had significantly gained in strength

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and in 1946 it united with the Italian Socialist Party to form “the Peoples Bloc.” By 1947 the Peoples Bloc had over two million members and controlled 19 percent of the seats in parliament.¹⁸ In the face of growing communist support the American Ambassador to Italy, James C. Dunn, asked de Gasperie to dissolve parliament and form a government without communist or socialist participation. Although initially reluctant, the Prime Minister finally agreed and resigned eleven days later. A new government was quickly formed.¹⁹

How best to ensure the election of a “democratic” Italian government, in the elections scheduled for the next year, was the topic of conversation at the first meeting of the National Security Council. Consequently the first statement of American objectives toward Italy, “NSC 1/1: The Position of the United States With Respect to Italy,” was completed on 14 November 1947.²⁰ It stated that the United States should “actively combat communist propaganda in Italy by an effective information program and by all other practical means…”²¹ A plan was quickly drawn up to furnish political aid.²² The use of both overt and covert psychological warfare operations quickly became a critical part of this plan.²³ At the second NSC meeting in December, it was decided that these operations would be placed under the direction of the Department of State. For all intents and purposes, State received these activities by default because neither the NSC (who viewed itself as an advisory body, not an operating agency) nor the military services or the CIA wanted them.²⁴.

Over the next month a psychological warfare paper, prepared by the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee, SWNCC 304/11, was rewritten and presented at the third meeting of the NSC as, “NSC/4: The Coordination of Foreign Information Measures.”²⁵ The paper placed overt information activities under the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs and charged the State Department with overseeing open or “white” psychological operations during times of peace. Despite the initial decision to place all psychological operations within the State Department, at this meeting, as a result of George Marshall’s “vehement opposition” to his department controlling these operations, the job was given to the CIA. It was not that Marshall morally disapproved of psychological operations but rather that he worried that the State Department’s international credibility would be tarnished if such operations became public.²⁶ Given the Secretary of State’s concerns the decision was made to separate information activities and psychological warfare, in much the same manner as had occurred during World War II, when Roosevelt divided these operations between OWI and OSS.²⁷ Thus, a secret annex to NSC 4, known today as NSC 4/a – or the Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on Psychological Operations – stated that while the State Department would oversee “informational activities,” the CIA would be charged with executing “covert psychological operations or “black” operations.”²⁸ In contrast to white operations – where the origin of the operation is known – black operations consist of any operation that is not to be attributed to the host country.

As policymakers began the process of drafting the NSC 4 series, Sydney Souers, executive secretary for the National Security Council, lobbied for the

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inclusion of some sort of “panel of guidance,” which he believed would be necessary to provide the CIA with advice on American foreign policy.²⁹ The military services also initially supported this idea, arguing that an independent psychological warfare organization should be set up to provide the CIA with strategic guidance. They envisioned the Director of Special Studies functioning as a policy liaison between the DCI and the NSC. Hillenkoetter, however, opposed this plan on the grounds that it would undermine his authority. As a result, Souers’ panel was removed from the final draft of NSC 4/a. Instead, a proviso was inserted that charged the DCI with ensuring that all operations were consistent with American policy.

Given the DCI’s hostility to the proposed panel of guidance, one could conclude that the bureaucratic procedure put in place was a victory for Hillenkoetter over the NSC and the military. However, the panel was removed from the final draft of NSC 4/a because both Secretary of State Marshall and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall believed that it was not in their best interests to allow this proposal to go through. Apparently neither man wanted “the responsibility or the bother” that a panel of guidance would entail.³⁰ They were already overburdened with administrative duties and did not relish another set of bureaucratic commitments. At any rate, when the NSC finally adopted NSC 4/a, Hillenkoetter was left to oversee operations he neither believed in nor wanted.³¹ Furthermore, the only instruction he received was that he was to ensure that all operations conducted by the Office of Special Operations were consistent with American foreign policy, a task that proved infinitely more difficult than he originally envisioned.

Although a full-time Inter-departmental Coordinating Staff (ICS) – consisting of one member from the State Department, one member from Defense and one from the CIA – was eventually set up to coordinate the foreign information program within the government so that a “unified and consistent” picture could be presented, it was never able to successfully coordinate strategies. It took three months after NSC 4 was signed to appoint a chairman to the ICS, two additional months before the staff was up and running, and an additional four months before its first paper was approved for circulation. During this critical period, from January through September of 1948, the various government agencies conducting psychological operations were left to function without guidance or coordination. This point was made clear in ICS’s first report, completed in May of 1948. Author Frederick Oeschner wrote that there remained “a marked need for interdepartmental coordination” in the foreign information program. [And a] closer working relationship between the policy-forming and information planning” offices is essential.”³² Eight months later, in December of 1948, the situation had still not been rectified. The ICS annual report stated that if the “information program is to be used as a practical instrument for supporting policy, then it is axiomatic that those responsible know what United States policy is.”³³

Despite the lack of guidance available on 22 December 1947, the same day that NSC 4/a was approved, a special operations group from the CIA was sent to

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Italy under the direction of famed spymaster James Jesus Angleton, another OSS/SSU veteran.³⁴ Angleton’s primary responsibility was to transfer American dollars surreptitiously to various front organizations for use in the election scheduled for the following year.³⁵ All told, the administration spent between ten and twenty million dollars on anti-communist propaganda and other “improvised covert operations.”³⁶ This, of course, was in addition to the millions of dollars received by the Italian Government under the Marshall Plan. Initially the money was funneled through the Economic Stabilization Fund, which was created in 1945 to minimize swings in the dollar. After the money was withdrawn from this account it was laundered through various individual bank accounts and then transferred to covert operatives who bought Italian lira and donated it to various anti-communist groups.³⁷ Additional funds eventually became available from the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA), which was charged with overseeing the European Recovery Program.³⁸ The ECA was set up in 1948 as part of the European Recovery Act. Its primary responsibility was to carry out American economic policy in Europe and to help coordinate the Marshal Plan. The ECA was placed under the direction of the State Department and their activities were to be coordinated through the ICS. As part of this mandate ECA was to conduct information activities designed to counter anti-communist propaganda and put a positive spin on American foreign policy.

Over the next four months a number of operations were initiated. One of the most successful was the “Letters to Italy” campaign organized, in part, by journalists Drew Pearson, who had strong ties to the CIA, and Generoso Pope, a leading figure in the Italian-American community. He also controlled one of the most influential Italian newspapers in the United States.³⁹ Pope’s papers printed “form” letters that could be sent to relatives in Italy. In March of 1948 the State Department’s radio station, Voice of America, also began an extensive propaganda campaign and a number of celebrities, including boxer Rocky Graziano, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, made a series of radio appeals to the Italian people.⁴⁰ Both the “Letters to Italy” campaign and the Voice of America made it clear that if the communists were victorious in the elections, not only would Italians not be able to receive economic gifts from abroad, but the European Recovery Program could be terminated.⁴¹ Eventually the Catholic Church also became involved in the project and priests began telling their parishioners to write letters to relatives in Italy alerting them to the dangers of voting communist in the forthcoming elections. Although Pope Pius XII had originally taken an ambivalent position on the election because of his suspicion of democracy, he eventually changed his mind and threatened to impose religious sanction and refuse absolution to those who planned to vote communist.⁴²

Both campaigns also stressed that Italians who voted communist could be barred entry into the United States. In 1924 Congress had passed a law that denied entry to anyone who advocated the overthrow of the American government by force. Apparently this law had been used to expel communists during the interwar years and there was talk that it would be renewed.⁴³ The movie

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Ninotchka was also re-released in the hopes that it too could be used to convince Italians not to vote communist. Starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas it satirized life under communism.⁴⁴ A number of other operations, including bribery, forged and unattributed publications, a transfer of arms, and a migration campaign were also employed.⁴⁵ According to McCargar the majority of these operations were hastily improvised and “could barely be dignified by the adjective covert.”⁴⁶ Yet they were apparently successful and on 20 April 1948, the Christian Democratic Party won the national election by securing 48.5 percent of the popular vote.⁴⁷ Although de Gasperi was once again forced to form a coalition government the perceived success of US operations in Italy produced a “sense of omnipotence, of confidence that the Free World could successfully engage in political warfare against communist subversion.”⁴⁸ It was shortly thereafter that the Special Procedures Group shifted its attention to the Soviet threat.

On 22 December 1947, only a few days after the passage of NSC 4/a, Hillenkoetter instructed Thomas C. Cassidy, an ex-banker from Chicago and one of Donovan’s most trusted aides, to organize a foreign information branch with the Office of Special Operations (OSO). This group was renamed the Special Procedures Group (SPG) and Col. Donald H. Galloway, another holdover from OSS and SSU, was made the Assistant Director for Special Operations. Although the SPG came into existence on 1 January 1948, it was not until two months later that it was ready to undertake operations. In March, Cassidy and Galloway began to plan operations designed to undermine the strength of foreign governments, organizations and individuals who were engaged in activities perceived to be inimical to American interests.⁴⁹ At this time, their number one priority was defined as, to “encourage the freedom-loving elements in those countries that have been over-run by Communism.”⁵⁰ So it was not surprising that the first two operations Cassidy undertook were designed with this objective in mind. The goal of the first operation, codenamed Project Umpire, was to beam propaganda into the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by way of a transmitter, strategically placed in Western Germany. One month later, the second operation, Project Ultimate, was to begin dropping propaganda leaflets behind the Iron Curtain using weather balloons.⁵¹

Once these operations had been agreed upon within the CIA, however, a number of questions remained to be addressed. For example, the degree to which SPG should “encourage the freedom-loving elements” in Eastern Europe remained unclear. Since the CIA had received no guidance on this question, one of the first things that Galloway did was to ask the State Department to furnish him with some sort of instruction in this area. In March 1948, he approached one of Kennan’s aides at the Policy Planning Staff, John Paton Davies Jr., and asked him to discuss the matter with his superiors. Instead of providing any specific policy guidance, however, Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett simply gave his tentative approval for the operations being planned. At the time, Lovett also made it clear that he did not want to know any of the details of the campaigns.⁵²

Less than a week later, however, George Kennan withdrew Lovett’s support,

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telling Cassidy that the “time was not ripe” for a campaign designed to use such “incendiary” propaganda.⁵³ Kennan had begun to voice his concerns about operational planning in the Special Procedures Group beginning in December 1947. This was despite the fact that it was not officially up and running until three months later.⁵⁴ As time went on, Kennan’s concerns only seemed to mount, and in March – no doubt in response to the release of NSC 7, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter – he worried that the operations about to be undertaken were too “aggressive.” Kennan wanted to know who would be operating the radios used in Project Ultimate and what was going to be said.⁵⁵ Legitimate questions certainly, however, they were classified as operational details and Cassidy had always maintained that he did not have to discuss operational details with the State Department. Moreover, Lovett had already made it clear that he did not want to know the details of the operations.

In the face of Kennan’s obstructionism Cassidy turned to Galloway and Hillenkoetter for advice on how to resolve the situation. He pointed out that the pamphlets he planned to use in Project Ultimate were in no way as incendiary as those being currently employed in the Italian campaign, nor indeed, he argued, were they as inflammatory as those being contemplated by Raymond Murphy in the basement of the State Department. Rather he argued, they merely “exhorted brotherly love, (and) sympathy” for the Soviet people.⁵⁶ Cassidy had a point. OSO operations in Italy and Murphy’s operations in Western Europe were provocative. Murphy’s operations, in particular, went well beyond those designed by Cassidy and Galloway. Having joined the State Department’s East European Division in 1925, over the years he had built up a group of independent operatives. In 1937, when the East European division was transferred to European Affairs, he was charged with debriefing communist defectors. By 1946 Murphy had built up his own secret intelligence network and was running psychological operations from within the State Department. He had a number of undercover agents in France, Rome, and Germany. All of these operations were conducted without any direction or oversight.⁵⁷ When Dean Acheson replaced George Marshall as Secretary of State in January of 1947, Murphy was finally reigned in and forced to close down his activities. However, he quickly moved on to a new job working for a junior senator in the House Un-American Activities Committee. Here, Murphy brought Whittaker Chambers to Richard Nixon’s attention.⁵⁸

Given the shenanigans going on within the State Department, it should come as no surprise that, after reviewing the entire situation, Hillenkoetter told Cassidy to ignore Kennan and to go ahead with the operations, which were scheduled to begin in April 1948.⁵⁹ The DCI based his decision to defy Kennan on his understanding that, although under NSC 4/a, he was required to “consult,” with the State Department, he was not required to “defer” to them.⁶⁰ Armed with the DCI’s go-ahead, Cassidy initiated plans to begin the operations. His refusal to give in on this matter was no doubt a product of his experiences working for Donovan during World War II. Schooled in the Donovan Tradition, Cassidy tried to build up the SPG in the same fashion as the OSS, and in the

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process, he stepped on some pretty important toes.⁶¹ In the spring of 1948, there were very few toes more fragile or more powerful than those of George Kennan.⁶²

The situation was made worse because Kennan did not think very much of Hillenkoetter, whom historians have characterized as “weak and ineffective,” with “little taste for the bureaucratic infighting or empire building.”⁶³ Given the tough standards that Kennan set for those he worked with, it is not surprising that he and Hillenkoetter had problems.⁶⁴ Their relationship had been on a downward spiral since March 1948, when the CIA failed to predict the Bogotá Riots and provide adequate warning to the State Department on the deteriorating situation in Colombia. The debacle that resulted left George Marshall caught between two warring factions. Hillenkoetter had been blamed for the fiasco and apparently Kennan had never forgiven him.⁶⁵ The tension that developed between the two men played a critical role in two events, which occurred over the next two years. The first matter is discussed below. The second event is outlined in the next chapter. Both underscore the important role that personalities and bureaucratic imperatives played in the evolution of American Cold War strategy.

The traditional argument has always been that in December 1947 the United States initiated limited “psychological operations” under the NSC 4/a. Six months later, the story goes, because of international events – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war scare of March 1948 and the Berlin Blockade – the Truman Administration decided to increase the scope and pace of these activities and initiate “covert operations.” However, newly declassified documents suggest that in actuality external events played only a small role in the expansion of these operations. Instead, the sudden push for a revitalized “political warfare capability,” which resulted in the passage of “NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects” in June of 1948, was the result of George Kennan’s frustration with Hillenkoetter’s decision to defy him on Projects “Umpire” and “Ultimate.” Thus, in this case as in so many others, domestic imperatives drove the evolution of American Cold War strategy.

Less than a month after Hillenkoetter told Cassidy to go ahead with the operations, a proposal for a new political warfare agency appeared. On 3 May1948, a paper titled “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” was circulated within the National Security Council. According to Arthur Darling, it was vintage Kennan.⁶⁶ There is, however, some evidence to suggest that John Paton Davies may have drafted the document, as Kennan spent most of the month in the hospital recovering from ulcers.⁶⁷ Davies had recently joined the Policy Planning Staff as an expert on Asia. He very quickly became involved in the development of covert operations. Unfortunately, his tenure under Kennan did not serve him well and he became one of the many martyrs sacrificed in the domestic cold war. These events will be relayed in detail in the next chapter. The point that I want to make here is that, irrespective of who really authored the report, it stemmed from within the Policy Planning Staff and, given that no staff paper was released without Kennan’s expressed authorization, there can be little doubt that he was behind its language, recommendations and conclusions.

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The report suggested that a new independent organization should be set up to plan for “political warfare” in the Cold War. The term “political warfare” was defined as “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” It argued that these operations could be both overt and covert and include political alliances, economic policies and the encouragement of underground resistance organizations.⁶⁸ It is important to recognize that this was the first time the word “political warfare” appeared in any postwar discussion of American intelligence planning. Previously, all discussions referred to these activities as either “psychological warfare operations” or “psychological operations.” In fact, American planners during World War II had originally dismissed the term “political warfare” because it was seen as “too British.”⁶⁹ Yet, in May 1948, Kennan made the decision to replace the term “psychological operations” with “political warfare:” The question is why? In her official history of the Central Intelligence Agency, completed for the Church Committee, Anne Karalekas tells us that the shift from psychological operations under NSC 4/a to political warfare under NSC 10/2 was significant, because the “latter meant the direct intervention in the electoral process of sovereign governments, rather than attempts to influence public opinion activities through the media.”⁷⁰ However erroneous this distinction was, until recently it was the accepted norm.

The traditional argument has always been that the United States only began to conduct political warfare in June 1948, after the passage of NSC 10/2. Yet American intervention in the Italian elections and the French labor disputes were well underway by the time NSC 10/2 appeared. By definition these operations were political interventions, not psychological operations.⁷¹ Thus, when tracing the evolution of American covert operations during the years 1947 through 1948 one cannot rely solely on operational distinctions to clarify the evolution of strategy. Rather, the push to adopt NSC 10/2 and the language used therein, must be viewed as part of a larger power struggle between the State Department and the CIA. Darling made this point explicitly when he argued that, for all practical purposes, the phrases psychological warfare and political warfare “are interchangeable. It better suited [Kennan’s] argument to use ‘political’ rather than ‘psychological’ [because] political matters are by tradition the particular concern of the Department of State.”⁷² In any case, Hillenkoetter refused to cooperate. In all of his replies to Kennan’s proposal Hillenkoetter consistently substituted the term “psychological warfare” for “political warfare.”⁷³

Despite the war of words that surrounded its release, “The Inauguration of Political Warfare” provides one of the best indicators of the thinking that underlay American political and psychological warfare planning in the spring of 1948. It was presented to the NSC on 4 May 1948.⁷⁴ Under the plan, Kennan outlined four operations that he believed should be immediately undertaken. The first option concerned “Liberation Committees” whose purpose was defined by Kennan as: to act as foci of national hope and revive a sense of purpose among political refugees from the Soviet world; to provide inspiration for continuing popular resistance within the countries of the Soviet world; and to serve as a

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potential nucleus for all-out liberation movements in the event of war. These committees were to be supported by “trusted American citizens.”⁷⁵ The second level of operations was designed to “support indigenous Anti-Communist elements in the threatened countries of the free world,” and advocated “preventative direct action in Free Countries.”⁷⁶ Kennan’s third point advocated direct action to protect critical American infrastructure, while at the same time providing for the elimination of products that were critical to the Soviets.⁷⁷ The fourth option promoted the use of paramilitary operations, guerrilla units, sabotage forces, subversive operations and rebellions to destabilize communist governments.⁷⁸ To conduct these operations Kennan called for an independent organization to be set up under a new Director of Special Studies. The director would be nominated by the Department of State and appointed by the NSC. He would be responsible to the State Department but not, and this is important, formally associated with it. He would develop plans for operations, “provide for their execution … and review the entire program.” The Director would also “develop a personnel training program and a catalogue of special supplies and logistical support” for the operations undertaken.⁷⁹ It appears that Kennan believed these operations would be limited and he was opposed to giving these activities to the CIA because he felt that it would conduct such operations “independently of national policy considerations.”⁸⁰

The critical question that went unanswered was, to what end? It would be five months after this paper was circulated before President Truman would sign off on NSC 20/4, which outlined for the first time US objectives toward the Soviet Union, and another year before American objectives toward Eastern Europe were made available to those charged with conducting operations in the field. Yet, within months, the Office of Policy Coordination would be asked to organize the East European communities into liberation committees. These groups would go on to provide the nucleus for a number of covert operations behind the Iron Curtain. Beginning in 1949, hundreds of émigrés were sent into Albania, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania.⁸¹ More often than not these operations came too late to be of any help to those trying to challenge Soviet control of Eastern Europe.⁸² The result was that countless agents loyal to the West lost their lives in operations that had little or no chance of success.

Kennan’s refusal to clarify American policy also had dire consequences for those in the Special Procedures Group, who were under pressure from the military to start setting up stay-behind networks in the off chance that World War III broke out. Just as Kennan began his campaign to remove Hillenkoetter from the process, the military added pressure to increase the scope and pace of American covert operations. In March 1948, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal publicly voiced his concerns about the slow pace of implementation of NSC 4/a. Furthermore, the JCS got into the act and began to push for their own organization to deliver psychological warfare. However, they were determined to ensure that this new group would not fall under what they characterized as the “lily fingered treatment of” the State Department.⁸³ As a result, when the JCS received a copy

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of Kennan’s proposal they simply sat on it. Not only were they hoping to keep psychological operations under their control but they also had a number of specific concerns about Kennan’s proposal for a new director of Special Studies. The JCS believed that his responsibilities would infringe upon and duplicate many of their existing programs.⁸⁴

As State and Defense continued to jockey for position Hillenkoetter and his men received no guidance of substance.⁸⁵ In the same month as Kennan’s paper appeared, and two months after he first approached John Davies for some type of guidance, Cassidy formally asked the State Department for the weekly policy directives, which were issued to the Voice of America and a liaison officer who would function as a link between his operations and the development of Cold War policy.⁸⁶ Over the next few months he made a number of similar requests. Cassidy’s repeated requests indicate that the director of the Special Procedures Group was not getting sufficient guidance to run his operations. However, in this case it is not clear what, if anything, happened. We do know that in 1947 and 1948 very few people were aware of what Cassidy was doing. In fact, only the Secretary of State, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, Robert Lovett, George Allen and a select few members of the Policy Planning Staff, had knowledge of NSC 4/a or the operations being conducted by the SPG. Given Congressional hostility, State’s reluctance to articulate national policy, and the bitter feelings that existed between Kennan and Hillenkoetter, it is doubtful that SPG received any guidance of substance.⁸⁷ This became a serious problem when State and Defense began to ask for contradictory operations to be undertaken behind the “Iron Curtain.”

Unfortunately the military’s role in the onset of American covert operations was more complicated than that of the State Department. With the exception of James Forrestal many of those in the Joint Chiefs of Staff remained ambivalent about their use in the postwar world. Indeed until 1949 the only branch to organize a psychological warfare division was the Air Force. Although both the War and Navy Departments had recognized the need for some type of psychological warfare program neither service had taken the steps necessary to provide for the continuation of these activities. According to Edward Lilly each service believed that in peacetime these types of actions were not “sufficiently important to require continuous and detailed staff consideration.”⁸⁸

Yet as Kennan’s paper made the rounds, the JCS suddenly became determined to reassert its voice. They began to argue that their influence in NCS 4 and NSC 4/a had not been protected and Forrestal asked that any new paper on psychological warfare recognize the military’s role in this area. In line with this new interest a “special section” in the Joint Strategic Plans Group (JSPG) was set up in order to service the “policy and logistic” demands. Yet, it quickly became apparent that this group would not be able to fulfill its mandate and they recommended that a new psychological warfare section be established directly under the JCS. However, when the proposal was presented each service filed numerous exceptions so that the original paper was never adopted.⁸⁹ The central issue revolved around the question of which branch would be given the

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dominant role in planning and executing these activities. Given the power struggle already going on over the command and control of nuclear weapons the issue was simply swept under the table. Although a few members of the JSPG continued to raise the question there remained no individual within the JCS who was charged with overseeing the psychological aspect of military policy. As a result, Lilly tells us that during this period there was “no continuity” in the JCS position and its knowledge on the subject was both “ephemeral and temporary.”⁹⁰ This became a serious problem as covert operators began to turn to the military for logistical and operational support.

In February 1948, Truman appointed three men to look at the performance of the CIA as a whole. The group was set up because neither Forrestal nor Souers had time to supervise the CIA’s operations. As a result, the President decided to assemble a group of outside consultants who would “check up” on the agency from time to time.⁹¹ It was hoped that this limited oversight would prevent many of the problems that had developed during World War II. Set up under the direction of Allen Dulles, the other members included William H. Jackson and Mathias F. Correa – previously, Correa had been assigned as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy. (William Jackson went on to become the CIA’s Deputy Director of Intelligence in 1950.) The point man in the group, however, was Dulles. Kennan and Dulles were friends, of a sort and frequented the same social gatherings and had met a number of times in the recent past to discuss how covert operations might be employed in the Cold War. Given Kennan and Dulles’ connection, it should come as no surprise that the Survey Group was strongly prejudiced against Hillenkoetter from the start.⁹²

When the survey group met for the first time the SPG had been officially up and running for about one month. Although an investigation of covert operations was not within the mandate of the Survey Group, given the controversy that was brewing over the control of these operations, coupled with Dulles’ wartime experience in the area, it is not surprising that it offered to include a small section on covert operations. What was surprising, was the fact that they submitted his report one day after offering to do so! Today, the timing remains somewhat questionable, especially when put in the context of Kennan’s behind-the-scene machinations.

In the report, Dulles argued that American covert operations in the Cold War should be expanded. However, he pointed out that a central planning and coordination staff was essential for successful operations and added that it would be extremely dangerous for American interests to have several uncoordinated operations going on behind the Iron Curtain. To prevent the numerous problems he envisioned, Dulles strongly recommended that the Director of Central Intelligence have intimate knowledge of all operational details. In other words, he had to be kept in the political, strategic and operational loop. However, Dulles went on to note that, given that Hillenkoetter’s leadership was both weak and ineffective, he did not feel this particular DCI was up to the task in hand. Thus, Dulles concluded that in the present circumstances, American interests would be better served by placing all political warfare operations in a

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new organization under the direction of the NSC.⁹³ His report virtually echoed Kennan’s recommendations that reached the National Security Council less than a week later.

On 19 May 1948, Kennan penned a memo to Lovett and Marshall, in which he argued that, although covert operations should be housed within the CIA, with “respect to both personalities and organization” this was not the favored solution at the present time. Instead, Kennan again recommended that they “let the CIA sleeping dog lie” and that an independent organization be set up, which at “a later date could be incorporated into CIA.”⁹⁴ He even went so far as to suggest that if the changes he wanted were not adopted, it would be better for the United States to give up conducting such operations completely, rather than leave them as they were, under the direction of the SPG.⁹⁵ Both reports were discussed in detail during the 11th meeting of the National Security Council held on 20 May 1948.⁹⁶ Although Kennan did not personally attend this meeting, given the controversy that was brewing, it was decided to put all operations conducted by SPG on hold.⁹⁷

Hillenkoetter, for his part, did not take Kennan’s interference lying down. He eventually challenged Kennan and Dulles’ recommendations.⁹⁸ Although he had never wanted responsibility for conducting covert operations in the first place, he now argued that it would be foolhardy to set up another independent group that would only duplicate operations already being planned.⁹⁹ As he noted, Kennan’s plan would “establish a staff function providing for authority in a delicate field of operations – without the responsibility.”¹⁰⁰ Clearly frustrated by Kennan’s scheming as the debates over the command and control of these operations continued, on 8 June 1948, Hillenkoetter wrote to James Lay saying, “since State evidently will not go along with CIA operating this political warfare thing in any sane or sound manner, we go back to the original concept … let State run it and let it have no connection with us at all.”¹⁰¹ The bureaucratic conflicts were taking their toll on the DCI.

A second NSC meeting on this subject was held on 3 June 1948 to try to resolve what was quickly becoming an ugly controversy. It is interesting to note that Kennan did not attend this meeting and removing political warfare from the CIA was not discussed at all.¹⁰² Instead, in an attempt to resolve the dilemma, Sydney Souers again lobbied for an advisory panel to be set up to provide strategic guidance to the CIA. He believed, as did Hillenkoetter and Forrestal, that the major problem, up until this point, was that the Special Procedures Group had not received any authoritative guidance from the State Department. Once again, both the military representative and Robert Lovett raised objections to a panel of guidance. This time, however, they were not immediately successful in having the panel removed from the draft of the new directive – now named NSC 10: Office of Special Operations – and the decision was made to include it in the draft forwarded to the NSC the next day.

At this meeting, Souers again lobbied for the inclusion of a panel of guidance and the final draft of NSC 10/1 included a proviso for an operations committee consisting of a member from each of the departments involved, to “offer author-

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itative policy guidance.”¹⁰³ This time, Hillenkoetter supported Souer’s proposal, however, he made it clear that he envisioned the advisory board as more of a “board of strategy” than a “panel of guidance.”¹⁰⁴ Foreshadowing similar concerns raised three years later by the Psychological Strategy Board, Hillenkoetter indicated that he wanted a high-level liaison team put in place to provide strategic guidance to the SPG. He argued that these officers “should be of sufficient stature to have the authority to pass on the forms of propaganda to be employed and to tell the CIA that it is the policy of the US to support such-and-such an underground resistance movement and to deny such support to another underground resistance movement.” Hillenkoetter concluded it was “the lack of any such liaison with authority that has really caused the present discussions.”¹⁰⁵

Given the widespread support for Souer’s proposal, the panel of guidance also appeared in a second draft of NSC 10 sent to the council on 15 June.¹⁰⁶ However, at the meeting two days later, the military again voiced their concerns. Secretary of the Army, Kenneth C. Royall and Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart W. Symington, forcefully made their case against inclusion of the panel. In the end the proposal was dropped. The military representatives on the NSC held a four to one ratio over other departments and agencies. Thus it was almost axiomatic that anything that came up for a vote would have to have the support of military in order to pass.¹⁰⁷ Without their support the panel of guidance was doomed to failure. As a result, like its predecessor, NSC 4/a, the final draft of NSC 10/2 made the DCI responsible “for ensuring through designated representatives of the State and Defense departments that covert operations were planned and coordinated consistently with United States foreign policy.”¹⁰⁸

Covert operations were defined as:

all activities (except noted herein) which are conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups in support of friendly states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim responsibility for them.¹⁰⁹

This was the first time that the term covert operations appeared in a NSC paper and the change in terminology was probably an attempt to resolve the war of words between Kennan and Hilly. It was a short-lived victory, however. By 1951 a new language war broke out and it subsequently dominated discussions surrounding American strategic planning.

Under “NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects,” a new office was set up under DCI Hillenkoetter. A new director of special projects was to be nominated by the Department of State, approved by the DCI, and appointed by the NSC. However, while the original proposal would have ensured that the panel of guidance would be “practically an independent policy-making body controlling the activities of the Office of Special Projects” the final draft, once again, gave the DCI the responsibility for ensuring that operations were consistent with foreign

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policy. This meant that any advisory panel set up in the future would subordinate to the DCI.¹¹⁰ While Kennan would never be satisfied with this option in the long run, he was willing to compromise in the short term because he realized that an agreement had to be reached quickly in order to secure additional funds before Congress adjourned for the summer.¹¹¹ Given the closing window of opportunity, one day later on 18 June, Kennan formally withdrew his opposition. He told Lovett and Marshall that State might as well agree to the new proposal because, as he put it, “it was probably the best arrangement” they could get at this time.¹¹²

In order to solidify the agreement, and to make it more palatable to State, Forrestal and Lovett came up with a compromise: although there would be no new agency and the CIA would continue to conduct covert operations, both Cassidy and Galloway would be replaced.¹¹³ Since they had been the worst offenders their removal would be a face-saving gesture for Kennan. Everyone agreed and the new Chief of Plans position was offered, on Kennan’s recommendation, to Allen Dulles. Unwilling to serve in the number two slot below Hillenkoetter, however, Dulles declined the offer. The position was subsequently given to Frank Wisner, whom Dulles recommended. Wisner came over to the CIA from his position of Assistant Secretary for Occupied Areas. At the time he was thought to be “State’s Man” and many believed that the SPG’s “free-wheeling” days were over. After all, Wisner had apparently done Kennan’s bidding on the SANNAC Special Studies and Evaluation Committee. Ostensibly, the problem seemed to be solved. As Kennan put it, while the Policy Planning Staff would take “no responsibility” for Wisner’s operations, they would “maintain a guiding hand.”¹¹⁴

Wisner replaced Cassidy in August of 1948. He was forty years old. He inherited a few people in Washington, a few in Germany, some money confiscated from the Germans during World War II, and two shortwave transmitters. The SPG was abolished and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was set up in its place. NSC 4/a was cancelled and NSC 10/2 instructed Wisner to conduct propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action, and subversion.¹¹⁵ According to Michael Burke, NSC 10/2 “freely translated from basic bureaucratic, meant that the CIA was to disrupt and unsettle, to harass and counter the Soviets by all special means – paramilitary, sabotage, black propaganda, political action – to turn loose among the chickens as many foxes as [they] could possibly get away with.”¹¹⁶ However, the question left unanswered was, to what end? OPC was given a mandate to plan and execute any operation that it envisioned as long as doing so did not involve direct military action. But no one told “the foxes” what they were trying to achieve. As Sherman Kent, the head of the Office of Reports and Estimates within CIA, later complained, although NSC 10/2 formally established the goal of exploring “Soviet vulnerabilities,” it did not define “what forms such exploitation should take, the types of operations which could be envisaged” or how such risks should be judged against other basic objectives of United States policy. Nor, he argued, did NSC 10/2 establish a set of priorities within the area of covert operations.¹¹⁷

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The situation was made worse by the bureaucratic fiasco that occurred when George Kennan refused to accept the compromise offered by the NSC. From Kennan’s perspective NSC 10/2 was a flawed document. His proposal to have these operations placed under his direction had been thwarted by the military, which had been a constant thorn in State’s side. The tension between the two government agencies would only escalate after Louis Johnson replaced James Forrestal as Secretary of Defense in January of 1949. Therefore, Kennan became determined not to let “the sleeping dog lie” and he continued in his campaign to exclude Hillenkoetter from operational planning. Two months after NSC 10/2 was signed, in August 1948, Kennan called a meeting in order to “clarify” the lines of authority under NSC 10/2. NSC 10/2 clearly stated that it was up to the Director of Central Intelligence to ensure synchronization of policy and operations. This proviso was supported by the Dulles Report, which clearly stated that if covert operations were left within the CIA then the DCI should be “in intimate touch, not only with plans and policies, but also with the details of operations.” The report concluded that if this were not the case, the DCI “would not be able to control the situation.”¹¹⁸ Hoyt Vandenberg, Hillenkoetter’s predecessor, also argued that if the DCI was not kept in the loop, “another freewheeling organization” would result.¹¹⁹ However, Kennan was convinced that he could not trust Hillenkoetter to get the job done.

The sophisticated reader might find it somewhat surprising that, given the ongoing Soviet blockade of Berlin (June 1948–May 1949), which began almost a week after the passage of NSC 10/2, Kennan continued to push for aggressive covert operations designed to undermine Soviet power. However, it is important to remember that Kennan and a majority of those in the State Department never believed that the Soviets would go to war against the United States. Nor apparently did those in the CIA’s Office of Reports and Estimates.¹²⁰ In terms of the crisis in Berlin, the only danger was that of a miscalculation. Understanding Kennan’s philosophy on the nature and degree of the Soviet threat is crucial to comprehending why he pushed so hard for the adoption of covert operations during this critical period of the Cold War. Had he believed that war was probable, he never would have advocated these campaigns.¹²¹ Thus, the decision to undertake covert operations owed more to the personality, belief system and persistence of one man, than it did to any external events.

Assembled at the August meeting were Kennan, Hillenkoetter, Wisner, Souers, Col. Yeaton (representing the military), and Robert Blum from the Policy Planning Staff. Despite the meeting’s informality, a “memorandum of the conversation” was taken and each participant was asked to sign it as they departed.¹²² It could not have been a pleasant experience for the DCI, given the animosity between him and the director of the Policy Planning Staff; and it is quite clear from reading the meeting minutes that Kennan and Wisner had ambushed him from the start. Kennan began the discussion by telling Hillenkoetter that he wanted “specific knowledge not only of the objectives of every operation, but of the procedures and methods involving political decisions.” Kennan then made it clear that he alone would decide which projects

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were “politically desirable.” Hillenkoetter agreed, but added that State must also be willing to accept “political responsibility” for all operations and be willing to provide additional guidance, as needed, throughout each project’s duration. Hillenkoetter made the point that this had not been the case in the past, and as a rule, operations had been turned over to him by State without the required political guidance. Kennan assured him that he would be “personally accountable.”¹²³

Frank Wisner then took the floor. The new Director of Plans did not think much of his boss, whom he later characterized as an “amiable lightweight.” Like Kennan, Wisner directed his comments to the DCI telling him that, given the nature of his work, it was of the utmost importance that he have direct access to both the State and Defense Departments, without having to pass through the CIA’s administrative hierarchy. Hillenkoetter again agreed with the proviso that he be kept informed of all “important” decisions.¹²⁴ And herein lay the rub: the agreement reached at the meeting ensured that the DCI was removed from the policy loop on all decisions not deemed by Wisner to be important. According to Michael Warner, a CIA in-house historian, this procedure gave the OPC a substantial amount of latitude within which to work, and it had the unintended consequence of making it “a quasi independent entity.”¹²⁵

I would take Warner’s argument one step further, however, and suggest that between August 1948 and June 1950, when the new DCI, Walter Bedell Smith, brought OPC directly under his control, Frank Wisner and his men were able to function as an independent operating unit. According to Lilly, OPC’s independence “went so far that OPC’s intelligence requests were handled by the CIA as requests for a separate agency.”¹²⁶ Although a number of mechanisms were subsequently put in place to provide strategic guidance, they were unsuccessful.

On 14 June 1948, Kennan finally accepted Sydney Souers’ proposal for a panel of guidance. He set up what became known as the 10/2 Panel. It consisted of two representatives: one from State, George Kennan, and one from the military, Joseph McNarney. In 1949, John Magruder replaced McNarney – their job was to provide policy guidance to the new Office of Policy Coordination. After the meeting in August, Kennan also assigned Robert Joyce and John Davies, two members of the Policy Planning Staff, to act as a liaison between his office and that of the Director of Plans, in order to ensure that guidance was in fact given. These provisions did not go far enough, however, because throughout this period there was “no formal mechanism whereby individual projects” were discussed or approved.¹²⁷ So Hillenkoetter’s desire in that regard was not fulfilled. Although Wisner met with Kennan once a week, their discussions were “very general and allowed for the maximum opportunity for project development.”¹²⁸ Given that Kennan was “the prime mover” in the establishment of OPC, it was unlikely that he “discouraged the overall direction of an organization he helped to build.” The same was said for the military representative on the 10/2 Panel who was “very sympathetic” to OPC concerns.¹²⁹ As one observer later lamented, the meetings between Kennan, McNarney and Wisner, often “degenerated into a sort of stereotyped chore for all concerned.”¹³⁰ In the end, the 10/2

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Panel “failed to provide a continuing element of review and evaluation” for covert operations during the early years of the Cold War.¹³¹

The lack of guidance was made worse by the operational culture that was transferred to OPC from SSU. Although Kennan believed that Wisner was his guy, the new director of plans “quickly developed an institutional loyalty to OPC and its mission.”¹³² Infused by Donovan’s spirit, Wisner went on to run OPC as an independent body. As one CIA deputy inspector later recalled, Frank Wisner and his staff “arrogated themselves total power, with no inhibiting precedent. They could do what they wanted, just as long as the ‘higher authority,’ as we called the president, did not expressly forbid it…. They had a heaven sent obligation and God knows, what opportunity.”¹³³ The potent combination of Donovan’s legacy, the lack of policy guidance, and a flawed bureaucratic process, helped ensure that covert operations found their own rationale, independent of national policy considerations.¹³⁴

Donovan, Magruder, Cassidy, Wisner, Dulles, Hillenkoetter and, most importantly, George Kennan, had all played a role in solidifying this tradition in the postwar world. Nothing had changed except the machinery.¹³⁵ Moreover, Kennan’s bureaucratic maneuvering had exacerbated the problem. The Director of the Policy Planning Staff co-opted the process and accepted responsibility for ensuring that US covert operations were in line with American foreign policy. Yet in the end, he failed to do his job. As we shall see in the next chapter, not only did he fail to provide sufficient strategic guidance to Frank Wisner and his team of covert operators, he also failed to provide a pragmatic statement that effectively reconciled aspirations and capabilities. Although steps were undertaken to provide a link between policy and operations, they remained ineffectual and OPC was thus able to, in the words of intelligence aficionado, Tom Braden, “run wild.”¹³⁶

It is somewhat ironic to note – some fifty years later – that the American public was told in 1948 that the new office of Policy Coordination had been developed to “coordinate the activities of the CIA with national security policy.”¹³⁷ This type of body was precisely what was needed during the early years of the Cold War. However, without the requisite political and strategic guidance coming from the Department of State, Frank Wisner and his men were able to undertake a number of covert operations of dubious value. In the end, a maverick operational culture, the lack of a coherent statement of policy, and flawed bureaucratic process had helped set in motion a chain of events that would ultimately give rise to an operational debacle that cost countless lives.

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4
An elucidation of imponderables that defy close analysis

In the last three chapters I chronicled the evolution of American covert operations in the immediate post World War II era. I suggested that three factors – the Donovan Tradition, the failure to decide on a consistent course of action vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and a flawed bureaucratic process – laid the ground work for the problems that ultimately characterized the planning and execution of early operations. It is important to understand, however, that when taken alone these problems were not sufficient to explain the operational debacle that occurred during Truman’s second term in office. The Office of Policy Coordination’s autonomous status only became a serious problem when the administration failed to develop a coherent strategy for waging the Cold War. In order to understand why it failed to do so it is necessary to come to terms with the evolution of American policy during the years 1948 through 1950, because, as historian John Raleigh has pointed out, ideally “policy” should give the CIA its “drive.”¹

In this chapter I suggest that, until 1950, a number of strategic visions became intertwined within American policy. However, these visions did not exist independently of each other. Rather they were pursued in unison, often in a contradictory and self-defeating manner. What was left was a strategy that contained core ideas, that were subsequently labeled containment, liberation, and/or Titoism, but, when pulled apart from one and another, each strategic vision failed to adequately capture American strategy as it unfolded during these years. Instead, US strategy embodied an amalgamation of strategic tendencies that were closely related, but lacked a core set of stable operating principles. As a result, during this critical period, US strategy had no fixed identity or stable meaning.² Thus, I believe none should be ascribed to it in retrospect.

Foreign policy during the first years of the Cold War was largely the State Department’s responsibility. However, during World War II, State had reached the nadir of its existence. It simply did not have the President’s confidence. Franklin Roosevelt had purposely diminished its role during the war and had instead given the Joint Chiefs of Staff dominance over questions of national policy.³ State’s lack of credibility, in the eyes of the President and his closest advisors, was reinforced because it was plagued by a host of bureaucratic and administrative problems. Foremost among these was the lack of a body, within

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the department, devoted exclusively to the formation of foreign policy. Indeed, there were only two people who could advise the Secretary of State on policy matters: the Under Secretary of State and the department’s Counselor. However, neither of these men had the time to think about long term planning because they were preoccupied by a host of other duties.⁴ Moreover, when the Secretary of State asked his geographical or functional desks for advice on policy issues, he usually came away with two very different perspectives. Therefore, when Roosevelt needed advice the Secretary of State was forced to set up an ad hoc group that consisted of his assistant secretaries.⁵ However, during these critical years there was no consensus as to what actually constituted “policy.”⁶ Thus, there was a great deal of acrimonious discussion.

This is not to suggest that there was never a foreign policy position available to the President. Prior to 1948, State did have a series of “statements” that covered various countries in the world. Yet these were solely intra-departmental products and they did not reflect the interests of the department as a whole or, for that matter, any of the other government agencies. Moreover, the President had not approved them.⁷ As a result, the debates over American postwar objectives, which had begun in 1945, continued because, with the exception of SANACC (State-Army-Navy-Air Force-Coordinating Committee), there was no government body in place to develop and coordinate policy. In other words, there was no formal mechanism available to clarify objectives in the Cold War. In fact, historian Melvyn Leffler has noted the number of times the President’s advisors beseeched him to set up the bureaucratic machinery necessary to develop and execute a coordinated policy, but Truman continually rebuffed all of their requests.⁸

Nevertheless, as Soviet intransigence continued, the President finally acknowledged the need to establish a formal policy-making process. In July of 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act. This act provided for the birth of the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Military Establishment (NME). These institutions were designed to provide the necessary framework, hitherto absent, for developing and executing United States foreign policy in the Cold War. The NSC, in particular, was put in place to overcome many of the difficulties that had characterized the policy process during World War II. Located in the old State Department building, next to the White House, it was designed to be the “highest policy arm of the president.”⁹ It consisted of three types of positions: staff members, the secretariat, and consultants. Consultants were the chief policy and operational planners from each department. The staff itself consisted of members from the various agencies involved.¹⁰ An Executive Secretary oversaw all of the meetings. Appointed by the President, he was to serve as “an honest broker of ideas.” He was to subordinate his personal views to the task of coordinating policy.¹¹ Of course, this did not always happen.

The council met Thursday mornings for approximately two and a half hours, in the Cabinet room of the White House.¹² During these meetings its primary responsibility was to “assess and appraise the objectives, commitments and risks

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to the United States … for the purposes of making recommendations to the President.”¹³ However, those who sat on the NSC had too many other commitments to give their full attention to these issues.¹⁴ Therefore, discussion of major topics usually fell to their subordinates – the staff members and consultants, who were the chief policy planners from each department or agency – each of whom had their own bureaucratic and institutional loyalties. As a result, as Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor at the Policy Planning Staff, pointed out, every time an issue came in front of the NSC it reflected “a negotiation of the bureaucratic interests of the people involved.”¹⁵ In other words, “policy” was usually a “compromise” between the various branches of government.¹⁶ In order to secure the compromise, language used in NSC papers was purposely vague, designed to cover up the differences that existed. And in order to ensure that these differences were glossed over before they reached the President, “inordinate delays” were the norm.¹⁷

More importantly, when the policy statements finally made their way to the council, they never contained alternatives to be decided upon. Rather, as George Marshall lamented, they appeared as “a fact accompli” (sic).¹⁸ Senior policy makers were forced to accept or reject the options presented in the papers as they were. If the options offered were rejected, months more work would ensue, and the whole process would begin anew. Complicating the situation further, were the personalities of those involved, as Nitze pointed out to C.B. Marshall, another member of the Policy Planning Staff, more often than not the director of the staff was forced to deal with the “sensibilities and ambitions” of all involved, “as well as matters of policy and substance.” In the end, he conceded that the NSC senior staff did little more than “waste time in uninformed and irresponsible debate.”¹⁹ This, he concluded was “not the atmosphere in which one produces integrated, sound, original, comprehensive approaches to new upcoming situations.”²⁰ He was right.

The NSC also had a number of enemies who resented its existence. Kennan and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, both worked behind the scenes to undercut its work because neither wanted to see it undertake questions of foreign policy.²¹ Indeed, between 1948 and 1950 the State Department fought many NSC initiatives head on. This ensured that the drafting of policy statements was prolonged needlessly. State’s hostility can, in part, be understood within the context of its historical experience. In the wake of Roosevelt’s death, as Truman took the reins of power, the State Department careerists made a conscious effort to preserve their policy mandate. Truman’s inexperience and his tendency to rely heavily on his advisors gave them the leg up they so desperately wanted. However, their new found position was counterbalanced by the fact that the President had nothing but contempt for the “striped-pants boys across the hall.”²² State’s complex relationship with Truman ensured that over the next few years its leaders would become almost militant in their determination to ensure that they controlled all questions of foreign policy.²³ In the end, they were successful in undermining much of the NSC’s work because the Council never had the President’s complete support. Until the outbreak of the Korean War, Truman

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rarely attended meetings and when he did make the time, very little was accomplished.²⁴ According to Secretary of State George Marshall, Truman “was not a leader [or] a force at the table to bring out discussion.”²⁵ Neither, apparently was the Executive Secretary of the NSC, James Lay.²⁶ This meant that questions of national policy were all too often left to other departments.²⁷

Given the State Department’s determination to control the policy process, it should come as no surprise that, between 1947 and 1950, the Policy Planning Staff wrote the majority of NSC papers.²⁸ When General George Marshall replaced James Byrnes as Secretary of State in January 1947, he set up the staff to help formulate national policy. As a career military officer, Marshall had a strong penchant for administrative organization. Thus, it was almost axiomatic that he would demand the same from his new department. Later in life, he recalled that, on assuming his new post, things were not quite as he had expected. He opined: “I don’t know that you’d call it disorganization; you’d say lack of organization. They just didn’t have any.”²⁹ The Policy Planning Staff was formed to address this problem and had five responsibilities: to formulate long-term policy; to anticipate problems within the State Department; to study politico-military problems; to evaluate current policy; and to coordinate policy within State.³⁰ Located on the 5th floor of the State Department building in Foggy Bottom, its staff usually met three to five times per week to discuss issues of policy. The meetings were highly informal, and when warranted, could last all day if a decision could not be arrived at. If resolution was impossible then the policy paper, more often than not, reflected the views of the director, George Kennan.³¹

Initially there were five members of the staff; by 1952 that number had increased to ten – nine men and one woman.³² Kennan was determined to keep the body small because he believed that large bureaucracies were one of the central problems of government.³³ Despite its size, however, like the NSC, the Policy Planning Staff was never able to fulfill its mandate because the bulk of its time was spent responding to individual crises rather than working on long-term policy planning.³⁴ When the staff was able to turn their attention to drafting policy, the papers themselves failed to set out a coherent statement of objectives because Kennan operated on the assumption that “political contingencies were so variable and intangible that long range political plans were impractical if not impossible.”³⁵ He believed that, because the US was dealing with an “endlessly changing and largely unpredictable” situation, the problems the department faced were “always in a state of change.” They were “different every morning, slightly and subtly from what they were the morning before.” As a result, policy “had to be comparative and relative rather than absolute.”³⁶ In order to ensure that American Cold War policy remained “flexible,” and “relative,” the language he employed in the papers themselves was so broad that it was interpreted in a number of different ways. It was precisely this element of ambiguity that allowed for the emergence of a number of strategic visions. Although a number of operations personnel pointed out this problem at the time, the papers were rarely revised once they were completed.³⁷

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The issue came to a head in 1948, when senior policymakers began to call for a more aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. Although it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when key decision-makers began to first think about their chances of effecting change behind the Iron Curtain, it is clear that by early 1948 a number of officials within the State Department were seriously considering the possibilities.³⁸ According to historian Walter Hixson, in January, George Kennan argued that the time had now come to get the Soviets out of Eastern Europe. He concluded that the US “cannot settle for their remaining there indefinitely.”³⁹ One month later, an NSC policy paper announced that US objectives in the Baltic countries, Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania and Hungary were “the establishment of [these] countries as democratic, independent members of the family of nations.”⁴⁰ In April, the American Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Walter Bedell Smith, suggested that the US must take advantage of the present situation “not only to ‘contain’ the Soviet sphere, but to reduce it, seizing and maintaining the initiative in all fields.”⁴¹ This theme was developed in detail two months later in a State Department “mill paper,” which argued the US should not be content to merely “contain” the Soviet threat, but rather “should pursue a determined policy to suppress international communism and Russian imperialism into a liberal concept of Russian nationalism within the confines of pre-war Russia.”⁴² During this same period, James Burnham, author of The Struggle for the World, told the National War College that the US was now at war with the Soviet Union and America had to win it. His comments were greeted with vigorous applause.⁴³

Yet, despite the flurry of activity, during the coup in Czechoslovakia, 17–25 February 1948, Truman responded with only a mild note of reproach to the Soviet Union.⁴⁴ The administration’s reaction underscores not only the lack of consistency in its foreign policy, but also its failure to reconcile its rhetoric with concrete policy options. More importantly, although there now appeared to be a widespread interest in challenging Soviet power in Europe, there remained no statement of policy that outlined what American objectives actually were. The only point of reference remained Kennan’s article “[t]he Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which had appeared the previous summer. Although a number of advisors highlighted the importance of constructing a statement of national objectives, according to James Lay, the assistant to the Executive Secretary of the NSC, as an “advisory body” the NSC was not designed for such an exercise, and the State Department simply refused to undertake the project. Kennan in particular, hated writing this type of paper because, as he stated, “it demanded an elucidation of imponderables that defied close analysis.”⁴⁵ Charles Bohlen, John Paton Davies, John Melby and Paul Nitze are also all on record as criticizing the constant requests for some type of statement outlining objectives.⁴⁶

Given the reticence exhibited by State and NSC, it is not surprising that the major emphasis for clarifying American goals came from the military. James Forrestal had been lobbying for a clear, concise statement on which military planning could be based, since the first months of 1947.⁴⁷ Forrestal, however, was not the only one looking for guidance.⁴⁸ The Policy Planning Staff was also

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deluged with requests from the Central Intelligence Group and the Interdepartmental Coordination Staff.⁴⁹ Although these requests were continually rebuffed, in May of 1947 a little known organization was formed by General Dwight Eisenhower to study concepts of security in light of the atomic age. Those working on the project found it extremely difficult to develop military strategy without a clear idea of what American objectives in the Cold War were. As a result, in February 1948, three colonels from Eisenhower’s Advanced Study Group (ASG) met with representatives of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) and requested a report that outlined US objectives. When Kennan’s staff refused to undertake the project, Forrestal interceded and the job subsequently was given to the NSC senior staff. One month later, their report was completed. It did not however, have the State Department’s support.

“NSC 7: The Position of the United States With Respect to Soviet Dominated World Communism,”⁵⁰ became the American government’s first official statement on the Soviet Union. Its central conclusion was that, “a defensive policy cannot be considered an effective means of checking the momentum of Soviet expansion.” Asserting that the “defeat” of communism was “vital to the security of the United States,” the authors argued that the administration should take the lead in organizing a worldwide “counter-offensive” aimed at strengthening anti-Communist forces in the West and at undermining the strength of the Communist forces in the East.⁵¹ In line with these objectives, NSC 7 suggested that the United States should intensify its fledgling anti-Communist information campaign and “develop and at the appropriate time carry out, a coordinated program to support underground resistance movements in countries behind the Iron Curtain, including the USSR.”⁵²

At the time, Kennan argued that NSC 7 represented a significant break with previous American policy on two important points.⁵³ First, he stated it illustrated the acceptance of strategy designed to undermine Soviet power and influence in both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through covert means. Second, it provided a framework to establish underground resistance movements behind the Iron Curtain. Within this context, it also provided for the use of a substantial amount of un-vouchered “emergency funds.”⁵⁴ Given his reaction to Cassidy and Galloway’s proposal discussed in the last chapter, one can only imagine his response to NSC 7. He was not alone: a number of people within the State Department were unhappy with this first statement of American policy. The offices of the American Republic, European Affairs, Near Eastern Affairs and United Nations Affairs, all voiced their concerns. The Joint Chiefs of Staff also raised a number of complaints.⁵⁵ However, despite the belligerent tone of the paper, no one disagreed with the new “counter-offensive strategy” outlined. Rather, they believed that the conclusions set forth in the paper were too general to be of any use.⁵⁶

Because of the controversy that developed over the report, George Kennan decided to place it in “indefinite abeyance” until he and George Marshall had a chance to hammer out “some of the problems implicit in its conclusions.”⁵⁷ However, given the numerous requests for policy guidance that inundated the

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staff it was subsequently decided that the report should be forwarded to the NSC as “an initial paper” and that it would be followed up by specific guidelines at a later date. The follow-up never occurred. Therefore, as drafted, NSC 7 outlined a new, albeit undefined, “counter-offensive” strategy for waging cold war on the Soviet Union. This strategy was significantly different from Kennan’s “strategic vision” outlined in Foreign Affairs in July 1947.

Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of confusion within the administration as to what US policy actually was. Although NSC 7 suggested that something could be done to combat Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe through the use of psychological warfare operations and resistance groups, it left open the question of just what these tactics were designed to achieve. NSC 7 also failed to address the issue of US capabilities behind the Iron Curtain. Yet it was in the same month that NSC 7 appeared, that Galloway and Cassidy proposed operations designed to encourage “the freedom-loving elements in those countries that have been over-run by Communism.”⁵⁸ In the spring of 1948 operations were running ahead of policy and strategy.

Given the problems with NSC 7, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal continued to press the State Department for a clearer statement of national objectives.⁵⁹ According to historian Melvyn Leffler, both Forrestal and the JCS were increasingly worried about the implications of the recent global expansion of American power and they wanted to force the government to “face the implications” of its national security policies.⁶⁰ Although George Kennan was initially successful in stymieing Forrestal’s request, in due course, after months of pressure, he was forced to give in. Whether Truman intervened is unclear; however, the Secretary of Defense did approach the President with the problem.⁶¹

During the spring of 1948 Kennan had been preoccupied with a number of other matters, including a stay at the hospital for a recurring problem with ulcers. With his ulcer under control and OPC reporting directly to him, in June he finally turned his attention to questions of policy. In the same month that “NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects” was completed, Kennan began to work on the NSC 20 series, which outlined American objectives toward Russia.⁶² Throughout the drafting process, however, he maintained that US policy must remain flexible in order to meet the changing circumstances of the international environment.⁶³ This theme was both implicit, and in some cases explicit, in all of his writings during this period.⁶⁴ For example, in NSC 20/1, the second draft of the paper, he wrote that the “objectives of national policy, in times of peace, should never be regarded in static terms. In so far as they are basic objectives, and worthy ones, they are not apt to be ones capable of complete and finite achievement.”⁶⁵

However, not everyone in the administration was happy with Kennan’s approach to policy making. In the process of trying to persuade the NSC to undertake a paper outlining American objectives toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, James Forrestal also suggested that this project, “outline the measures to be followed” in order to achieve US objectives.⁶⁶ In other words, he wanted the Department of State to develop a strategy for waging the Cold War.

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He was initially successful in his request. Indeed, part of the job given the Policy Planning Staff in conjunction with the NSC 20 series was the mandate to develop a corresponding strategy, or the “measures” required, to achieve American policy. Not surprisingly Kennan and his staff moved very slowly on this project and it appeared that, given their pace, NSC 20 would be delayed indefinitely. In order to prevent this and to guarantee that something would be made available to the President in “a timely fashion,” it was decided to split the project in half. NSC 20 would now concentrate on goals and objectives, and a second report, “NSC 35: Measures Required to Achieve United States Objectives,” would delineate the strategy by which the objectives were to be achieved. The job of formulating strategy was subsequently given to the NSC senior staff, no doubt much to Kennan’s chagrin.⁶⁷

In the end, the “Measures” paper became a paper on psychological warfare and the two projects – NSC 20 and NSC 35 – proceeded in tandem. Throughout the process, however, the State Department representative on the NSC continued to advance the view that no useful purpose would be served by drafting a paper of this kind.⁶⁸ Kennan’s deputy director, George Butler, took the position that such a report would lead to a rigidity of the American position rather than the kind of flexibility of operation that was essential under such circumstances.⁶⁹ Other members of the Policy Planning Staff involved with the project also maintained that the report was both unnecessary and undesirable. They argued it would open a “Pandora’s Box,” which could ultimately come back to haunt the President. They also suggested that it would provide the Soviet Union with grounds for war, if the Russians ever found out what was in the report.⁷⁰

Despite the open hostility on the part of Kennan’s team the NSC senior staff initially tried to complete the paper. Yet, given the differing bureaucratic loyalties of those involved, the project was beset with problems from the start. Eventually, discussions broke down over one issue: who should control psychological warfare operations during times of war and threat of war (i.e. Cold War)? Who controlled these operations determined the type of activities undertaken, and both the State Department and the military wanted the power to control operations. This was a very divisive topic and the two sides could not reach a settlement. After months of heated debates, all involved finally gave up and Kennan removed NSC 35 from the council’s consideration.

However, Forrestal continued to press for some type of document outlining American strategy. In the end, in order to placate him and the JCS, the Policy Planning Staff drafted “Policy Guidance to Assist in Achieving US Objectives,” a much watered down version of the original “measures” paper.⁷¹ However, after it appeared Kennan again went on the record, lambasting its conclusions. In a letter to Dean Rusk, he criticized the assumption that it was possible to outline a program designed to achieve US objectives. Any attempt to do so, Kennan argued, inevitably led to the assumption that American objectives were static. This was not the case, he wrote, pointing out that “the Russian question will never be entirely solved.” He concluded, that it was simply “wrong in principle for the NSC to produce papers of this sort.”⁷² Faced with Kennan’s and the

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Policy Planning Staff’s obstructionism Forrestal tried approaching Secretary of State George Marshall directly, in November 1948. Marshall told him that his staff had tried to develop just such a paper, but “it was unable to reach the proper balance between belligerency and appeasement.” As a result, no such proposal would be forthcoming in the near future.⁷³ The State Department’s failure to address this issue or to resolve the stark dichotomy between the two extreme positions – belligerency and appeasement – in the fall of 1948, is startling. Yet it illustrates just how determined Kennan was to keep US Cold War policy as open ended as possible. His position was ironic given his own earlier experience in the Foreign Service. According to historian Anders Stephanson, Kennan was perceived as somewhat of a nuisance because of his constant demands for clear instructions.⁷⁴

The battle that occurred during the drafting of the strategy paper became even more heated, when the objectives paper was finally released in November of 1948.⁷⁵ “NSC 20/4: United States Objectives With Respect to the Soviet Union,” became the first comprehensive statement of American objectives in the Cold War.⁷⁶ Until NSC 68 was drafted, two years later, it remained the official policy statement on which all covert operations were based. Although historians have tended to suggest that NSC 68 was the definitive statement of Cold War national policy, this document merely re-affirmed the objectives outlined in NSC 20/4.⁷⁷ In NSC 20/4 Kennan differentiated between “general objectives” and what he termed “supplementary aims.”⁷⁸ He wrote that “objectives” were overall policy goals while aims were merely “guiding purposes.” However, in NSC 20/1 he added that “objectives,” in peacetime, “should be thought of as lines of direction rather than as physical goals.⁷⁹ “Objectives” and “goals,” he argued should only apply to “short term matters and tactical matters.” Instead of focusing on either, however, Kennan preferred to talk about “direction … as the centre concept of US foreign policy.”⁸⁰ He favored the word “direction,” over “goals or objectives,” because, as he later argued, the last thing he wanted to do was to define “some fixed” objective in the “future” that had to be reached, “within a given time” because “by the time you [got] there you [would] find that that point itself was a point only in relation to other things in space, and those things have changed, and that it wasn’t therefore, quite the point [you] thought it would be.”⁸¹ Instead, “direction,” provided a general course of behavior based on certain principles which could only be found by examining American diplomatic history. Yet he never stated what those principles were.

Given Kennan’s complex approach to policymaking it is no wonder those charged with operational planning became skeptical of the State Department’s ability to draft a coherent statement of policy.⁸² Kennan’s tendency to juxtapose relatively vague qualifications on top of open-ended and flexible lines of directions, which were then presented to those charged with conducting operations, created a great deal of confusion, especially given the nature of the direction outlined. In NSC 20/4, for example, he defined American objectives as the reduction of Moscow’s power and influence to a point where it no longer constituted “a threat to the peace, national independence and stability of the world

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family of nations,” and a change in “the theory and practice of international relations by the government in power in Russia [that] conform[s] to the purposes and principles set forth in the UN charter.”⁸³ He then went on to argue that the administration should aim to:

a Encourage and promote the gradual retraction of undue Russian power and influence from the present perimeter areas around the traditional Russian boundaries, and the emergence of the satellite countries as entities independent of the USSR.

b Encourage the development among the Russian peoples of attitudes, which may help to modify current Soviet behavior and permit the revival of national life of groups evidencing the ability and determination to achieve and maintain their national independence.

c Eradicate the myth by which people remote from Soviet military influence are held in a position of subservience to Moscow and to cause the world at large to see and understand the true nature of the USSR and the Soviet directed world communist party and to adopt a realistic attitude toward it.

d Create situations which will compel the Soviet government to recognize the practical undesirability of acting on the basis of its present concepts and the necessity of behaving in accordance with the precepts of international conduct as set forth in the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.⁸⁴

However, he added an important qualification; he stated that it was not an American aim, in a time of peace, “to bring about the overthrow of the Soviet government.” He merely wanted to encourage Russia “to change their behavior.” In NSC 20/1 he elaborated on what he meant. He wrote, “a complete retraction of undue Soviet power should be possible without necessarily engaging the vital interests of the Russian state.” And he pointed to Tito’s defection, which he argued was not viewed as a matter of “state prestige” by the Soviet Union.⁸⁵ However, neither this explanation, nor any other, appeared in NSC 20/4 and therefore American objectives were read, at least by those in OPC, as the liberation of Eastern Europe and the rollback of Soviet power. OPC requested a copy of the policy paper on 15 October 1948.⁸⁶

Although there seemed to be little debate within OPC on American objectives, as outlined in NSC 20/4, the same cannot be said for the rest of the administration. Indeed, given the myth of containment that was growing both inside and outside the White House, there appeared to be some confusion over the extent to which NSC 20/4 differed from previous policy. Also, because it was only read by a limited number of policymakers, there continued to be a large group within the administration, and within Congress, who believed that American policy was solely the “containment” of the Soviet threat.⁸⁷ This misunderstanding was never corrected. For example, at an NSC meeting in January of 1950, a year and a half after NSC 20/4 appeared, an official asked whether the US policy of “containment” should be changed to a more aggressive policy that included operations in the USSR itself. In response to the question, the argument

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was made that, while “NSC 20/4 furnishes a point of departure for this study,” it was unclear “whether it places a ceiling on the project, or if so how far beyond its limits” American policy should go. It was ultimately decided to put the matter aside for future study.⁸⁸ The question remained unanswered, yet OPC was already conducting covert operations in Russia.

American foreign policy, as outlined by Kennan, contained a number of inconsistencies. As one policy analyst argued, the language used was highly problematic since one could read it in many different ways depending upon how one interpreted its underlying assumptions. For example, he complained that while it suggested that “containment” could not remove the Soviet threat, and therefore the goal was to “destroy Soviet power … there remained a number of underlying assumptions that must be clearly stated before we can begin to rough out a grand strategy within this framework.”⁸⁹ US objectives, as outlined in NSC 20/4, were “general and vague.” As Edward Lilly pointed out at the time, “such national aims afforded covert activities many opportunities, but their vagueness left many uncertainties on which the operational planner wanted answers.”⁹⁰ This point was made explicitly five years later, when newly elected President, Dwight Eisenhower, commissioned an evaluation of the previous administration’s efforts to exploit Soviet vulnerabilities. The authors of the report concluded that, while NSC 20/4 clearly laid the basis for these operations it did not outline the types of operations that could be undertaken, or how these operations should be balanced against the risks to American national security. Nor, they added, did it “establish priorities within the area of covert operations between cold war operations designed to lead to the retraction or reduction of Soviet power and the creation of stay-behind assets that might be utilized in times of actual hostilities.”⁹¹ This had serious ramifications for American operations in Eastern Europe, as psychological warriors began to compete for agents and resources in this theatre.

Not surprisingly, given the contradictions that lay at the heart of NSC 20/4, not everyone was happy with the report. The Advanced Study Group, the same group that had pressed so hard for this paper in March 1948, leveled a number of scathing criticisms. They argued that, as a whole, it was “dangerous in the extreme,” and they “opposed strongly” its adoption on several grounds. First, they counseled against taking such a hard line, and they pointed out that the “careless implementation [of this policy] might well create situations which the USSR would consider grounds for war.” Most important, however, they pointed out that “the key policies are phrased in language which is subject to misinterpretation and which does not provide adequate guidance.” They further suggested that the language was open to “dangerous misinterpretation,” they referred specifically to the decision to try and “reduce the power and influence of the USSR.” They concluded their report by arguing that the administration should never “accept this policy, or if by mistake we did accept it, it should never be reduced to approved written policy. It is morally and legally [from the UN point of view] wrong.” They strongly recommended that NSC 20/4 be destroyed and a “more careful” policy paper be written.⁹² This, of course, never

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occurred. The next policy paper drafted by the administration was NSC 68, which called for a dramatic increase in operations designed to achieve the same wooly headed objectives.

Kennan’s unwillingness to clarify his strategic vision also had important implications beyond any esoteric discussions of policy. His determination to keep the American position elastic, his refusal to work on questions of “strategy,” coupled with his behind-the-scenes machinations, which resulted in OPC being removed from the CIA’s command and control, eventually affected the lives of thousands of men and women. John Paton Davies, an Asia expert serving on the Policy Planning Staff, was one of the first to face the implications of Kennan’s failure to articulate a clear statement of national objectives.⁹³ According to the New York Times what happened to Davies, Kennan’s subordinate, was “a story of Kafkaesque dimensions in which a State Department bureaucracy, having committed an error, decided to protect itself rather than correct it.”⁹⁴ They were right – in 1949 Davies found himself caught in the eye of a perfect storm and, like so many others who had gone before him, he would not survive. It is to this story that I now turn, because it illustrates, in a dramatic way, the breakdown between policy and operations that took place under Kennan’s tenure.

Kennan and Davies met for the first time in 1945, when the two men served together in the American embassy in Moscow.⁹⁵ They stayed in touch after Kennan returned to Washington, and eventually, Davies joined the Policy Planning Staff at Kennan’s behest. He brought to his new job an independent spirit and a unique set of life experiences.⁹⁶ Having spent most of his life in China, where his parents were missionaries, Davies, unlike Henry Luce, William Donovan, and Frank Wisner, emerged from these experiences a “modern” man, and more importantly, I would argue a “realist.”⁹⁷ Like Kennan, he refused to see the world solely in moral terms. What this meant was he did not accept the premise that communism alone, represented a direct threat to American national security interests.⁹⁸ Davies’ philosophy was developed during the 1930s and 1940s when he worked as a Foreign Service officer in China. It solidified during World War II when he served as a political advisor to General Joseph Stillwell. Here, he developed a reputation as somewhat of a “freewheeler.”⁹⁹

Davies was able to cultivate a number of contacts within the Chinese communist movement, whose objective, like that of the Americans, was to force Japan’s withdrawal from China. During this period, Davies came to the conclusion that the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, would never be able to unify China under its leadership. He believed that Chiang had lost his “Mandate from Heaven.”¹⁰⁰ After World War II ended, Davies was asked to stay on as consultant to the new American Ambassador, Patrick Hurley.¹⁰¹ Unfortunately, their relationship soured quickly because Hurley was a staunch anti-communist and a strong supporter of Chiang. Not surprisingly, given their opposing views, in January 1945 Davies was transferred to Moscow, where Hurley hoped he would be educated in the “realities” of communism.¹⁰² In Moscow, Davies served as the embassy’s chancery officer, under Kennan.¹⁰³

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When Kennan moved to Washington, Davies followed, a little over a year later.¹⁰⁴

In the Policy Planning Staff, Davies started out as Kennan’s deputy on Asian affairs and in the fall of 1948 he drafted “PPS/39: To Review and Define US Policy Toward China.”¹⁰⁵ Four months later, this paper was redrafted and sent to the National Security Council as “NSC 34: US Policy Toward China.”¹⁰⁶ It called for a more supple and flexible approach to the ongoing civil war in China that included negotiations with communists.¹⁰⁷ Because Davies believed that the communists would eventually be successful in winning the civil war he knew that the United States would eventually have to deal with them.¹⁰⁸ Therefore, he suggested that the US should stop aiding the Nationalists, unless the administration was actively and forcefully willing to resist communism.¹⁰⁹ At the time Davies’ views were also held by many of those within the government. The CIA’s Office of National Estimates, Secretary of State George Marshall, and Kennan, all believed the Communists would ultimately be successful in over-throwing Chiang.¹¹⁰ Unfortunately, there were those within the administration who disagreed. Their position was publicly articulated by the China Lobby, which felt that continued aid to the Nationalist Government was integral to American national security. It seems the President also supported aid to the Nationalists. On 11 March 1948, for example, he stated that the United States “did not want any communists in the Government of China or anywhere else if [the US] could help it.”¹¹¹ Many Americans agreed, and when the communists finally expelled the Nationalists and took over the government, the China Lobby and the Republican Party, which had just lost its fifth presidential campaign, began looking for someone to blame. Davies and the State Department’s office of Far Eastern Affairs provided an easy target.

Just as the right wing began to target Asian specialists in the State Department, Davies turned his attention to the situation unfolding in Eastern Europe. Since following Kennan from Russia he had become one of the most vocal proponents of a new aggressive strategy toward the satellites. In early 1949, he argued that if the United States could “put certain refinements on [its] treatment of ‘communism’ it might provide an opportunity to ‘go to town’ on the satellites and other communist areas outside Russia.”¹¹² In March 1949, in the aftermath of Tito’s expulsion from Cominform, a Policy Planning Staff meeting was called to discuss the situation.¹¹³ At the meeting, Kennan took the floor and argued forcefully that, given the success of the Marshall Plan, the communist threat to Western Europe had been largely stemmed. It was now time to do something about the Soviet problem in Eastern Europe. In his words, US objectives must now be to obtain the retraction of Soviet power in this theater. If the US did that, he added, “then war should not be necessary.”¹¹⁴ Kennan’s position gained additional support from James Webb who, a month later, sent a memo in which he asked the director to explore “a more active policy toward the satellites.”¹¹⁵ Kennan then instructed Davies to find “some brave new approach on the question of what to do with Eastern Europe.”¹¹⁶

To help with the project, a group of outside consultants were brought in: they

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included professors: Black from Princeton, Philip Mosely from Columbia University and Robert Wolfe from Harvard. Two members from the American Federation of Labor, Benjamin Cohen and Jay Lovestone, were also included in the ad hoc group. Their goal was to find “the means of improving and intensifying [American] efforts to reduce and eventually cause the elimination of Soviet influence in the satellite areas.”¹¹⁷ After the consultation process ended, Davies took the lead in drafting the new policy paper. Although he was the primary author of what eventually became “NSC 58/2: US Policy Toward the Soviet Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” Robert Joyce also worked on the project. Joyce, an OSS/SSU veteran, who had worked for Frank Wisner in Romania, served briefly on the Policy Planning Staff. He later moved over to the CIA and, as journalist Evan Thomas makes clear, he was not “a voice of restraint.”¹¹⁸ Indeed, at the same time he was working on NSC 58, Joyce was also planning a paramilitary operation designed to undermine the communist government of Enver Hoxha. Joyce’s role in both the Albanian operation and NSC 58 is important, because it underscores the extent to which the two strategies were intertwined and, as I will make clear below, ill conceived.

A first draft of the paper, “NSC 58: DOS Report to NSC Draft Statement on US Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe,” was completed on 14 September 1949.¹¹⁹ A second draft appeared on 6 December 1949.¹²⁰ The third and final draft reached the National Security Council later in that month.¹²¹ Picking up on the themes Davies outlined in his paper on China, in the NSC 58 series, Davies and Joyce advocated a new and controversial strategy toward the satellites that was subsequently labeled “Titoism,” or “wedge strategy.”¹²² Implicit in their argument, was the belief that since the end of World War II the United States had stemmed the westward advance of Soviet Communism. However, as the report stated, these were “defensive accomplishments … [and] the time [was] now ripe for the US to place greater emphasis on the offensive, to consider whether [it was possible to do] more to cause the elimination or at least a reduction of predominant Soviet influence in the Satellite areas of Eastern Europe.”

NSC 58/2 stated that the overall aim of the Truman administration “must be the elimination of Soviet control from those countries and a reduction of Soviet influence to something like normal dimensions.” It went on to note, however, that while the ultimate objective of US policy must be the “appearance … of non-totalitarian administrations [in Eastern Europe] … strong tactical considerations … argue against setting this goal as the immediate objective.” Therefore, instead of calling for the removal of communist governments, the report suggested that, at least in the near term, the US should “seek to achieve this objective through fostering communist heresy among the satellite states, and encouraging the emergence of non-Stalinist regimes as temporary administration, even though they may be communist in nature.”¹²³

The rationale offered for this shift in strategy was three-fold. First, Davies and Joyce argued that, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, all of the East European countries had a legacy of authoritarian governments. “Democracy,”

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they argued, “in the Western sense, was alien to their culture and tradition.” Therefore, they concluded, “it would be virtually impossible to achieve democratic governments in Eastern Europe, in the near-term.” Second, they believed that since “the non-totalitarian leadership … had been thoroughly fragmented and crushed … it had little chance of coming to power save through armed intervention from the West.”¹²⁴ Third, given this situation, they opined, if the US undertook operations designed to create democracies in Eastern Europe, in the near term, they would probably directly challenge the Kremlin’s prestige, something they wanted to avoid at all costs.¹²⁵ Moreover, they mused, should the US be successful in this campaign and Eastern Europe become suddenly democratic, the administration, “would find [itself] deeply immersed with an infinitely continuing burden of political, economic and military responsibility.”¹²⁶ This, too they suggested, was undesirable.¹²⁷ Thus the only viable alternative appeared to be the short-term support of non-Stalinist communist governments. Clearly, NSC 58 represented a significant departure from previous American Cold War policy as outlined in NSC 20/4. Despite the similarity in the ultimate objectives outlined in the two policy papers there were important differences in tactics and strategy. For example, while NSC 20/4 made no distinction between the eradication of Soviet power and communism, NSC 58/2 suggested that Soviet power and influence needed to be removed. In other words, a non-Stalinist communist government could be supported, at least in the short term.

Not surprisingly, however, there were many in the State Department who opposed supporting communist governments of any type, for any period of time. According to John Campbell, an East European specialist, the debates that ensued over NSC 58 “raised the whole question of what [the US] were really after in Eastern Europe.”¹²⁸ Was the government opposed to “communism,” he asked, or to Soviet power or both? Given the emerging Cold War ideological consensus, Davies and Joyce’s “strategic vision” proved to be very divisive within the administration.¹²⁹ Yet no attempt was made to resolve the situation.¹³⁰

The contradictions inherent in American policy – the public myth of containment, the State Department’s new policy of Titoism and OPC’s plans for liberating the satellites – became a serious issue when John Paton Davies was forced to navigate between the various strategic tendencies. Like Kennan, Davies had an interest in intelligence operations – Kennan had even placed him on the short list for Frank Wisner’s job in 1948.¹³¹ Although he did not get the position, Kennan later appointed him to act as one of his liaison officers to the Office of Policy Coordination. Robert Joyce was Davies alternate. It was their job to provide strategic guidance to OPC; this, however, proved infinitely more difficult than originally envisioned, in large part because Kennan, who was generally overburdened with other commitments, only discussed “general concepts with his staff” and provided very little detailed instruction to either man.¹³² Given the ongoing problems with American strategy, Davies was left to his own devices.

In April 1949, Kennan asked Davies to come up with some ideas on how the US could influence intellectuals living in China in order to help shift their allegiance toward the West. On 21 April 1949 Davies drafted a memo in which he

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outlined a covert operation codenamed Tawny Pipit. It picked up on some of the themes outlined in NSC 58/2. In the memo, he recommended the use of balloons and “black” leaflet drops to get pro-American information into China.¹³³ This, of course, was similar to the operation proposed by Galloway and Cassidy a year earlier but, which had not gotten underway – according to Kennan – because of “recruiting difficulties.”¹³⁴ As part of the proposal, Davies apparently also suggested that left-leaning “fellow travelers,” who were considered sympathetic, or at least not antagonistic, to the communist government, be used to prepare the pamphlets.¹³⁵ According to Congressional records, although there is some debate on this point, he recommended six Americans for the job: Agnes Smedley, Anna Louise Strong, Edgar Snow, Benjamin K. Schwartz, John K. Fairbank and his wife Wilma.¹³⁶ The plan was to set them up in an office outside Washington, where they would prepare the propaganda leaflets. An OPC “cut out” would direct the operation.¹³⁷ The purpose of the “cut out” was to ensure that those involved in the operation would never know that they were working for the CIA.

In October 1949, Davies also suggested that American psychological operations be coordinated with guerrilla operations to help encourage civil disturbances in the USSR. He argued that the US should recruit small groups of anti-communist refugees from the East, train them in airborne and guerrilla warfare and, in the advent of war, drop them into Russia for the purposes of organizing civil war. He argued, at the time, that these units “may represent a closer approximation of the absolute weapon than the atomic bomb.”¹³⁸

Clearly Davies was no softie when it came to dealing with the communists. However, Tawny Pipit did advocate developing a relationship with known communists and “fellow travellers,” and this proved to be a problem. The year 1949 was terrible for America’s psyche. A succession of spy cases in Canada, Great Britain and the United States, which culminated in the arrest of Alger Hiss, fueled a burgeoning anti-communist hysteria that gripped the country. Republicans, in search of an issue after Dewey’s surprising defeat in the 1948 presidential campaign, seized the initiative and embraced the fear of communist “subversion” as a political weapon. The crisis atmosphere propelled Joseph McCarthy from a little known Republican Senator from Wisconsin to a figure of national prominence. By the fall of 1949 a perfect storm was brewing on the horizon and John Davies was headed directly toward it.

Already under suspicion for appearing to support communists in Asia, when he worked for Hurley John Davies proved to be an easy target. The situation came to a head on 16 November when Davies, serving as Kennan’s liaison, met with two OPC operatives – one of whom, Lyle Munson was a “hard right conservative”¹³⁹– to discuss Tawny Pipit.¹⁴⁰ Davies opened the meeting with a description of the operation and he then suggested that they discuss the plan. At this point the two OPC officers – Munson and Edward H. Hunter – walked out of the room.¹⁴¹ What Davies did not know was that Hunter and Munson were serving as liaison officers between OPC and the new internal security organization that President Truman had set up in order to ferret out communists working within the administration.¹⁴² On leaving Davies, the two men immediately went to see DCI Admiral

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Hillenkoetter and told him that Davies wanted the CIA to hire communists. After hearing the two men out, Hillenkoetter, went to the FBI.¹⁴³

Prior to approaching the FBI, Hillenkoetter made no attempt to contact Kennan or anyone else at the State Department. The question is of course, why? Hillenkoetter’s successor, Walter Bedell Smith, believed that his predecessor was “unduly shocked” by the nature of these operations and simply did not have the experience or wherewithal to fully comprehend their long-term implications.¹⁴⁴ Yet, although Hillenkoetter did not like some of the operations he was called upon to oversee, and he remained skeptical of others, Smith’s explanation does not hold a lot of weight, given Hillenkoetter’s history in intelligence. Instead, one has to wonder whether his animosity toward Kennan played a role in the Davies affair? While Kennan never conceded this publicly, he did suggest that if Allen Dulles had been DCI at the time, the matter never would have unfolded as it did.¹⁴⁵ At any rate, Hillenkoetter’s decision to turn the matter over to the FBI meant that Davies would have to face the Loyalty Review Board.

On 2 December 1949 Davies alerted Kennan to the situation which was unfolding.¹⁴⁶ However, by this point Kennan’s attention had shifted to what he considered to be more important issues, such as the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb and the administration’s decision to go ahead with the development of the hydrogen bomb: a decision that Kennan strongly disagreed with. As a result, Davies was left to his own devices. Over the next five years he was forced to endure nine security investigations. Although Kennan finally intervened on his behalf, his support for his subordinate was never unconditional or unqualified. He never made it clear what his instructions actually were.

As Davies faced the security investigations one by one, he began to have second thoughts about American Cold War strategy. In 1950, for example, he concluded that it was “a failure as it now stands.” He lamented that there were a number of strategic questions that had been left unresolved and, as a result, a number of operational problems had developed.¹⁴⁷ He traced all of these issues back to NSC 20/4 and its supporting staff study, NSC 20/1. Not only were these reports “sufficiently vague in outlining the means by which these objectives could be attained or in evaluating the capabilities of the US to successfully pursue such aims,” he argued, but they also failed to define whether US objectives were “to contain the Soviet Union or to foment opposition on the part of the peoples of the USSR and the satellites against the Soviet regimes, or to bring about other means, which would not involve challenging the Soviet regime’s internal power, or to change the basic concepts and actions held by the Soviet leaders or ruling groups.”¹⁴⁸ Mired in pointless hearings, Davies was unable to address the dilemma that went to the heart of American objectives.¹⁴⁹

Now I am by no means suggesting that, if Davies had not been under indictment he may have been able to reconcile the various strategic tendencies in play. I doubt that any one person could have positively influenced the course of American policy as it unfolded during these years.¹⁵⁰ My point is, however, that today it is difficult to “appreciate the miasma of fear, suspicion and pusillanim-

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ity which McCarthy had spread over official Washington.”¹⁵¹ The Davies case, along with that of John Melby, John Carter Vincent and the numerous other members of the State Department who were forced out during the heyday of McCarthyism, had a devastating impact on the Department of State. As Davies concluded in 1964, “the attacks from the radical right, culminating in the early fifties with the violence and subtlety of the purges and intimidation, left the Foreign Service demoralized and intellectually cowed. With some doughty exceptions, it became a body of conformists.”¹⁵²

It is often said of my generation that we no longer believe in heroes; that we prefer “tabloid” history to “national” history. Instead of honoring those who spend their lives serving their country we prefer to spend our time telling only the most sordid of tales; oftentimes more for our own purposes than for the sake of an accurate historical record. I am sure there are those who will read my account of Kennan’s tenure at the Policy Planning Staff in such a light. There will no doubt be some who will decry my motives, especially since this book appears so soon after Kennan’s death. They may also suggest that I am more interested in stirring up controversy than in recognizing the important legacy left by one of the great architects of American Cold War policy. In doing so, however, I believe that they will miss the point.

I have no doubt that the [Hi]stories of the Cold War will continue to celebrate George Kennan’s accomplishments, and rightly so. Indeed, Kennan spent most of his life helping to ensure that the myths he put in place would survive intact. However, there is also another story that needs to be told. I believe, and have maintained throughout this book, that despite his best public diplomacy, which was and remains a daunting legacy, his complicated and contradictory policy, which blurred any distinction between the containment of the Soviet threat and the reduction of Soviet power, was never translated into a unified and coherent strategy for waging the Cold War. Moreover, his determination to keep policy as flexible as possible ensured that, during his tenure in the Department of State, aspirations were never reconciled with capabilities.

Given the lack of direction emanating from the State Department, OPC – steeped in its own operational culture – was able to conduct operations as it saw fit. Thus, the gap between policy and operations – that had been enshrined within the flawed bureaucratic process – actually widened under Kennan’s tenure. The bureaucratic quagmire that existed, only added to the chaos as operations began to unfold. As Forrestal, Lovett and finally Kennan, left office, “OPC found itself in the questionable position of judging whether its own operations, even when desired or approved by the departmental liaison officers, were actually in accord with national strategy.”¹⁵³ After retiring from the administration, Kennan lamented that American foreign policy during the first years of the Cold War was “the gross product of a series of isolated and haphazard actions, uncoordinated amongst themselves and only vaguely related to specific concepts.”¹⁵⁴ He was right, yet in many ways he had only himself to blame.

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5
A clinical experiment

According to William Daugherty, a former intelligence officer within the CIA, in order for a covert operation to be successful it must “further national objectives as defined by the President.” It should be coordinated with other government agencies and be well managed with no compromises or tradecraft errors. It ought to have a “minimal human cost,” and ideally it should “make a significant difference in the shape, nature and condition of the world.”¹ Early American covert operations did none of the above. By the beginning of 1949 the Truman administration still had no basic premise or underlying principle governing its foreign policy. Although “NSC 20/4: US Objectives Toward the Soviet Union” had been approved by the President a year earlier, American Cold War policy remained ill-defined and obscure. The situation worsened in the summer of 1949, upon the release of “NSC 58/2: US Objectives With Respect to Eastern Europe.” Thereafter, three strategic visions: “containment,” “liberation” and “Titoism,” developed more or less independently of each other. It was in this environment that American covert operations were developed and implemented.

The most infamous operation conducted by the United States was Operation Valuable, a British “owned,”² paramilitary operation designed to destabilize the communist government of Enver Hoxha.³ Today, however, the actual objectives of this operation remain somewhat of a mystery. While the majority of scholars concede that the operation was designed to oust Hoxha, James McCargar maintains that this was never the objective. Instead, he argues that the operation was merely a “probe” to ascertain “whether there was sufficient opposition to Hoxha inside Albania for an effort to overthrow him to have a reasonable chance of success.”⁴ As it turns out, ambiguous operational objectives were just one of many factors that hampered the development and execution of this campaign.

Between 1949 and 1954 a number of paramilitary insertions took place in the country and all ended in disaster.⁵ Albania was not an easy country to operate in, or against; the Albanian people were “inveterate individualists,” who cherished their freedom; they were not easy to control and were suspicious of strangers. The majority of the population were believed to be Moslems, who lived in small clans and farmed the mountainous terrain, which they inhabited.⁶ Until 1912, the country was part of the Ottoman Empire. It was able to maintain its independent status after World War I, only after Woodrow Wilson intervened and saved it from partition.

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Ahmet Bej Zogu, who later changed his name to Zog,⁷ governed the tiny country during the interwar years. Referred to as “the hillbilly” by his people, Zog served first as Prime Minister, from 1922 until 1924, then as President, from 1925 until 1928, and finally as a self-appointed monarch until 1939. During this period he developed very strong ties with Italy. However, after Mussolini demanded that the Italian language be taught in Albanian schools and Zog refused, the relationship deteriorated. On 7 April 1939, Italian troops occupied the country and Albania became an Italian protectorate. For the Albanian people, this date marked the outbreak of World War II.

During the war, Zog and his family fled to England, where they were kept “on ice,” by British intelligence.⁸ Under occupation, Albanian society, already divided by a number of clans, split into a number of additional amorphous subgroups: nationalists, communists, royalists, traditionalists and collaborationists. Each group was designed to cope with, and in some cases resist, fascist rule. Yet each group also had its own agenda and there were a number of important differences between the groups – blood feuds were common.⁹ The hostility between the various factions continued after the war ended and they played an important role in how Albanian political culture developed in the postwar years.

When the Nazis finally retreated, in 1944, Zog tried to reclaim his throne, but was unsuccessful because Enver Hoxha, a committed communist, worked closely with Yugoslav emissaries – Miladin Popovic and Dushan Mugosha – and was able to seize power. Nevertheless, Hoxha’s first years were difficult ones. Initially he tried to develop a close relationship with Tito, but, after the Yugoslav President was expelled from Cominform (The Information Bureau of the Communist and Worker’s Party), their friendship cooled. Hoxha’s isolation, in the wake of Tito’s defection, was reinforced because each of Albania’s neighbors – Yugoslavia and Greece – had territorial designs on the small country. In 1945, the Greek government viewed Albania as a wayward Greek province destined for annexation. Determined to reassert their control over the Northern Epirus, the Greeks became increasingly annoyed with Hoxha after he began to support the communist partisans in the Greek civil war. Albanian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav interference was so serious that the United States eventually brought the issue before the United Nations.¹⁰

Of course Hoxha’s support for the partisans also alienated the British government, which was actively involved in supporting the Caldaris’ regime in Greece. For his part, Hoxha did little to repair the relationship. In May of 1946, Albanian forces had fired on two British destroyers cruising in the Corfu Channel; five months later two destroyers were sunk after hitting Albanian mines in the Channel. Aside from hostile British and Greek governments, Hoxha also faced a threat from across the Adriatic Sea, as the Italian press began to call for the annexation of Albania. Therefore, by 1949, Albania was an isolated and vulnerable “bastion of Russian influence on the fringe of Western Europe.”¹¹ Apparently, the Russian Soviets were even having difficulty getting food into the country.¹²

It was the British government’s Russia Committee, formed in 1946 to deal

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with the Soviet threat in the postwar world, which first came up with the idea to liberate the Albanian people from communism. Under the direction of veteran political warfare experts, Christopher Warner and Ivone Kirpatrick, the Committee began to lobby for a new aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union in 1947.¹³ By this point, there were a number of people within the British government who had come to believe that the West “could not win the ‘cold war’” unless an offensive was carried out “inside Russia and the satellite states.”¹⁴ Yet, as Richard Aldrich reminds us, support for this new strategy was not unanimous within the British government; indeed, Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, was against the Albanian campaign from the start.¹⁵

Despite Menzies’ reservations, Ernest Bevin, British Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s Foreign Secretary, gave the go-ahead for Hoxha’s removal in mid-February 1949.¹⁶ The operation was then turned over to the Special Political Action Group within England’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. Because of a lack of qualified personnel within SIS, former Special Operations Executive (SOE) personnel had to be recalled to active duty. Famed British spymaster David Smiley supervised the team. Although Smiley had extensive experience in Albania – he helped train Hoxha during World War II – it was clear almost from the start that the Americans would have to be included.¹⁷

Not everyone was happy with this turn of events. Many British officers, in an auspicious bit of foresight, feared that the tension that had developed between SOE and OSS, during World War II, would again manifest itself.¹⁸ Despite their concerns, Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), was apprised of Operation Valuable in late 1948 and the US officially became part of the project in the spring of 1949. By all accounts, Wisner was excited about the operation and supported it unconditionally. He viewed it at the time as “a clinical experiment to see whether larger rollback operations would be feasible elsewhere.”¹⁹ Both he and the British officers, with whom he worked, hoped that a successful counter-revolution in Albania, might encourage similar uprisings across Eastern Europe.²⁰

In March 1949, William Hayter, a senior British Intelligence officer who was serving as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), traveled to the United States with a group of SIS and Foreign Office staff. The group included Gladwyn Jebb, Earl Jellicoe and Peter Dwyer of MI6. In Washington, they met with Robert Joyce (Kennan’s liaison officer from the Policy Planning Staff, who was working on NSC 58 with John Paton Davies) and Frank Wisner to discuss the operation. A month later, the Policy Planning Staff, still under the direction of George Kennan, gave its go-ahead and a joint Anglo-American task force was set up to plan the operation.²¹ Headquartered in Washington D.C., the group consisted of the Soviet mole, Harold “Kim” Philby, Joyce and Franklin Lindsay. According to both Philby and McCargar, who participated in the joint task force meetings, the gatherings were generally “convivial,”²² and a “jocular mood” predominated the discussion of the operations.²³ Historian Beatrice Heuser goes even further. She suggests that “element, of reprehensible dilettantism” characterized operational planning.²⁴

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The American side of the operation was placed under the direction of Franklin Lindsay, Wisner’s deputy at OPC and an OSS veteran. He had spent most of World War II in Yugoslavia working with Tito, however, unlike many OSS personnel who joined SSU after the end of hostilities, Lindsay returned to graduate school. He still managed to stay in the operational loop, however, and in September 1948, while serving as a consultant to the State Department, he and Charles Thayer (another OSS veteran who went on to work for the Voice of America) drafted a memo advocating the use of displaced émigrés to undermine Soviet power in Eastern Europe. The report eventually made its way to the Policy Planning Staff, where it was greeted by a receptive audience.

It is impossible to separate the émigré or refugee question from the development of early American covert operations, as the majority of East Europeans who took part were recruited from the refugee camps that sprung up across Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Initially, the Truman Administration ignored the millions of homeless men, women and children displaced by the war.²⁵ They simply returned over two million displaced persons who sought refuge in the West, to Soviet custody. This included several thousand Russians who had never been Soviet citizens.²⁶ Until l949, all Soviet refugees caught escaping from the East were also forcibly returned.²⁷ Although the State–War– Navy-Coordinating Committee’s (SWNCC’s) special subcommittee on psychological warfare had called for the use of Soviet and East European expatriates to foment unrest in the Soviet bloc, and a number of high-level officials (including Secretary of Defense James Forrestal and Under Secretary of State Robert Lovett) had advocated the same thing, nothing much was done on the matter until March of 1948, when Kennan’s paper on political warfare made the rounds.²⁸

In his paper, Kennan called for the use of refugees to encourage resistance in the Eastern bloc. Under the plan, East European expatriates would be brought together under so-called “Freedom Committees,” which would be financed by the United States. However, while Kennan believed the government should back the operations, and provide a guiding hand, he argued that the organizations should be run by high profile American citizens, who at least appeared to have no connections with the government. He specifically singled out Allen Dulles, whom he suggested would be an excellent candidate for the job. According to Kennan, Dulles was ideally placed to establish contact with the underground resistance forces that existed in Eastern Europe, and pass on assurances of American support.²⁹ Apparently, Dulles “inspired trust, he was genial, [and] he came with a glamorous reputation in intelligence…” Moreover, “his tweedy, pipe-smoking manner was disarming.”³⁰

The project was subsequently code named BLOODSTONE and according to Burton Hersh, it was “manifestly dicey [and] fraught with political traps.”³¹ It called for the use of East European exiles to distribute psychological warfare in occupied countries and run covert operations behind the Iron Curtain. However, it also created a channel whereby a flood of refugees was able to enter the United States. And, according to Christopher Simpson, many of those who

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gained access to the United States, through BLOODSTONE, were former Nazis.³² Initially, the operation was run out of the State Department, however, Kennan quickly tired of dealing with the constant bickering between the East European factions and he eventually found a way to “rid” his department of having to “do business” with them.³³ In 1950, he turned the whole matter over to Frank Wisner, at OPC, despite DCI Hillenkoetter’s vehement objection; at this point, Dulles was brought in to oversee the operation. Although he worked full time for over a year, he did not receive a government salary until December 1950, when he officially joined the CIA.

During this period, he played a critical role in both the formation of the Free Europe Committee and the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE); he was even named the first president of NCFE. When he officially joined the CIA, DeWitt Clinton Poole, another OSS veteran who had also maintained close connections to the intelligence community, replaced him. Aside from Dulles and Poole, the organization’s roster read like a Who’s Who of the American intelligence community and its board consisted of a number of high profile citizens, including: Henry Luce, Joseph Grew, Adolf Berle and Dwight Eisenhower.³⁴

Therefore, two years after he had first thought up the idea, Kennan’s plan came to fruition, however, the creation of NCFE did not mean that the refugee question had been solved; indeed, their status was subject to ongoing debate throughout the remainder of the Truman Administration. As Susan Carruthers has recently pointed out, those who breached the Iron Curtain often found themselves “encamped between camps, suspended in both space and time, unable to go back or move forward.” They “existed in a precarious limbo: caught between the administration’s desire to promote escape” and those, both within and outside the government, who did not.³⁵

Ostensibly, NCFE’s goal was to devise “peaceful efforts to prepare the way toward the restoration in Eastern Europe of the social, political and religious liberties.”³⁶ Yet many of the operations it funded were in no way peaceful and its ultimate objective was to encourage the liberation of the satellite countries. Initially, Kennan and Dulles hoped that the organization’s budget could be raised through private donations. This proved impossible, however, and the CIA stepped in. During its first year, NCFE spent approximately $30 million: 90 percent of which came from undisclosed government accounts; $2 million, for example, came from impounded Nazi accounts cleared through the Exchange Stabilization Fund.³⁷ Before reaching NCFE the money was laundered through a number of foundations and charities, including the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The “State–Private” network that developed, was important because, as historian Scott Lucas has pointed out, the American Cold War “was not the exclusive domain … of politicians, diplomats and generals,” or for that matter, covert operators. It was waged by a number of private groups and high profile individuals who worked with them.³⁸

NCFE’s semi-independent status meant that those who worked for the committee were not always easy to control. Poole, for example, was known within OPC as, “little Napoleon.”³⁹ Its complex position also meant that it did not

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always receive adequate guidance from the State Department.; in fact, most of its guidance came from OPC and, according to Poole, he only received “scattered directives” from Frank Wisner, and these rarely “made too much sense.”⁴⁰ Apparently, providing strategic guidance was not one of Wisner’s strong suits.

Despite the political and strategic vacuum in which NCFE functioned, however, the committee launched Radio Free Europe in 1949. RFE was a large broadcasting station designed to beam propaganda into Eastern Europe. It was developed in order to intensify the American information campaign already being waged by the Voice of America (VOA). VOA was set up in World War II to combat the German and Japanese threat; its first broadcast was to Germany on 4 February 1942. By the end of the month, it had programs running in France, Italy and Spain,⁴¹ and at the height of the war, it broadcast around the clock in forty different languages.⁴² When hostilities ended, however, the majority of its staff resigned. At the time it was unclear whether the operation would survive in the postwar world and, by April 1946 nearly two-thirds of its employees were gone.⁴³ Throughout 1946 and 1947, VOA came under increasing criticism from Congress, which viewed America’s foray into psychological warfare with a burgeoning skepticism, bordering on hostility. During this period, VOA was also attacked by the mainstream media, which saw it as competition for talent and money.⁴⁴ Over time, a number of cuts were made to its funding, and the number of programs it was able to mount declined.

As Soviet propaganda intensified, however, a number of high-ranking government officials changed their tune and began to call for an increase in the American information program. In late 1947, a group of Congressmen traveled to Europe, where they came face to face with the effects of Soviet propaganda on American allies. When they returned, two Senators, Howard Smith and Karl Mundt, sponsored the United States Information and Education Act; Congress eventually passed what became known as the Smith–Mundt Act on 27 January 1948. Over the next three years, the Voice of America grew steadily, and by 1951 it boasted four hundred hours of programming a week, in forty-five different languages.⁴⁵

However, during the Truman administration VOA never received the guidance it needed from the State Department. Although both the President and his foreign policy advisors had publicly enunciated American objectives in general terms, they rarely mentioned short-term aims or the measures required to achieve them. As a result, those charged with putting the programs on the air were unsure whether they should focus on programs designed to defend the European Recovery Program and bolster West European identity, or on challenging Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe.⁴⁶ At the time, they were under pressure to conduct shows of both types, however, as the State Department was still wrestling with this question internally, no specific instructions were provided. According to Robert T. Holt and Robert van de Velde, two specialists on postwar psychological warfare, the only direction VOA received, “involved some hazy notions of ‘drilling’ holes in the Iron Curtain through which ‘truth’ could be ‘poured.’” At the time, they pointed out, that it was generally believed that the truth would make you free.⁴⁷

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The lack of strategic guidance was particularly problematic for American psychological warriors, because they relied on slogans and catchphrases in order to bring home their message. However, because both NSC 20/4 and NSC 58 were classified top secret, those charged with psychological warfare planning had nothing to go on but the public statements made by policymakers, and prior to 1950 these rarely went beyond calls to “contain” the Soviet threat. Over time, however, VOA underwent a transformation of its own making. In 1949, a Russian specialist became the station’s new director and programs in Russian were increased to around the clock. By the end of 1949 about half of its programs were directed against the Soviet Union and international communism. Aside from an increase in the number of programs, the intensity of the rhetoric employed also increased. VOA’s anti-communism became so intense that one State Department analyst worried that Eastern bloc listeners might suffer from “propaganda fatigue.” He concluded: in VOA programs “the audience is exposed to an uninterrupted succession of purposeful messages without ever having the opportunity of a breathing space; it is an all-out offensive.”⁴⁸ Once again, operations ran ahead of policy and strategy.

In response to VOA’s new aggressive line, in October 1949, the Soviets began jamming the station. According to historian Walter Hixson, in order to block out the programs the Soviets had to broadcast signals on a wavelength slightly different from that being used by the Americans. The result was a sound reminiscent of “the buzzing of a gigantic electric razor, mixed with a scraping noise and the roar of a squadron of B-24s.”⁴⁹ Soviet jamming proved to be effective and listeners were easily deterred. In order to come up with ways to stop Russian jamming, President Truman launched Project Troy in 1949. The project began when Under Secretary of State James Webb, approached the President of MIT, James Killian, and asked him to put a study group together in order to provide guidance on how VOA could transmit more effectively. In the summer of 1950, a group of academics were brought together in order to study the problem; their report was presented to the President in February 1951. The study concluded that American psychological warriors needed not only better understanding of their audience but they needed clear and precise guidance on American objectives. In the aftermath of Project Troy a number of centers were set up across the United States in order to deal with these issues; the first forum developed was the MIT Center for International Studies, which was set up in 1952, the last year of Truman’s presidency.

Eventually, the United States was able to counter Soviet jamming: in 1950, the National Security Council agreed to implement the “Ring Plan,” the objective of which was to surround the Soviet Union with a number of new and more powerful transmitters that were impervious to jamming. The plan worked, and by the end of the Truman administration, VOA had emerged as one of the most effective tools to counter Soviet propaganda.⁵⁰ However, as Voice of America began to improvise its propaganda strategy, it came into conflict with other government agencies and departments who had different objectives and missions.⁵¹ In early 1949, the Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization

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(IFIO) was set up to address the lack of coordination between the various bodies conducting information activities. However, by this point, State and Defense were at loggerheads over who should control psychological warfare during times of war or national emergency. As a result, the cooperation necessary to ensure that all psychological warfare programs were coordinated was not forthcoming.

As the controversy over the command and control of psychological warfare continued, the Joint Chiefs of Staff became determined to play a more effective role in the development of these operations. According to Edward Lilly, prior to 1948 there was no single individual within the JCS who was responsible for the psychological warfare aspect of military policy. In 1949, however, a special section was established within the Joint Strategic Plans Group (JSPG) to deal specifically with this topic; it was this unit that went on to provide guidance to OPC, under NSC 10/2.⁵² However, rather than helping to improve coordination between State and Defense, the tension between the two main government departments actually got worse. As time wore on, the JSPG and the CIA began to press the information programmers to develop a long-range plan for psychological warfare. Without any clear direction from the State Department, however, they were unable to do as they were asked. “Hence round and round the argument went without resolution or reference to the basic differences involved.”⁵³

The situation became worse after Radio Free Europe (RFE) was set up, under the auspices of the NCFE. Ideally RFE was to augment VOA; its goal was to beam propaganda directly into Eastern Europe and “to contribute to the liberation of nations behind the Iron Curtain by sustaining their morale and stimulating them in a spirit of non-cooperation.”⁵⁴ Unfortunately, RFE never got the strategic guidance they needed. According to Wayne Jackson, author of an internal CIA history on Allen Dulles, an investigation of RFE archives could find “no record of any formal policy guidance coming from the State Department.” Instead, all of the guidance RFE received came through the International Organization (IO) Division within the CIA.”⁵⁵

Two years later, Radio Liberty began broadcasting; placed under the direction of Frank Lindsay its objective was to beam propaganda into the Soviet Union. Ideally RFE and Radio Liberty were to complement each other, but the strategic guidance necessary to achieve this was not forthcoming – according to Sig Mickelson, despite the similar mandates there was very little coordination between the two projects. He concluded: “in essence they represented separate cells of a secret society.” “Even their sources of policy guidance and funding were kept in separate and discrete units.”⁵⁶ In order to maintain the fiction that RFE and Radio Liberty were private organizations, two more associations were set up to collect money for it, yet they never raised more than “a small fraction” of the finances needed to run the radio programs.⁵⁷ The lack of coordination between all three of the radio programs became a serious issue as American policymakers began to debate Cold War policy and strategy. As these debates raged on, each station took on the strategic vision of its host department; RFE and Radio Liberty became more hard-hitting, more aggressive, and more exciting than VOA, which was told to follow a more moderate course.⁵⁸

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RFE’s first broadcast to Czechoslovakia was made in 1950; within a few months it had developed programs that targeted five countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Programming eventually expanded to include three more language programs: Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian.⁵⁹ An Albanian language program was also added in 1951. However, it ended two years later because there were not enough radios in Albania for it to have any effect.⁶⁰ The results of these early programs were mixed, and often they did more harm than good. For example, during its first year in operation, RFE caused a currency panic in Czechoslovakia. Within a few hours, after its currency was devalued, people were marching in the streets. However, as the demonstrations grew and the Truman Administration did nothing, East European audiences became increasingly skeptical of RFE promises of aid. By 1952 Joseph Grew believed that the time had come for the United States to decide what it wanted to accomplish in Eastern Europe. RFE simply could not continue to contribute to the state of unrest in Eastern Europe without any follow-up. “Something must happen,” he opined, using a football analogy. The administration had to decide if they were going to go on the offense or if they were going to stay on defense. “We can no longer take ad hoc action,” he concluded.⁶¹

The most troubling question to emerge during this period, was whether or not the United States should encourage Soviet and East European defectors; by 1950 the government was divided between those who wanted to encourage defectors and those who did not. The NSC had remained silent on the issue, but in 1951 it finally released NSC 86, a still classified document, which was designed to outline American policy on defectors. Unfortunately, its prescription, like those of previous NSC papers was vague and the situation remained unresolved.

Despite the lack of unanimity within the administration in its daily programs, RFE often encouraged people to leave the East and come to the West. The announcers promised food, clothing, lodging and pocket money to those who escaped. In September 1951 a Czech train engineer, after listening to RFE, diverted a train from East Germany to West Germany taking 108 passengers with him.⁶² Problems occurred when he reached the West and found the promises made on Radio Free Europe were hollow; instead of being greeted with open arms they were put in hastily constructed refugee camps that were overcrowded and ill equipped to handle the daily influx of new people.⁶³ Not surprisingly, many of the refugees became disillusioned with Western promises and some even returned to the East, providing the Soviets with an important propaganda victory.

Eventually, more and more people within the State Department began to question the wisdom of encouraging East Europeans to leave their homes. They pointed out that not only were they losing valuable intelligence sources in the East but also they were depleting an already small resistance force. However, the government as a whole was divided between those who wanted to encourage defections and those who did not; as one analyst concluded: until the National Security Council addresses this question, our policy “remains in a vacuum.”⁶⁴ Yet the broadcasts went on, and during the final years of the Truman Adminis-

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tration, the number of refugees actually increased. Yet of the 10,000 escapees who were receiving assistance only 2,800 had been resettled.⁶⁵ Given the lack of resources available, many of those who came to the West between 1949 and 1952 were forced to spend months in “detention centers,” where they were sometimes housed, along with common criminals.⁶⁶ Over time the West European governments began to decry the daily influx of people – not only were Radio Free Europe’s programs undermining US objectives as outlined in NSC 20/4 but they were alienating America’s allies as well.

The central problem was that there was no one providing central direction; the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were operating in a political and strategic vacuum.⁶⁷ In 1950, the new director of RFE complained “[w]e receive only the occasional identified ‘flimsy.’ Of these we have had little more than a dozen in all and none of them has contained very much that was helpful.” As a result, he explained, the announcers were often left to decide policy questions themselves.⁶⁸ Those making the decisions were, more often than not, East European expatriates and their objectives frequently differed substantially from their American sponsors. What’s more, it was impossible to get the various East European factions to agree with each other on questions of content. According to Cord Meyer, who was brought in to head RFE in 1951, “the different political groups were so prone to infighting that a Tower of Babel would have been erected if they were left to their own devices.⁶⁹

The lack of coordination became even worse when the NCFE model expanded to include a number of East European national committees. During Truman’s presidency, approximately a dozen national councils were created.⁷⁰ One of the first to be set up was the Albanian National Committee; it was designed to provide the nucleus for the Albanian government in exile. Mithat Frashëri became the first president of the organization. He had first approached the American government in 1947 and offered his services – which included a plan to “import fifty Albanian refugee leaders into the United States” in order to “counteract” communist intrigues – in the United States. At this time, his visa application was denied by the State Department, which argued that his group consisted of known collaborators and this would, in time, “occasion embarrassment” to the administration.⁷¹ They were right. However, two years later, on 12 May 1949, Robert Joyce interceded on Frashëri’s behalf and he and his fellow compatriots were granted a visa. Frashëri never lived to see Operation Valuable unfold, however, dying less than five months later, on 3 October 1949, while staying at the Lexington Hotel in Manhattan. In a bitter twist of fate, his death occurred within hours of the first landing at Divijka Beach.

Upon his death, Hasan Dosti, the former Minister of Justice during the Italian occupation, replaced him as the new head of the Free Albania Committee. Like Frashëri, Dosti was a member of Balli Kombeter (The National Front), which has been characterized as, a “right-wing, ultra-nationalist” and “anti-monarchist,” movement. The group’s primary goal, aside from Albania’s liberation from communism, was the annexation of Kosovo, then a province of Yugoslavia. Initially, the Truman Administration supported the National Front,

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because it tried to function under a “pseudo-banner of democratic ideas,” hence the somewhat misleading characterization, which still persists to this day, that it was a “republican” party. However, many members of the National Front were anti-British and anti-Tito. Some were even reported to have collaborated with the Nazis. This was a dangerous combination and it opened the door to a host of problems; not surprisingly, a number of operations people refused to work with them. McCargar, for example, “screamed bloody murder” about their inclusion, because, as he put it, they would be a “blot on everybody’s escutcheon.”⁷² He was right. However, his concerns were overruled.

The British were also suspicious of the National Front and they were not as easily appeased. Although they had initially approached Frashëri with Operation Valuable, they quickly became disillusioned with his group’s anti-monarchist stand. In due course they turned to another Albanian resistance organization, the Legality, which was set up in 1943 under the leadership of Abas Kupi. The Legality’s primary goal was to return King Zog to the throne, however, like the National Front, some of its members were believed to have collaborated with the Nazis.⁷³ None-the-less, given the National Front’s anti-monarchist stand, the British government made the decision to support Kupi and his followers.⁷⁴ Unfortunately, this caused a number of problems, because OPC continued to back Balli Kombeter.

Over time, it became clear that they would have to open ties with the monarchist party as well. However, by the time they came around to this decision they had so alienated Zog, that when the American envoy arrived in Egypt, where he was living in exile, they were refused an audience.⁷⁵ After some fancy footwork on the part of a quick thinking officer, Zog finally agreed to see them and the Legality joined NCFE. However, their inclusion was only a means to an end for the Americans. At no time did the US envision the restoration of the monarchy in Albania.⁷⁶ Not surprisingly, this resulted in an enormous controversy whenever the structure of Albania’s post-liberation government was discussed.

The central problem was that neither the Ballists nor the Legality got along – a number of fights eventually erupted and a few deaths occurred.⁷⁷ Legend has it that at a BBC lawn party the head of the Legality, Abas Kupi, picked up a snake and chased the aging head of the BK, Mithat Frashëri, around the garden with it.⁷⁸ Despite the histrionics, the tension between the two groups was very real and it reflected serious political divisions, which existed within Albanian society as a whole. The tiny country was made up of a number of different religious, political and economic sub-groups; the various controversies between the clans were steeped in history and the tension between the various factions had come to a head during World War II as each political group competed for members and prestige. Competition was so intense that families were sometimes divided and destroyed, along political lines. This, of course, helps explain why so many of the commandos were captured so easily. Today, we know that some of the men were turned in by members of their own family.⁷⁹

In order to mask the infighting between the BK and the Legality it was decided to expand the NCFE and stick to strict recruiting quotas when soliciting

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membership. By the time Operation Valuable got under way 40 percent of NCFE’s membership came from Balli Kombetar, 40 percent from the Legality and 20 percent was taken from the remaining smaller parties.⁸⁰ However, the inclusion of the smaller parties caused a number of additional problems, because some of these groups were sponsored by Albania’s neighbors which had their own interests in the country. Italy, for example, backed the Independent Block, which ran its own covert operations in Albania.⁸¹ Indeed, three months before the British launched Operation Valuable, the Italian government sponsored its own covert operation designed to destabilize the Hoxha regime.

In July of 1949, a group of Albanian expatriates left Italy by plane and parachuted into the Kurvelesh region of Albania. Unfortunately, the team was captured four days after their insertion and one of the men, Ethem Cako, was forced to lure more commandos into the country in an operation called, Buza e Bredhit or Fir’s Edge. Eventually, another fourteen men tried to cross the border to meet up with Cako. However, half the men were “annihilated before even entering” the country. Although the remaining commandos were able to return to safety, the Italians continued to send ammunitions, food, clothing and medical supplies to Cako (who they believed was hiding in the mountains) for another year. Of course, all of the supplies went directly into the hands of the Albanian security force. The operation was finally exposed on 30 June 1950 when Cako was brought to trial.⁸² The Greek government also sponsored their own Albanian party in exile and they too sent insurgents into the tiny country; as time went on, their operations were eventually coordinated with the British and the Americans.⁸³ However, by the time these operations were synchronized, the damage was done. The majority of the Albanian populace, already suspicious of Italian and Greek motives, was unable to distinguish between Italian and Greek operations and those sponsored by the British and the Americans. Therefore, all of the “diversionists” were viewed with suspicion and skepticism.

Tito also had his hand in Albanian politics and he too, supported an Albania resistance group based in Yugoslavia.⁸⁴ Tito’s position on Albania was complicated, as was American policy toward Yugoslavia; initially, the State Department tried to ignore the maverick communist leader, nonetheless, in 1948, a few overtures, including a transfer of arms, were made. However, as Policy Planning Staff took steps to improve relations with Tito, a “rogue” American operational team entered Yugoslavia and tried to overthrow the communist government. Although the mission was ultimately called off (after it was exposed by the British Government, which was livid), the damage was done.⁸⁵

The decision to execute a covert operation designed to topple Tito, undertaken simultaneously with efforts to improve relations with Yugoslavia, underscores not only the separation between policy and operations that existed within the administration, but the confusion over American Cold War policy in general. Although there were some individuals in the Policy Planning Staff, like John Paton Davies, who supported developing a relationship with Tito, there were others, like John Campbell, who opposed working with communists of any type. This was an important point that needed to be clarified, especially if the

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Albanian operation was to have Tito’s support. While those in the State Department debated the question, Tito was told by a high-ranking official that the US would be willing to see any type of government in Albania as long as it was democratically chosen. Yet, as one State Department member lamented, promising Tito a communist ally in Albania raised the question of what American objectives in Eastern Europe actually were. Were they, for example, “to detach the satellites from Russia or to settle in advance what their future forms of government” should be?⁸⁶

In the end, the issue remained unresolved and Tito refused to support Operation Valuable, arguing that it would do nothing but encourage Soviet reprisals in the area.⁸⁷ He became increasingly hostile to the campaign, however, when a paramilitary team was dropped “by mistake” in his country. Although the Americans apologized, claiming the men had “missed their way,” Tito was furious and relations between all involved deteriorated significantly.⁸⁸ Over time, a number of people within the administration began to question the wisdom of continuing the Albanian operations in the face of Tito’s opposition. The State Department, for example, finally came to the conclusion that the Albanian operation was not worth worsening US–Yugoslav relations.⁸⁹ However, OPC continued the project for four more years.

This was not the first time the State Department and OPC differed over Cold War strategy, nor was State the only government department who encouraged OPC to abandon Operation Valuable. The CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO), which was charged with the drafting of intelligence estimates, also tried a number of times to warn OPC off the project. In September of 1949, for example, they pointed out that neither the United States nor Britain had any means of assessing popular support in the country,⁹⁰ therefore, they concluded, the chances of actually encouraging a popular revolt were unknown. The following month they submitted an estimate which argued that the Albanian Committee for National Liberation “was unlikely to constitute a serious threat” to communist government,⁹¹ and they went on to argue that the settlement of the differences between the various Albanian factions was a necessary precondition to the successful toppling of the Hoxha regime. More importantly, however, they opined that even if the differences were settled, and the Albanians had access to outside aid, it was unlikely that the Hoxha regime could be overthrown.⁹² The operation went ahead anyway.

During the first years of the Cold War a considerable gap existed between the intelligence side of the CIA and its operational branch. Until the final months of 1950, OSO and OPC existed as two separate entities. Their separation went so far that each office had its own representative in the various field stations. Not surprisingly, they competed for both resources and agents. Rivalry between the two units was fueled because, during these years there were a number of ambitious officers who were always on the lookout for ways to promote their own careers, “even at the expense of their colleagues.” According to Wayne Jackson, the central problem was that “no one had set a tone of cooperation or goodwill within the organization.”⁹³ The tension that developed between OPC and OSO

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also reflected the various personalities of those involved; according to journalist Peter Grose, “a clear cultural gap divided the two jerrybuilt clandestine services.” There was a disparity in social classes and working experience; the two branches were divided between “academics and police, liberals and conservatives, professionals of intelligence collection and elites from the Ivy League,” “enthusiasts and inexperienced amateurs, scornfully labeled ‘Park Avenue Cowboys.’”⁹⁴ Not surprisingly, dog fights and turf wars occurred on a regular basis, yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, the differences “went beyond petty bureaucratic struggles” to the heart of what the CIA was supposed to do.⁹⁵

Part of the problem, Jackson tells us, was that DCI Hillenkoetter simply did not have the “talent” or “inclination for easy personal friendly relationships,” and as a result a spirit of cooperation took a long time to develop within the agency.⁹⁶ Therefore, until Walter Bedell Smith replaced Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence and announced his intention to bring the two branches together under a new Operations Directorate, OSO and OPC continued to exist as separate entities and they rarely coordinated their intelligence or their operations.⁹⁷ Frank Wisner’s weak organizational style only complicated the situation; according to historian John Prados, the Director of Plans “reveled only in action.” He “lacked the patience for organizational issues” and, as a result, “there were bursts of wild activity,” instead of coherent operational planning.⁹⁸ Given the lack of guidance, OPC began to run on “a project system,” where operations were developed around individual activities rather than overall objectives. This system was reinforced by the way in which the agents were judged. What mattered most, according to Prados, was not how successful an operation was, but rather how many operations an agent could develop. During the immediate postwar years quantity always trumped quality. Not surprisingly, competition, overlap and “maximum independence” dominated operational planning.⁹⁹ All of these problems ultimately came to a head as Operation Valuable got under way.

By the fall of 1949 the British and Americans had agreed on a plan to oust Hoxha. It consisted of inserting commandos in small teams in the hopes that, once in Albania, these men could develop a resistance force capable of toppling the communist regime. James McCargar was brought in to run the operation; nick-named “the Scarlet Pimpernel of a Renegade Intelligence Service,” McCargar joined OPC after “the Pond” was shut down.¹⁰⁰ He served under the direction of Robert Low, a former OSS agent who later went on to become the Time Life correspondent for Eastern Europe. According to McCargar, Low was sent to Rome, “the center of Albanian emigration,” to recruit men to form the Albanian National Committee.¹⁰¹ Another OPC officer, with State Department connections, Carmel Offie, was put in charge of recruiting Albanians from the Displaced Person (DP) camps in Europe.¹⁰² Wisner hired him in 1947, after the State Department fired him for using the diplomatic pouch for illegal money transfers. At the time Offie had a reputation for getting the job done, no matter what the cost. In the words of Burton Hersh, when Offie was around, “red tape disappeared fast” and “ethical limits fell away.”¹⁰³ The general consensus was

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that he would either be Secretary of State one day, or be found floating in the Potomac River.¹⁰⁴

The latter was probably closer to the truth. Openly gay, at a time when homosexuality was considered a threat to national security, Offie ultimately fell victim to Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts. In early 1950, only a few months after Operation Valuable got under way, his career effectively ended after he was arrested for solicitation in the public washrooms in Lafayette Park. According to political scientist David Barnett, McCarthy used Offie’s arrest to tie homosexuality to communist subversion in his infamous speech wherein he charged that the Truman Administration was harboring communists.¹⁰⁵ Despite the numerous calls for Offie’s resignation, which occurred in the aftermath of McCarthy’s comments, Frank Wisner kept him on OPC’s payroll as long as he could; eventually, however, he was forced to let him go. Offie went on to join the private army of “old boys” who continued to do Wisner’s bidding from outside the government’s walls.

Before he was arrested, Offie recruited a number of men from the displaced person camps in Europe. Some were “hardened fighters,” whereas others, journalist Peter Grose tells us, were “former prisoners of war, slave laborers, or general malcontents.”¹⁰⁶ Initially, thirty men were selected to take part in Operation Valuable. They were housed in Fort Bin Mema, an old castle in Greece, but over time they were dispersed to one of three bases across Europe. In these camps they were taken through a series of activities designed to prepare them for the mission they would undertake. In the span of a day, one hour was spent in physical fitness classes, an additional hour on hand-to-hand combat – knives were the weapon of choice – and another two hours were spent on parachute training. A final two hours of instruction, on how to use transmission radios and telephones – this was despite the fact that there were very few radios in the country and that the majority of Albanians did not have phones until the 1960s – capped their official duties. During their free time, the men were taught reading, writing, arithmetic and geography. The geography lessons came in handy, as a number of the commandos and their supplies were dropped off target. Occasionally, they watched movies and took part in seminars that stressed the benefits of democracy over communism. Every once in a while, the leaders of Free Albania Committee – Abas Kupi, Professor Abaz Ermenji (co-founder of Balli Kombetar) or Gaqo Gogo – came to the camps to remind the men why they were there. They were told that the United States and Britain had promised to help with the liberation of Albania, that year. However, they were also cautioned that, should circumstances warrant, they might be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice.

This was not idle chatter; on leaving the safety of the camps each operative was provided with a cyanide capsule, known as the L-pill, that they were to ingest in the event of capture. They were warned that, under no circumstances, should they allow themselves to be taken alive.¹⁰⁷ Although it remains unclear how many of the men chose suicide over capture, those who took part in the operations rarely questioned their Anglo-American advisors, even when they thought the plans were foolhardy. Apparently they did not want their senior officers to think they were afraid.¹⁰⁸ Unfortunately, their erstwhile sponsors failed to

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treat them with the same respect; indeed, as a sign of their contempt, British and American officers took to referring to Albanian commandos as “pixies.”

Operation Valuable commenced on 3 October 1949, and on that dark, cold night a “small private schooner,” aptly christened The Stormy Seas, carried nine men, including Sami Bardha, Petrit Butka, Zihni Mançe, Seferi Luarasi and Përparim Aliu, to Divjaka, a beach near Lashnja, fifty miles southwest of Tirana, the Albanian capital.¹⁰⁹ They were armed with German machine guns, knives and two hand grenades. They also carried with them two radios, binoculars, a few propaganda leaflets, toilet paper and a suicide pill.¹¹⁰ After a couple of days on the ground, the men split into two groups. Although they were told not to contact anyone along the way, they were forced to deviate from their plans in order to secure food and water. As a result one of the teams came to the attention of the Sigurimi, the Albanian secret police. In the gun battle, which ensued, three of the men were killed and a fourth disappeared.

Over the next few days the five men who remained, tried to recruit friends and family into a resistance force that could be used to challenge the Hoxha regime. However, many of the people they contacted viewed their objective with skepticism; they wanted to know where the British and American troops were. After a while, the remaining commandos decided to abort the mission and retreat overland into Greece. As part of their training, each of the men was given a “sign/code,” or secret signal, to use at the border in order to ensure safe passage.¹¹¹ As they tried to escape, however, an additional member of their team was killed. By the time they made it to safety, half of their force had been lost to the Sigurimi.

Nonetheless, a week later a second group of eleven commandos entered the country. Despite their efforts, they too were unable to secure support from the local populace. Moreover, many of those they contacted were subsequently arrested and executed. The Albanian security force had been on their trail as soon as they entered the country and, like their predecessors, this group quickly aborted the mission.¹¹² The following month, the CIA released its first estimate on Albania, stating that, although “overt opposition against the regime exists in the country … it is largely uncoordinated and its effectiveness is an unknown quantity.” The report concluded that a combination of factors makes the overthrow of the Hoxha regime “unlikely this winter.”¹¹³ Although neither the intelligence estimate nor the dramatic failure of the first two operations caused OPC to rethink the campaign, the British government began having second thoughts.

According to Richard Aldrich the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb, the “fall” of China to the communists and the outbreak of the Korean War caused the British to fundamentally re-evaluate their objectives in Eastern Europe. As a result, from the summer of 1950 onward, successive British governments were more interested in containing the danger of war, than in containing communism.¹¹⁴ In 1950 they pulled out of Operation Valuable. Cooperation between the two sides had never been forthcoming.¹¹⁵ Apparently “Anglo-American frictions plagued the operations at all levels.”¹¹⁶ Not only did they fail to agree on which émigré organization to support, they could not agree on how

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best to insert the paramilitary teams. The British supported amphibious landings while the US lobbied for low-level parachute drops. Ultimately, neither approach worked and in 1950, after a series of operational failures, the British finally walked away.

The Americans, however, were not as easily discouraged. In 1950 Operation Valuable was renamed Project BGFIEND. A number of Albanian refugees and a handful of Albanian-Americans from the Boston area were subsequently organized into a paramilitary force consisting of about 250 men. The group, known as Company 4000, was trained in Germany and placed under the direction of Thomas Mangelly, an American of Albanian descent.¹¹⁷ In the spring of 1950, a number of Albanian commandos entered the country by land and sea, however, they all failed to achieve their objective and the majority of those who took part were eventually captured and shot, after lengthy show trials.¹¹⁸ In July of 1950, the US attempted two more insertions. Under the command of Ali Basholli, two teams – one dispatched over land, the other by sea – entered the country surreptitiously. Unfortunately, the Sigurimi again anticipated their arrival and they arrested the majority of commandos who took part, the survivors crossing into Yugoslavia. In November 1950, the US changed its tactics and initiated an air-infiltration campaign using a C-47 Dakota aircraft.¹¹⁹ Airdrops were chosen because the majority of King Zog’s followers lived in central Albania and by this time, OPC had shifted its support from the Ballists to the Legality. To reach these groups, by land, would have taken weeks.¹²⁰ Given the time constraints and pressure they were under, however, OPC failed to give the men adequate parachute training. According to aerospace historian, Curtis Peebles, none of the men who took part had jumped out of a plane prior to their 19 November 1950 departure. Despite the lack of practice, the operation went ahead and the new recruits were dropped inland in two and four-man teams. Once again, however, the majority of Albanians who participated were captured. Those who survived, did so only because they had been dropped off-course.¹²¹

Despite this dismal record, in late 1950 and early 1951, American covert operations in Albania were again expanded. At this time, Michael Burke, another OSS veteran who later gained fame for running the Barnum and Bailey Circus and the New York Yankees, replaced Robert Low as the agent in charge of the operations. Burke had a reputation for “juggling unstable resistance groups,¹²² and he had “no qualms taking charge of what was, at the time, the CIA’s largest and most comprehensive field operation.”¹²³ As he put it in his memoirs thirty-four years later, “instinctively as though an electric switch was thrown, [he] was on the main current, wired to the taut uneven vibrations of the secret war.”¹²⁴ In Germany, he inherited “a large disparate body of Americans with varying skills and talents, dispersed in a dozen locations, a myriad of ongoing activities of varying quality, and hundreds of indigenous men and women agents ranging from individual couriers to organized resistance movements.”¹²⁵ In 1951, Burke selected another twelve recruits to be parachuted into Albania. Once they landed, they too came under attack, six men being killed immediately, four were surrounded and burned alive, and two were captured. Of

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the sixty men who parachuted into Albania between 1949 and 1953, less than a handful survived to tell their story. Those who did survive had to contend with arrest and torture of their families.

By the end of the year, even the new leader of Balli Kombetar, Abas Ermenji, was having second thoughts about American attempts to “liberate” his country. He warned his followers not to take another “tumble through the meat grinder.” Nevertheless, the operations continued and, in 1952 another airdrop took place. This time, Hamit “the Tiger” Mitjani, an Albanian hero, was captured and executed by Albanian security forces. Although he was not considered “a very cultured person,” Mitjani was liked and respected by the vast majority of Albanians.¹²⁶ This was his sixteenth mission into his country and his death had a profound effect on the resistance movement. The Americans, however, merely changed their tactics and tried infiltrating guerrilla forces overland, from Greece.¹²⁷ While this approach seemed to have more success, and some of the men survived longer, the result was always the same: the majority of those involved were captured and executed.¹²⁸ Today, it is estimated that somewhere between 200 and 1,000 people lost their lives in Frank Wisner’s “experiment.”¹²⁹

Operation Valuable should never have been undertaken. It was reckless and foolhardy. That it was undertaken, is testament, not only to the ambiguous nature of American Cold War objectives, but the complete breakdown between policy and operations that existed during these years. The operation was also compromised by a lack of a coherent strategy that effectively coordinated the paramilitary campaign with other government departments and agencies. At no time, for example, did a well-planned information program accompany the paramilitary operation. Was it not axiomatic, as William Donovan had argued so frequently during World War II, that propaganda should be the “arrow of initial penetration in conditioning, and preparing the people in a territory in which invasion is contemplated.”¹³⁰ Yet, aside from the few propaganda leaflets carried by those who entered the country, no attempt was made to coordinate the information program with the paramilitary operations until 1951, two years after the initial landings had begun.¹³¹ As a result, there was very little support among the populace for the American plan.

A civil war had been going on in Albania for over four years. The vast majority of those who opposed Hoxha had either left the country, were in prison, or dead. Those who survived had lost relatives in the fighting and therefore wanted to avoid what they derogatively termed as “politics.” More importantly, the Albanian people were culturally predisposed to view sabotage and terrorism as dishonorable modes of conflict, therefore they were disinclined to provide support to those they derogatively referred to as “diversionists.”¹³² Given this cultural predisposition, it is difficult to understand why there was no attempt made by the Truman Administration to launch a psychological warfare campaign with the paramilitary operations, in order to build support among the populace. Yet it was not until 1951, that RFE began broadcasting to Albania.¹³³ When it did go on air, it did so only temporarily. Radio programs were simply not an effective way to reach the Albanian people because there was very little

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electricity in the area: only a few radios, and “definitely no batteries.”¹³⁴ When propaganda leaflets were employed, on a widespread basis, they were frequently dropped on the wrong town.¹³⁵ As one Albanian escapee concluded in 1952, two years before Project BGFIEND was shut down, the propaganda effort it was too little too late. Although RFE “helped sustain the peoples hope of eventual liberation,” no other results could be expected. The government crack down had ended all hopes of freedom.¹³⁶

By all accounts Operations Valuable and BGFIEND were dramatic failures. As Robin Winks has argued “seldom has an intelligence operation proceeded so resolutely from one disaster to the next.”¹³⁷ Not only were America’s objectives not advanced, but the operation was not coordinated within the government. Consequently, a number of errors in tradecraft occurred. Covert operations in Albania also had a terrible human cost: Frank Wisner’s “clinical experiment” ended in disaster, and even he was forced to concede that the best they could hope for would be to “get it right the next time.” Unfortunately, as we shall see in the next chapter the important lessons that emerged from this operation were not internalized and, as a result, the same problems that plagued Operation Valuable continued to affect American covert operations as they dramatically expanded across Eastern Europe.

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6
A few martyrs

The confusion over the scope and pace of covert operations finally came to a head in 1950. On January 31st President Truman ordered Dean Acheson and Louis Johnson, the Secretaries of State and Defense respectively, to re-examine US Cold War objectives in light of the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb, the “fall” of China and the US development of a nuclear fusion capability.¹ Three months later, in April, the State Department distributed its seventy-five-page response to the President’s request. On 30 September 1950 the National Security Council adopted what is today known as: “NSC 68.” Instead of clarifying US policy, however, a new strategic vision emerged in its afterglow. For a brief period of time, from April through November 1950, “rollback” dominated the political scene, and the administration, at least temporarily, unified behind this new strategy.

Nevertheless, as American forces became bogged down in a trench war in Korea a number of policymakers began to question its efficacy; by the end of the year, “containment,” “liberation” and “Titoism” had reemerged to challenge “rollback’s” primacy. Each vision had its own patrons and sponsoring body. The controversy which ensued, over which strategy to pursue, at what time, and in what country, underscored the central problem facing the administration: the United States simply did not have a unified strategy for waging the Cold War. William H. Godel, who served as Defense Department liaison to the CIA during the 1950s, summed up the dilemma, when he argued that the CIA’s inability to achieve its objectives was “adversely affected by the failure of the United States to develop a valid and practical strategic objective.” This failure, he concluded, prevented the development of a worldwide overt and covert psychological operations program, which supplemented and complemented each other.²

Godel was right.³ By 1950 there were a number of organizations within the American government, conducting psychological operations and each of these departments had its own idea of what the administration’s objectives were. However, there was no central body in place to coordinate the various activities. The State–War–Navy-Coordinating Committee’s (later State–Army–Navy–Air Force-Coordinating Committee or SANACC) Special Studies and Evaluation Committee had been set up in 1947, in an attempt to address precisely this issue.

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In the same year, the Interdepartmental Coordinating Staff (ICS) was set up to coordinate information activities; yet neither of these organizations was able to provide the central direction that was needed. Addressing the problem was put on hold in 1948 while NSC 10/2 was under consideration.

Its passage brought the issue to the forefront of the administration’s agenda, because paragraph four of NSC 10/2 specifically stated, in “times of war” all covert operations had to be coordinated with the JCS. Furthermore, it added, “in active theaters of war … covert operations will be conducted under the direct command of the American theater commander and orders, therefore, will be transmitted through the Joint Chiefs of Staff unless otherwise directed by the President.”⁴ According to Frank Wisner, director of the Office of Policy Coordination, this clause was “the subject of more divergent views and conflicting constructions than any other portion of the paper.”⁵ The debate surrounding its implementation was so heated because the issue of command and control was directly tied to the debate over American Cold War strategy: whoever controlled the operations controlled the strategy, and the policy planners and the military fundamentally disagreed over the nature of American strategy.

Since the end of World War II, the State Department and the Defense Department had disagreed over a number of problems associated with the development of US covert operations. According to psychological warfare expert, Edward Lilly, this was because each department had “completely divergent and irreconcilable views on the American position towards the USSR.”⁶ While Kennan held the directorship of the Policy Planning Staff, the State Department believed that war with Russia was not inevitable. As a result, they advocated operations that were designed to weaken communism and strengthen Western values. During this period, one of State’s primary goals was to encourage East Europeans to leave their homeland and come to the West: the operations they supported in order to achieve this goal included propaganda, rumor spreading, bribery, and the organization of anti-communist organizations abroad.

In contrast to State’s objectives the military believed that conflict with the Soviet Union was likely. As a result, they advocated operations that would be useful during wartime, therefore, they tended to support operations designed to encourage East Europeans to stay in their countries, join underground resistance networks, and wait until war broke out. They advocated operations that would support the evacuation and the escape of government leaders and the organization of guerrilla units to serve behind enemy lines. In this context, they tended to favor sabotage, assassinations, and paramilitary operations.⁷ The central problem, from an operational perspective, was that, given the limited resources available, it was almost impossible to undertake all types of activities. There were only a limited number of possible contacts within the East and one could not encourage these people to leave their homeland while at the same time recruiting them to serve in an underground resistance organization.

The only organization in place to resolve these differences was the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee, which had the military’s support but not the State Department’s. In fact, George Kennan worked behind the scenes to have it

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disbanded. Although he was unsuccessful in the short term, his opposition ensured that SSEC was unable to provide any clear direction.⁸ In order to help resolve the dispute, the Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization (IFIO), which consisted of representatives from State, Defense, CIA and the National Security Resource Board, was set up to coordinate psychological warfare planning.⁹ The members of the new organization were referred to as the Interdepartmental Foreign Information Staff (IFIS). At this point the SANNAC subcommittee on psychological warfare was shut down. IFIO also replaced the “Inter-departmental Coordinating Staff” (ICS), which was organized after the release of NSC 4. It was hoped that this bureaucratic shuffle would solve the problems which had dominated discussions in both the Special Studies and Evaluation Committee, and the ICS. However, all it did was to shift the bureaucratic battles from one coordinating staff to another.¹⁰ Not surprisingly, the staff ran into many of the same problems as its predecessors. The tension between the various departments involved was so great that after three months its members had still failed to agree on “a modus operandi” to permit discussion!¹¹ Once they started talking, however, they quickly divided along bureaucratic lines. The central issue to emerge was who should control “foreign policy planning” during times of war or threat of war. The State Department remained determined to maintain primary control but the military wanted to ensure that policy development was “closely coordinated with, and made partially responsible to, military planning.”¹² Integral to this debate were the differences between State and Defense over what should constitute strategy, and how it should be articulated. The military wanted clear and precise guidance on which to base operations, but the Policy Planning Staff refused to codify strategy. These differences played a critical role in undermining the staff’s progress, because every time the military members tried to draft a strategic plan they were blocked by the State Department, which refused to give IFIS the support it needed because they believed that the staff were trespassing on their mandate.¹³

During 1949, and into 1950, the situation remained tense for all involved. The bureaucratic jostling was made worse by a personal animosity between the warring Secretaries of State and Defense. Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as Secretary of State in January 1949, and a few months later, Louis Johnson replaced James Forrestal, who was suffering from a mental illness. Acheson and Johnson did not get along, and the hostility between the two men further undermined efforts to coordinate a strategy for waging the Cold War. For its part, the NSC was not functioning well and plans to reorganize it also floundered amidst inter-agency bickering.¹⁴

The controversy between the various departments reached a crescendo in December 1949 with the release of “NSC 59,” a national security policy paper designed to coordinate the foreign information program.¹⁵ Drafted primarily by the State Department, NSC 59 suggested that in “peacetime, during a national emergency, and in the initial stages of war, the Secretary of State [should] control policy matters and handle operational coordination.”¹⁶ Not surprisingly, the report failed to provide for “sufficient coordination” with the JCS, however,

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after some tinkering with the language, the National Security Council did approve the paper. The final draft of NSC 59 stated that, until hostilities actually broke out, the State Department would maintain policy control of psychological warfare and covert operations, however, on 5 June 1950, North Korean forces entered South Korea. At this juncture, the differences between State and Defense took on a whole new meaning.

In an attempt to make an “end run” around the process, the State Department announced the creation of the National Psychological Strategy Board (NPSB) in August of 1950.¹⁷ The new board, firmly under State’s control, was ostensibly designed to improve inter-agency coordination. Membership included: the Under-Secretary of State for Public Affairs, the Director of Central Intelligence, and representatives from State, Defense, JCS, the National Security Resource Board (NSRB), and the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA). These men met weekly to give informal approval to policy statements released by State. According to psychological warfare expert, Edward Lilly, however, major divisions between the two schools of thought continued to hamper any significant progress on the key questions that plagued operational planning.¹⁸

The problem reached a point where its resolution could not be delayed, in December of 1950, as Truman declared a state of emergency. In doing so, he ensured that all operations would fall under the auspices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Both the State Department and OPC wanted to avoid this at all costs, and initially it appeared as though they would emerge victorious in their attempt to limit the military’s influence, but on 14 December 1950, paragraph four of NSC 10/2 was suspended and a new supplementary directive, NSC 10/3 was drafted, which essentially reaffirmed the State Department’s primary role in policy planning. However, the JCS refused to sign off on it and, eventually the debate between all involved, crystallized into two schools of thought. On the one side stood the military and the CIA, who believed that control of psychological warfare should be placed under the command and control of a new organization responsible to either the NSC or the President, and on the other stood the State Department, which wanted strategic planning and operational coordination placed under its direction.

As 1950 drew to a close, the NSC again tried to resolve the dispute. They were unable to reach an agreement, however, and on 28 December 1950, they were forced to present a report to the President – “NSC 74/1: The National Psychological Effort” – that merely reiterated each of the three possible solutions to the problem: closer departmental coordination without the creation of a new agency; the development of a new agency with no operational functions; and the establishment of a new board to take over all psychological operations.¹⁹ Tired of the bureaucratic bickering, President Truman finally took the problem away from the NSC and directed Rear Admiral Sydney Souers and James Lawton, both from the Bureau of the Budget, to find a solution. They finally did, but the directive, which authored the creation of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), was a compromise between the three positions outlined above, thus ensuring that the lack of intra-agency coordination would continue to hamper operational planning.

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The President’s decision to create the PSB clearly underscored the belief that the United States needed a unified strategy for waging the Cold War.²⁰ Two experts on psychological warfare made this point explicitly in 1960, arguing that during the early Cold War years, what the Truman Administration lacked was a “a plan of action to reach [the] stated objective.” According to Robert Holt and Robert van de Velde, psychological warfare or covert operations “can only be successful in achieving a difficult and long range goal if they are employed as part of a total strategy involving the use of all instruments of statecraft.” They concluded that the “government had a goal of liberation, but no strategy of liberation.”²¹ In many ways they were right. However, they failed to grasp that American strategy was never solely, “liberation.” Three other strategic visions: “Containment,” “Titoism,” and “rollback,” were also in play during these years. Each strategic vision was intertwined within an ambiguous and uncertain foreign policy, resulting in a series of ad hoc and clumsy initiatives, which were “scattered in loose profusion” across Europe.²²

The decision to increase the scope and pace of covert operations can be traced back to the release of NSC 68 and the outbreak of the Korean War. Paul Nitze was the primary author of the document.²³ Nitze had replaced George Kennan as head of the Policy Planning Staff in January of 1950 – the change in leadership was important because Nitze and Kennan approached their jobs in very different ways. Nitze, for example, “was less articulate and less spectacular” than Kennan – indeed, according to Washington Star reporter Wallace R. Deuel, “Kennan’s leadership of the Policy Planning Staff was a little like a gallant cavalry charge, with George brandishing a saber in the lead, astride the most spirited horse in the regiment.” Nitze, in contrast, he opined, “operates more like a chief of staff – or like the editor of a great research project; he presides, listens and suggests.”²⁴ Of course, this meant that Nitze and Kennan also approached the formation of policy in different ways: where Kennan had privileged relativism and flexibility, in developing national security policy, Nitze wanted to develop “a set of maxims of copybook clarity – concepts, [that were] indisputable and obvious.”²⁵ It is important to note, however, that while this may have been Nitze’s objective, the policy papers he actually drafted never achieved the clarity he had hoped for.

Kennan and Nitze also differed on how they viewed the Soviet Union and why they believed American covert operations were necessary to ensure victory in the Cold War. Nitze thought that the United States was on the brink of war with the Soviet Union. In February of 1950, for example, he argued that, “recent Soviet views reflect not only a mounting militancy, but suggest a boldness that is new – and borders on recklessness.”²⁶ As a result, he firmly believed that the administration had only a small window of opportunity in which it could undertake aggressive covert operations designed to undermine Soviet power. In a few years, he argued, the Soviets would achieve strategic nuclear parity, effectively shutting down American efforts to win the Cold War. Thus, Nitze advocated expanding aggressive covert operations because he believed war was imminent. Kennan, on the other hand, supported limited covert operations because he did

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not believe war was looming.²⁷ Later in life, Nitze joked that he and Kennan had very few disagreements, except on matters of substance.²⁸ Irony aside, it is important to remember that the dissimilarities between Kennan and Nitze were based on a variation in perception, meaning that their diverse approach to American strategy during these years owed more to personality than any real or direct threat from the Soviet Union.

In NSC 68 Nitze argued that American national security programs to date had been “dangerously inadequate” and that, in the face of the recent changes within the international environment, the danger of war had vastly increased.²⁹ Crystallizing the dilemma that had dominated national security planning to this point, he defined Cold War policy as “containment.” Following Kennan’s lead, however, he went on to note that a “policy of containment” is one that seeks by all means short of war to: block further expansion of Soviet power; expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions; induce a retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence; and so foster seeds of destruction within the Soviet system, that the Kremlin will modify its behavior and conform to generally accepted international standards.³⁰ Ignoring the inherent contradictions in this assumption, he added that the “the frustration of the [Kremlin’s] design was the first and perhaps most important step” toward victory in the Cold War.³¹ To this end, he suggested that “dynamic steps” be immediately undertaken to “roll back the Kremlin’s drive for world domination,” the ultimate objective of which, he argued, was the establishment of governments “friendly” to the West and not under Soviet control.³²

This was not the first time that the term “roll-back” or “rollback,” was used in an NSC paper. According to Bruce Cumings, the word first appeared in an unsigned paper on East Asia in August of 1949. Therein it was argued that the immediate objective of US policy should be to “check and roll back” Soviet communism in the Asian theater.³³ The term again appeared in an early draft of NSC 48, which outlined American objectives toward Asia. This document initially read: Asian forces should be used to “commence the roll-back of Soviet control and influence in the area.” However, at the time, Secretary of State, Dean Acheson stepped in and had the line changed to: “Asian indigenous forces could ‘assist the US in containing Soviet control.’” And the final version of NSC 48 stated that the American objective was to “contain and where feasible to reduce” communist power in Asia.³⁴

It is important to note that, in 1949, Acheson was not alone in his concern over the appearance of rollback in the two NSC papers.³⁵ Cumings tells us that a number of people in the State Department decried the shift in language from containment to rollback.³⁶ However, over time, rollback’s power as a viable strategic alternative to “containment” began to grow, and by November of 1950, even Dean Acheson had come around. At a State Department meeting, where NSC 68 was discussed, Charles Murphy asked the Secretary of State whether the document sanctioned efforts to “rollback” Soviet power. At this time, Acheson replied that this “was very important and quite right.”³⁷ Therefore, although it remains unclear where the term “rollback” actually came from, it did

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have an important, albeit short-lived, impact on the development of American Cold War strategy.³⁸ Once believed to be nothing more than a rhetorical device used by the Republicans to separate their foreign policy from that of the Democrats, today it is argued – by some – to be a more apt description of early American Cold War strategy than “containment.”³⁹ Yet, as historian Bruce Cumings reminds us, rollback was merely a “mythical abstraction … forming a reality that [was] never neatly configured.”⁴⁰ Like “containment,” it was made up of a bundle of cultural assumptions that were loosely tied together but were never fully explored or clarified and, as we shall see below, its power base owed more to its form than to its substance.

After receiving his draft of NSC 68, on 19 April 1950, Robert Joyce met Wisner, Frank Lindsay and Charles V. Hulnik, at Carmel Offie’s home, to discuss its operational significance.⁴¹ Joyce told the men that OPC should take “dynamic steps to reduce the power and influence of the Kremlin inside the Soviet Union and other areas under its control.”⁴² He argued that OPC should also initiate overt psychological programs designed to encourage mass defections from the Soviet bloc, and to foment unrest and support revolts in selected strategic satellite countries.⁴³ Frank Wisner agreed with Joyce’s assessment: like Joyce, he had read NSC 68 as signifying a shift in American strategy, from resisting Soviet imperialism, to the more aggressive aim of weakening Soviet capabilities for aggression. Implicit in this change, he argued, was the eventual rolling back of Russian conquests and a positive attempt to bring about a change in the Soviet attitude toward the rest of the world. Wisner thus embraced “rollback” as a rhetorical tool to help in his push to expand American covert operations.⁴⁴

Yet the question remains, did American strategy really change under NSC 68? While the majority of historians writing today believe it did not, Gerald Miller, who drafted one of the first internal histories of the Office of Policy Coordination, believes that, in terms of OPC’s operational planning, it did. He argues that, until June of 1950, OPC paramilitary operations were limited to plans and operations for stay-behind networks in the event of war.⁴⁵ After NSC 68 was released, however, he states that OPC dramatically expanded operations in Eastern Europe designed to roll back Soviet power. However, as I illustrated in the last chapter, Operation Valuable was well underway by the time NSC 68 appeared, and although Nitze did use the term “rollback” in NSC 68, he ultimately defined American policy as “containment.” Moreover, much of the language he employed in NSC 68 was taken directly from NSC 20/4 – Kennan’s first paper on American Cold War policy. Indeed the aims and objectives he outlined in NSC 68, remained virtually the same, therefore, I believe that the expansion of American covert operations, which took place after NSC 68 was approved, were more tactical than strategic; more of a degree, than of a kind. What changed was the intensity in which these operations were developed and executed. OPC was now charged with mounting “a vigorous offensive action” against the Soviet Union.⁴⁶ Of course, as these operations intensified, so too did the strategic dilemma that faced the administration.

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The first covert operation untaken by OPC took place in the Ukraine. The genesis of this initiative can be traced back to 1946 when the Strategic Services Unit explored the possibility of using the remnants of the wartime Ukrainian resistance force to mount offensive operations against the Soviet Union. At this time, the Ukraine boasted the largest resistance force in Eastern Europe. The biggest group operating was under the leadership of Stephen Bandera, who in 1920 had helped form the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). During World War II Bandera organized the Ukrainian Resistance Army to resist Soviet occupation. Although Bandera had collaborated with the Nazis, the British began to support OUN immediately after World War II ended.⁴⁷ On British prodding the SSU opened discussions with Bandera as well, however, at this time it was decided that these types of initiatives were just too risky.⁴⁸

A year later, however, twenty-nine members of OUN arrived in Germany and again asked for aid from the United States and Great Britain.⁴⁹ Carmel Offie met with them in early 1948; at the time he cabled Washington:

if, as I understand, there is some planning going on with regard to how such groups … might be used in our interests, it might be useful to follow up this matter. In any event the Bandera boys are here in our zone and available at any time. I should be grateful for any information which you feel you can give me on the subject.

The response from State was not encouraging. Offie was admonished, “not to give to (sic) much encouragement to Ukrainian nationalists because of the effect [it] might have on racial Russians.”⁵⁰ Not easily deterred, Offie responded that he had a direct request from the Ukrainians that VOA be beamed into the country. Again Washington hesitated.⁵¹ Apparently, it was still too risky to employ these groups.

A year later, however, both OPC and the Office of Special Operations, the intelligence branch of the CIA, began to work with the remnants of another Ukrainian resistance army – the National Labor Alliance or the NTS (Natsionalno Trudovio Soyuz) – which had been formed in Belgrade in the 1930s.⁵² The British, however, continued to support OUN. Not surprisingly, coordination between the allies remained illusive. More importantly, however, according to Harry Rositzke, by the time the United States had decided to support these operations “the Ukrainian guerrillas could play no serious paramilitary role.”⁵³

On orders from the Pentagon, OSO began to recruit Ukrainian agents to collect intelligence on a number of high value targets. At this time the armed services had no special warfare units of their own.⁵⁴ Moreover, by the end of World War II the United States had very little information on the Soviet Union: according to Rositzke “even the most elemental facts were unavailable – on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields.”⁵⁵ Yet the Pentagon had a “wish list” that consisted of “two thousand agents on the ground to monitor Soviet ports, air bases, and other targets.”⁵⁶ The

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JCS wanted detailed information on the location of Soviet military units and aircraft, the condition of Soviet airfields and Soviet military plans.⁵⁷

In order to meet these requirements, on 5 September 1949, a month before Operation Valuable began, two Ukrainian agents working for OSO parachuted into the Soviet Union from an unmarked C-47. Over the next four years a number of men followed suit. These operations were very tightly controlled; even the Secretary of State was not informed of them until 1950.⁵⁸ At the same time as these operations were unfolding, however, OPC was asked by the JCS to undertake “totally unrealistic” paramilitary operations designed to “retard a Soviet military advance into Western Europe by building up anti-Soviet resistance groups.”⁵⁹ Thus, between 1949 and 1954, the year the operations officially ended,⁶⁰ OSO and OPC ran separate and uncoordinated operations in the same country, using the same group of exiles. Not surprisingly, this raised a host of problems; apparently Frank Wisner and his opposite number at OSO, Richard Helms, clashed on a day-to-day basis.⁶¹

Cooperation between OSO and OPC reached its nadir in 1949 and 1950. OSO tended to view OPC operations as “unrealistic” because its leaders did not understand OPC’s relationship with the military or with the East European governments in exile. Apparently these differences were magnified because OPC insisted that its operations be kept totally separate from OSO.⁶² The tension between OSO and OPC also affected American operations in Romania, where, according to journalist Peter Grose, “OPC’s most extensive subversive effort” took place. Romania was, of course, Frank Wisner’s old stomping ground.⁶³ Wisner had been stationed in Romania during World War II, and after the war ended he maintained contact with the resistance forces operating in the country. The Strategic Services Unit had picked up this operation after Wisner moved over to the State Department.⁶⁴ However, efforts to prevent the communists from seizing power collapsed in 1947 and SSU shifted its mission to helping the agents, who had worked for them, exit the country.⁶⁵ In May 1948, just before President Truman signed NSC 10/2, James McCargar, then working for the POND, and Frank Wisner, began to renew contacts with the members of Iron Guard, a Romanian exile group known for its cruelty and fascist tendencies. Two years later the operation finally got underway. By this point, however, OPC and OSO had merged into a new operations directorate that was designed to prevent the type of coordination problems that had developed as OSO and OPC competed for resources in the Ukraine. However, the problem between the two warring bodies was not easily solved and competition and overlap again dominated operational planning.

At the time, OSO was charged with mounting “stay-behind operations,” in which agents, in two and four-man teams, were inserted into the country in order to provide intelligence on Soviet and Romanian troop movements.⁶⁶ These operations also developed at the behest of the US military, which needed reliable information on Soviet military targets should war break out.⁶⁷ OPC, however, developed and executed operations designed to support local resistance groups and encourage insurrections against the communist regime. Over

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time, OPC operations came to be viewed as “more spectacular,” and therefore it could pick and choose the agents it wanted to work with.⁶⁸ Moreover, OPC recruits were better paid than those who worked for OSO; this caused a great deal of tension between the two main branches of the CIA, because agents who had been recruited by OSO often switched sides and went to work for OPC.

The lack of coordination between OPC and OSO was not the only problem to plague the development and execution of early American covert operations; Soviet counter-intelligence operations were also very successful in undermining these initiatives. According to Harry Rositzke, the “most substantial and dangerous paramilitary effort inside the Soviet orbit,” took place in Poland.⁶⁹ The Anglo-American relationship with the Polish people was complicated, however. England had gone to war over Poland and during World War II both the British and American governments had supported the Polish government in exile. Therefore, they already had strong ties to the Polish resistance networks when the war ended. However, all was not rosy; both countries had failed to come to the aid of the Polish Underground, in any substantive manner, during the Warsaw Uprising. Moreover, the “allies” had watched from the sidelines as Poland was divided at the end of World War II, and the communists seized power. Therefore, there was a great deal of tension between all involved. According to McCargar, while the Hungarians, for example, were generally unified in their desire to secure American support for undermining their communist government, it was not so for the Poles. Some members of their population considered American support detrimental to their interests.⁷⁰

Nevertheless, in the aftermath of World War II, members of two Polish émigré organizations – The Polish Peace Council, which operated in London, and the Freedom and Independence Movement or Wolnose I Niepodlenose (WIN) – approached British intelligence. Within a short period of time, OSO was also brought into the operation. It was primarily Colonel Robert McDowell, a SANACC policy and planning advisor, who pushed for the relationship.⁷¹ The operation was undertaken in order to “satisfy urgent [military] intelligence requirements” and to prepare paramilitary units for sabotage operations that would slow Soviet moves into Western Europe should World War III break out.⁷² Although Richard Helms remained skeptical from the start, the operation appeared to have some initial successes. Between 1950 and 1952, OSO provided over one million dollars in aid to the two resistance groups.⁷³ However, on 29 December 1952, the operation was revealed as a Soviet intelligence operation.⁷⁴ Today, we know that both organizations were penetrated by Soviet intelligence, and in the case of WIN, the operation was actually run by the Russians.⁷⁵ The British faced a similar scenario in the Baltic countries where the Soviet Union launched elaborate counter-intelligence operations.⁷⁶ Although the Americans eventually participated in these operations, as well, it was “too little and too late.”⁷⁷

In addition to these campaigns OPC also ran a number of operations designed to foster suspicion between the satellite governments and Stalin. The goal of these operations was to encourage purges in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. British journalist Stewart Steven first brought the story to light.⁷⁸

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In 1974, he published a book titled Operation Splinter Factor, in which he argued that the United States and Britain designed covert operations in Eastern Europe to play on Stalin’s paranoia and suspicion of the East European communist governments. The result of these operations, he argues, were the purges that occurred throughout Eastern Europe in the late forties and early fifties. Although the majority of historians have been reticent to comment on Steven’s claim, renowned intelligence scholar Richard Aldrich has recently argued that Steven might have been correct.⁷⁹ However, these operations were rarely coordinated with the John Davies strategy “Titoism,” which continued to dominate the State Department’s strategic planning during these years. In July 1951, for example, two years after the release of NSC 58, the question was raised at a Psychological Strategy Board meeting: who determines whether American strategy should concentrate on bringing about the defection of a satellite government, or trying to overthrow it? This was certainly a logical question since operations of both types were taking place and steps toward one or the other were mutually exclusive. The controversy which ensued, between the State Department and the PSB over the responsibility for such a determination, underscored the central problem facing the administration.⁸⁰ No one was determining strategy. As late as 1951 the Truman Administration still had no position on whether covert operations should be concentrating on bringing about the defection of a satellite government or on overthrowing it. Yet operations designed to achieve both objectives took place until at least 1954.

According to Edward Lilly, there simply was not the time, or the inclination, to think about the long-term implications of these campaigns.⁸¹ NSC 68 had created a wish list, without a corresponding strategy that spelt out the necessary directives to guide operational planning. Paul Nitze conceded as much in 1968, when he told members of Congress that the objectives he outlined, in NSC 68, were things the US wanted to see happen, not necessarily things the administration could actually accomplish, given America’s resources.⁸² At no time during this period, were American objectives actually measured against OPC’s capabilities or force levels. What is more, no attempt seems to have been made to prioritize the type of operations that were executed. Was it more important, for example, to destabilize the Hungarian government or to have accurate measures of Soviet troop deployments? Should American covert operations concentrate on overthrowing the government of East Germany or encouraging the communist government to distance itself from Stalin? All of these questions remained unanswered throughout 1950 and 1951.

As US covert operations continued to unfold, two books by government insiders with close connections to the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Policy Coordination and the Republican Party were released. Although neither book advocated the adoption of a new strategy of “rollback,” per se, each played a critical role in the emerging debate over “containment,” that was about to overwhelm the administration. In the spring of 1950, conservative intellectual James Burnham released The Coming Defeat of Communism.⁸³ A few months later, John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles’ brother, published War or Peace. In The

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Coming Defeat of Communism, Burnham suggested that American foreign policy, to-date, had been both obscure and hesitant. He argued that the US needed to define a “precise” and “narrow” objective for winning the Cold War.⁸⁴ American leaders, he went on to note, needed to “face the fact that there is only one possible objective of US foreign policy; the destruction of communist power.”⁸⁵

In order to bring about this objective Burnham argued that the US needed to undertake “the prosecution of an offensive, political-subversive war.” He singled out both Albania and the Ukraine as possible targets of these operations. It was no coincidence that he highlighted two countries where operations were already under way. At the time his book appeared, he was working for Frank Wisner in OPC; years earlier, he had also been employed briefly, by the OSS.⁸⁶ Although Burnham refrained from explicitly labeling his strategy, in The Coming Defeat of Communism, two years later he was not as circumspect. His next book, Containment or Liberation, was published in late 1952. By this time, he had quit OPC and was working full-time for Eisenhower’s presidential campaign.

John Foster Dulles also challenged the Truman Administration’s so-called strategy of containment in his book, War or Peace. And there is little doubt that his thinking on this question was at least partially influenced by his brother, Allen. However, somewhat surprisingly, given the role Dulles is usually accorded in politicization of containment, his “strategic vision” was not as aggressive as Burnham’s. For example, Dulles did not advocate an armed revolt in Eastern Europe; to do so, he concluded, in War or Peace, without the forces to back it up, would be morally reprehensible.⁸⁷ That said, Dulles, like Burnham, did play a critical role in the emerging debates over American Cold War strategy, because he appeared to provide an, as of yet, unnamed strategic alternative to the ambiguous foreign policy of the Truman administration.⁸⁸

Never a shrinking violet, George Kennan did not take Burnham and Dulles’ challenge to “containment” lying down. In February 1950, while still serving as a policy consultant to the administration, he wrote an article for Readers Digest, in which he reaffirmed his support for the strategy of “containment.” According to a Washington Post reporter, the appearance of the article, which coincided nicely with the release of The Coming Defeat of Communism, effectively divided Washington into two camps, “Burnhamnites and Kennanists.” Apparently, the differences between the two men were: “the current staples of conversation at Washington salons and dinner tables and in the offices of the Pentagon.”⁸⁹ The first round of this debate was short-lived, however. By the summer of 1950, “rollback” had clearly usurped both “containment” and “liberation” as the new strategy of choice. Integral to its acceptance, was the outbreak of the Korean War. In this context, “rollback,” appeared to be the perfect catch-phrase for American objectives. Unfortunately, its supremacy was short lived. It died in the fall of 1950 when Chinese forces crossed the Yalu and forced American troops back to the 38th parallel. In the invasion’s aftermath, as the war stalled, the word was expunged from the lexicon of even the most die-hard inter-

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ventionists. In its place, emerged the less ascetic alternative, “liberation.” Thus “rollback’s” power was directly tied to the Korean War, which the Truman Administration viewed as a “deliberate, unprovoked aggression,” sanctioned by the Soviet Union.⁹⁰

The war forced the administration to get its house in order: almost immediately Truman began attending NSC meetings. He appointed Averell Harriman as his new special assistant and Walter Bedell Smith as the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He also asked the ailing George Marshall to emerge from retirement in order to run the Pentagon. Marshall asked his former Under Secretary of State, Robert Lovett, to serve under him. The result of these bureaucratic shifts, according to noted Cold War historian, Melvyn Leffler, was that the “dynamics of policymaking within the Truman Administration” changed, and a new “spirit of cooperation” characterized Cold War planning.⁹¹ Unfortunately, this new cooperative spirit meant that there was no one left to question the basic assumptions that underpinned NSC 68.

Almost immediately after North Korean forces crossed into the South the United States developed plans to roll back communist aggression in South Korea. Covert operations eventually became an integral part of this effort. Prior to the outbreak of the war, however, the CIA had not been active in this theater. During World War II, McArthur had virtually banned the OSS from Asia; his hostility continued into the postwar world and the CIA was unable to open a station in Japan until May of 1950. It was not until September of 1950 that it launched its first airdrops into North Korea.⁹² Radio broadcasts, propaganda, and aerial reconnaissance were eventually employed to augment McArthur’s landing at Inchon and subsequent march to the Yalu.⁹³ As the war continued, Korea became a testing ground for a number of unconventional warfare operations and Taiwan emerged as a major operational base. Approximately 8,500 guerrillas were trained on the tiny island between 1950 and 1953; OPC also ran over three hundred covert operations from Taiwan.⁹⁴ Two thousand agents were inserted into the North; but only a very few survived.⁹⁵ The vast majority of those who took part were captured, executed or turned into double agents, and by 1952, a majority of these operations were halted, because the communists had thoroughly penetrated them.⁹⁶

Aside from Chinese and North Korean counter-intelligence operation, the major problem to characterize OPC’s operational planning in Korea, was the same issue that had plagued its operations in Eastern Europe. American covert operations were not coordinated amongst the various agencies and departments involved in executing the war. Not only were OPC operations not coordinated with the military branches – the Army, Navy and Air Force were also conducting their own independent maneuvers – but they often over-lapped or duplicated initiatives undertaken by OSO. According to Peebles: “it was not unusual for both OSO and OPC agents to be on the same aircraft, scheduled for drops in different areas, for completely different missions.”⁹⁷ The situation was not rectified until July of 1951 when the Joint Advisory Commission-Korea (JACK) was established.

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With CIA expansion into Asia, pressure also began to mount for the development of operations in China.⁹⁸ Initially, the goal of these operations was to draw Chinese troops away from Korea, however, eventually OPC began to support resistance movements which advocated the overthrow of the new communist government. These operations were run primarily by Major General Claire Chennault, who led the Flying Tigers during World War II. After the war had ended, Chennault and a number of his squadron had returned to China, only to watch the Chinese communists seize power. Dismayed by this turn of events, in 1949 Chennault asked Washington if he could help the Nationalists regain control of the mainland. While the State Department remained skeptical, Frank Wisner immediately saw the possibilities. In July of 1950, OPC bought Chennault’s planes and a new company, Civil Air Transport Incorporated (CAT), was born.⁹⁹

Although Chennault’s ultimate objective was the liberation of China from communism, it is clear that very few people in the State Department supported this cause. It is also doubtful whether this objective was supported throughout the CIA. A number of former OSS operatives, including the illusive William Donovan, who had emerged from the shadows to lobby for the liberation of Eastern Europe, questioned the merits of this objective in Asia.¹⁰⁰ For Donovan, covert operations, in this theater, were more about keeping the communists off balance than actually trying to liberate the Chinese from tyranny. As Richard Aldrich points out, unfortunately “[n]ot every policy-maker enjoyed such clarity of thought in the area.”¹⁰¹ The problems that developed, because of the lack of a coherent or unified objective toward China, were magnified by the lack of coordination between Washington and the field, and by the tendency of OPC operatives to “undertake wild activities.”¹⁰²

OPC’s first operation in China was codenamed Paper and it involved supporting a small nationalist force, which consisted of several thousand troops who were stationed in Burma. The group had entered Burma when the communists took power. Although Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith, argued that providing aid to such a small force would do little more than harass the communist government, Truman gave his approval in early 1951 and the operation got under way. Unfortunately, the Chinese communists captured the majority of agents who took part and Paper ended a little over a year after it began. A similar fate awaited the two hundred or so men who entered China from the island of Quemoy. Eventually these operations were abandoned and replaced by smaller “hit and run” coastal raids, but although they had more success, the casualty rate remained high.¹⁰³

For the most part, those who lost their lives in these operations were Chinese. However, in 1952 four Americans found themselves on the front lines of the secret war: the need for American operatives arose because the CIA also ran covert operations with independent Chinese guerrillas who wanted to destabilize Mao Tse Tung’s regime, but did not necessarily want to see the Nationalists put back into power. This posed a problem because CAT owed its existence to Chiang Kai Shek and, according to Peebles, in order for this arrangement to work, knowledge had to be kept from both the nationalist government in Taiwan

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and a number of members of CAT who were loyal to Chiang. Codenamed Tropic, the operation was based in Japan and it involved dropping agents into Manchuria. Because of the secrecy involved, two Americans, Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy, flew the majority of the missions. On 29 November 1952, Richard G. Fecteau and John Downey joined them in what they thought would be a routine mission to pick up a Chinese agent. The pick-up was a trap, however, and the Chinese shot down the plane carrying the four men. Schwartz and Snoddy were killed instantly, and Fecteau and Downey were captured. The two men spent over nineteen years in prison, before they were released as part of Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with China.

The story does not end here, however. In 2002 the Chinese government gave the United States permission to investigate the crash site. Two years later, on 11 June 2004, human remains were located and subsequently identified as those of Robert Snoddy. His body was subsequently returned to the United States. The body of Norman Schwartz was never recovered.¹⁰⁴ To this day, Schwarz and Snoddy remain the only two Americans known to have lost their lives in the Truman Administration’s secret war. Also unclear is the number of Chinese and Koreans who lost their lives. What is apparent, however, is that American operations in Asia, like those, which had unfolded in Eastern Europe, ended in disaster and the men and women who died on these battlefields were martyrs to a cause that very few understand today.

As these operations continued to unfold, however, a number of people began to recognize the central problem facing the administration. Their voices got an initial hearing in the fall of 1950, when President Truman requested more specific guidance from each government agency involved in the massive buildup called for in NSC 68. Annex #6 of NSC 68/1 was the response from the intelligence community. Released in September 1950, the same month that Truman authorized General Douglas McArthur to cross the 38th parallel in Korea, it argued: “a substantial and rapid build-up of strength in the free world is necessary to support a firm policy intended to check, and rollback the Kremlin’s drive for world domination.”¹⁰⁵ However, the author of the report, Ludwell Lee Montague, also pointed out that the ability of the CIA to successfully conduct its mission was severely hampered by the “constant differences over the true intent and meaning of the pertinent statutes and directives.” He concluded that, “in this atmosphere the attitude of all concerned has become negative and defensive which in turn has prohibited positive and constructive action in the national interest … Until a clear and positive doctrine is established and maintained, effective coordination of the total intelligence effort cannot be achieved.”¹⁰⁶

Despite Montague’s concerns, a few months later, OPC received support for the continued expansion of American covert operations from an unlikely ally. In December of 1950, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) argued that US covert operations should be “comparable in scope” to the Manhattan Project during World War II. They believed that the time was ripe to take the offensive because the communist regimes in certain European countries, particularly Czechoslovakia and Albania, were becoming increasingly resistant to Soviet control.¹⁰⁷ The new

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Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was not so sure, however – Smith had replaced Hillenkoetter as DCI on 7 October 1950. Rumors of Hillenkoetter’s demise had been circulating for almost two years; the only surprise was that he had remained at the helm for so long. On a number of fronts, Smith was a mirror opposite of his predecessor. Legendary for his take-charge attitude and his short temper, he had both the reputation and the prestige that Hillenkoetter lacked.¹⁰⁸ According to Wayne Jackson, Smith was “ a man of very forceful character with a style of leadership which obscured, if not eclipsed the personalities beneath him.”¹⁰⁹

One of his first moves, on assuming his new position, was to bring OPC directly under his control. He found it inconceivable that the departments of State and Defense were directing OPC on operations without the DCI’s approval or knowledge.¹¹⁰ In his first meeting with Frank Wisner, he made it clear that in the future all guidance coming from State and Defense was to be funneled through his office. This meant that the DCI alone would direct the Office of Policy Coordination on questions of national strategy. Smith also created a new position, a Deputy Director of Administration, and made him directly responsible to the DCI. He appointed William Harding Jackson as the new DD/A; thereafter Jackson controlled both the money and manpower OPC would need to conduct operations. By controlling OPC’s resources Smith hoped to be able to control Wisner,¹¹¹ and according to Jackson, Smith’s leadership did prevent Dulles and Wisner from running “hog wild.”¹¹² Ironically, there was no opposition from the Policy Planning Staff, which quickly assented to Smith’s demands. By this time, Kennan, Davies and Lovett had all left the administration; the men who replaced them had no desire to hold on to this bailiwick.¹¹³ With no one left to turn to for support, on 12 October 1950, Wisner was forced to comply with Smith’s instructions. At the time the two units merged, OPC had over two thousand personnel, forty-seven stations around the world and a budget of over $200 million.¹¹⁴

To further ensure that Wisner was reined in, Smith formally hired Allen Dulles and named him Director of Operations. His job was to act as an intermediary between the DCI and Wisner. Thus, within only a few months, Wisner received a “double demotion.”¹¹⁵ According to historian Leonard Mosley, while Wisner and Dulles had always been friends and had frequented the same social gatherings, Dulles’ new position initially caused some hard feelings. The tension was short-lived, however, and over time, they worked together very effectively.¹¹⁶ On taking office, Dulles quickly allied himself with Wisner; the two men had much in common. They were both trained by Bill Donovan, were fascinated by operations, and loathed bureaucracies. They also continued to aggravate Smith by pushing for aggressive paramilitary operations designed to destabilize the Soviet bloc.

According to Montague, who wrote the official history of Smith’s tenure at the CIA, the DCI was “dismayed by the variety and magnitude” of the operation he was asked to oversee.¹¹⁷ In an attempt to divest the CIA from some of these activities, he began to push for a revision of NSC 10/2 which would remove

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paramilitary operations from the CIA. He told both Wisner and Dulles to make a distinction between covert operations and guerrilla warfare and to limit the CIA’s commitment to the former. Wisner and Dulles, however, “discreetly opposed and eventually frustrated” his orders.¹¹⁸ Not easily dissuaded, on 8 May 1951, Smith submitted a memorandum to the National Security Council known as the “Magnitude Paper.”

The paper was Smith’s attempt to get more specific policy guidance on the scope and pace of covert operations, because he believed that the CIA simply could not do the job being asked of them.¹¹⁹ The memo was a response to the operational requirements that had grown out of NSC 68. Therein, he argued that the policies articulated in NSC 68 had never been spelled out in terms of specific operational directives to the CIA. For example, he asked: “to what extent can the United States support a counter-revolution in a slave state?” He went on to point out that, “in the absence of a specific detailed plan for conducting a comprehensive Cold War program, it [was] not possible to make an accurate estimate of manpower, material or money required.”¹²⁰

Ironically, Frank Wisner now shared many of Smith’s concerns, albeit for different reasons, and he too drafted a memo to the NSC. While Smith wanted more specific policy guidance in order to limit operations, Wisner pressed for more guidance in order to pursue even more aggressive campaigns. Like his DCI, Wisner argued that the policies articulated in NSC documents “had not been translated into a directive sufficiently specific for OPC operational guidance.” He then asked a number of questions, including: “what is the correct interpretation of national objectives?”¹²¹ He elaborated on these complaints in July 1951, when he argued that, in order for American covert operations to be successful, OPC must “have well defined targets against which to apply our ‘Cold’ War weapons and thus we must develop strategies for their use against these targets.” Clearly identifying the problems that had plagued operations to date, Wisner opined that OPC needed to have: “first, a definition of objectives which we will hope to achieve. Second, ‘a strategic plan for achieving these objectives’; and thirdly, a coordinating mechanism “to insure that our strategy is in fact being followed.’” He concluded that the National Security Council was not meeting these needs. “What is lacking,” he wrote, is a government organization whose functions begin where the NSC leaves off.¹²²

It is important to note that Wisner and Smith were not alone in their concerns. In 1950 the Bureau of the Budget argued that, with respect to NSC 68, “there was an inadequate definition of objectives and means, and a failure to assess – or to make possible an assessment of – the implications of the proposed courses of action. It is not enough to say that objectives should be adopted.” The bureau concluded: “since the objectives are so general that they cannot be given meaningful context except in more substantive terms.”¹²³ Given the controversy that was brewing, the “Magnitude Paper” was referred to a special committee of the NSC Senior Staff. After seven weeks of internal wrangling, the group recommended that the National Security Council approve in principle “NSC 10/5: Scope and Pace of Covert Operations,” which called for an intensification of

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covert operations designed to place a “maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power.” In order to accomplish this, NSC 10/5 advocated the use of an underground resistance force and guerrilla operations in strategic areas.¹²⁴ NSC 10/5 also officially recognized the CIA’s “need for, and right to, high level policy guidance.”¹²⁵

On 23 October 1951, the NSC adopted NSC 10/5. It called for the immediate expansion of OPC, the intensification of its activities, and an increased program of operations designed to destabilize the Soviet regime.¹²⁶ Clearly, this was not what Smith wanted, since, instead of decreasing or canceling existing operations, the reverse actually occurred and covert operations, including paramilitary campaigns, were actually stepped up. Between 1949 and 1952, OPC’s budget went from $5 million dollars to $82 million dollars. Within one year, 1950–1951, their personnel increased from 584 to 1,531 with most of the growth coming in the area of paramilitary operations. Although the Korean War was responsible for the largest increase, only about half of these new recruits actually went to the Far East.¹²⁷ The remainder were sent to Europe, and American covert operations against the Soviet bloc increased yet again. There simply was not the political or operational will to end them.

A few months after NSC 10/5 was approved, Allan Dulles told a group of psychological warfare experts and Republican strategists, that he did not think the US could wait any longer to undertake aggressive covert operations designed to undermine Soviet power. He argued that the United States simply did not have the luxury of waiting until the required troops were in place and it was clear that they were going to win the Cold War. Rather, he stated it was time to “start and go ahead.” As I said before, he continued, “you have got to have a few martyrs. Some people have got to get killed. I don’t want to start a bloody battle, but I would like to see things started. I think we have to take a few risks….”¹²⁸

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7
Ye strategic concept for ye cold warre¹

Between 1951 and 1953, a battle for the soul of US foreign policy was fought at the highest levels of the American government. At the root of the controversy lay different conceptions of American strategy for waging the Cold War. The inability of the State Department to define a clear set of national objectives on which covert operations could be based had created a number of competing and contradictory strategic impulses. This problem was compounded because an ingrained maverick operational culture and a flawed policy process had isolated the planning of covert operations from broader questions of national policy. Psychological warfare expert Edward Lilly, captured the problem facing the administration when he argued that, from 1948 onward, the US had both the “tools and the blueprint” to execute its covert operations. However,

there was no foreman to tell the agency mechanics what to do in order to contribute to a national plan as a whole. As a result, each agency had its own idea of the national aims and where its corresponding operations fit.²

In this chapter, I explore the first substantive debates over the meaning and interpretation of American Cold War policy that occurred within the Truman Administration. These deliberations took place in and around the Psychological Strategy Board in 1951 and 1952. Although the board was designed to provide “the missing link”³ between policy and operations, the discussions that took place within this forum merely underscored the divisions that existed, over the meaning and interpretation of US policy toward the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in November of 1952 – the same month as the Presidential election – the PSB did release a statement of national strategy. And, although it reflected a retrenchment from the positions outlined in previous National Security Council papers, it was nothing more than a “compromise” between various conflicting groups; one of the hallmarks of the “bureaucratic politics” paradigm.⁴ Thus, domestic factors again proved to be the primary determinant behind Cold War planning. And in the end, instead of resolving the central problem plaguing the administration, the PSB’s strategy paper “was so general and platitudinous that like the NSC policy papers it meant all things to all people and the various agencies and departments were free to interpret its conclusions as they wished.”⁵

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Harry Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board on 21 April 1951. Highlighting what he perceived to be the weakness in the American effort to date, the President instructed the board to “formulate and promulgate” guidance to the departments and agencies responsible for psychological operations.⁶ He also authorized the PSB to provide for “more effective planning, coordination and conduct, within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.”⁷ The original members of the board included: Under Secretary of State, James Webb; Deputy Secretary of Defense, Robert Lovett; and Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, who was designated the first chairman. Admiral Leslie Stevens was appointed as military representative; Gordon Gray, who had only recently retired as Secretary of the Army, was brought in from the University of North Carolina as the new director. Gray was a personal friend of Truman and, according to Edward Lilly, the President had “practically forced” him to accept the position.⁸ He apparently agreed only on the condition that he could split his time between Chapel Hill and Washington, working two or three days a week at each job, and that he would remain for only six months.⁹ Given the PSB’s vague charter and the hostile environment into which it was dropped, Gray’s stipulation was not an auspicious sign.¹⁰

Headquartered in Lafayette Square, the PSB was divided into four departments: the Director’s Office, the Office of Plans and Policy, the Office of Coordination, and the Office of Review. Those charged with “plans and policy” were ordered to translate national security policy papers into workable plans for psychological operations. Those charged with “coordination” were to ensure that strategic plans were coordinated among all government agencies, and those who were charged with “reviewing operations,” were to investigate and evaluate all ongoing operations, ensuring that they were conducted in a timely fashion. On paper it seemed like a good plan, one that could provide the necessary mechanisms, hitherto absent, for developing and executing a coherent national strategy for waging the Cold War. However, because the PSB’s mandate included everything from clarifying policy through operational oversight, as the board began operating it came under fire from the government departments, on whose jurisdictional toes it appeared to tread. And, given that it depended on those same organizations to secure money, supplies and manpower, the result was somewhat less than anticipated.

The State Department, in particular, resented its existence. Charles Burton “Bert” Marshall, the representative from the Policy Planning Staff who was initially assigned to the board, argued that this new organization was merely “a covert way of setting up another State Department.” He later conceded that he “did his best to prevent the project from realization,” including warning Dean Acheson – who was “too busy” with other considerations – to notice the threat posed by the PSB.¹¹ In June 1951, he met with Acheson and apprised him of the situation. After hearing his subordinate out, Acheson responded, no doubt partly in jest, by suggesting that his department should go on the “counter-offensive” and express their misgivings “about the failure to realize the opportunities in the military field,” and that, in the face of these deficiencies, a special agency should be set up to handle “super military matters.”¹²

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Acheson was only half joking however. Tensions between State and Defense had escalated soon after his appointment. Although they abated somewhat when George Marshall replaced Louis Johnson as the new Secretary of Defense, there were still a number of issues on which the two sides differed. While the State Department was acutely aware that the CIA needed more guidance they believed that the real problem lay with the White House and the military. They specifically singled out James Lay, the Assistant to the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, who they argued, was not supplying the necessary leadership. Nevertheless they maintained that a new board would only compound the problem.¹³ Ultimately, their hostility to the PSB became a key factor in the PSB’s inability to conduct its mandate. They were able to have such a dramatic effect because the board functioned as a committee of top officials from the four government departments. As a result, those who served on the PSB owed their allegiance either to State, Defense, the NSC, or the CIA.

Aside from the general bureaucratic hostility to the board the language used in the presidential order was “sufficiently ambiguous” that it permitted “widely different interpretations” of the PSB’s role and mandate.¹⁴ In an attempt to circumvent some of the hostility to the new board, over the spring and early summer of 1951, DCI Smith took it upon himself to organize three informal meetings which included representatives from government departments: Allen Dulles acted on behalf of the CIA; Edward Barrett spoke for the State Department; John Magruder represented Defense; and Admiral Leslie Stevens served the interests of the JCS. Smith brought the group together in order to resolve the controversies which were developing around the board’s jurisdiction and mandate. In order to deal with these thorny issues, each member of the board was presented with a “planning kit” which consisted of “coordinate paper, Mercator map projections of the world, a protractor and a number of colored crayons,” again not an auspicious sign.¹⁵

Not surprisingly, Smith was unable to get the group to reach a compromise. When the board officially met for the first time on 2 July 1951, Smith was forced to present Gray with three separate reports, each of which staked out a different position on the role and mandate of the new board. The primary question revolved around the board’s jurisdiction. Since 1948, both the military and the CIA had been lobbying for well-defined national objectives below the NSC level, and an overall strategic plan for achieving these objectives. They believed that the PSB was set up to provide “the missing link” between policy and operations. Therefore, the CIA argued that the organization should provide “independent and objective direction to the whole Cold War effort.”¹⁶

In order to secure what became known as the “broad” jurisdictional mandate, the CIA suggested “psychological operations [was] a cover name to describe the systematic application, in times of peace and war … of all elements of national policy.”¹⁷ As such, they argued, the PSB was set up to “formulate subsidiary national aims” and sharpen NSC directives, “which are broader than the competence of any single department and superior to the aims of any particular program.”¹⁸ The CIA’s position was supported by the Department of Defense;

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their representative John Magruder, who, less than five years earlier, had spent a difficult six months as director of the Strategic Services Unit, had also served as the military’s representative on the 10/2 Panel, therefore he was intimately aware of the problems faced by those charged with conducting operations. In his report he declared that the PSB should function as a “general staff” for waging the Cold War.¹⁹

The State Department, however, did not agree. After reading both reports, Bert Marshall argued, “a PSB thus conceived involves a fundamental, indeed revolutionary shift in the authority of the whole executive branch.”²⁰ In contrast to the “broad” interpretation, Marshall – intent on maintaining State’s position within the policy-making hierarchy – suggested that the PSB’s mandate should be solely limited to “coordinating” psychological operations, which he defined as primarily, “informational activities.”²¹ His boss, Paul Nitze, author of NSC/68 and the new director of the Policy Planning Staff, went a bit further, arguing that the PSB’s role should be limited to “sharpening” the directives for the information program, covert operations and the defector program. Should any policy questions arise in addressing these issues, he made it clear that they should immediately be transferred to the State Department.²²

Summarizing the department’s concerns, Marshall drafted a “more conservative” interpretation of both the board’s jurisdiction and the term “psychological warfare,” which was premised “on the need for a definition that would … set limits, rather than leave a practically unlimited jurisdiction for the Board.”²³ Therefore, the controversy over the board’s jurisdiction was translated into a fight over definition of “psychological warfare,”²⁴ however, the fight was really about power and influence. A wider interpretation would give the PSB the ability to deal with questions of policy and strategy and would, therefore, impinge on State’s domain. In order to prevent this, both Nitze and Marshall worked behind the scenes to keep the definition of “psychological warfare” narrow. In doing so, they hoped the board’s jurisdiction would also be limited.²⁵

Because of this disagreement, the first, and indeed many, subsequent PSB meetings, were spent trying to clarify what exactly the President’s directive meant. In order to move beyond these facile discussions, Gray decided that, rather than try to achieve an agreed-upon definition of the term psychological warfare or the board’s jurisdiction, he would ignore the two questions and simply deal with the matters at hand.²⁶ Not surprisingly, the issues refused to go away and they set a dangerous precedent from which the board never fully recovered.²⁷ According to James Webb, the executive officer of the NSC, the inability to resolve the two divergent schools of thought was apparent in all areas of the board’s work.²⁸ Indeed, the State Department continued to challenge every directive the board issued, even going so far as to reject a memo Gray wanted to use when interviewing prospective employees, because it characterized the PSB as an “instrument for the central responsibility of Cold War strategy.”²⁹

Despite State’s hostility, both the military and CIA remained determined to secure more adequate strategic guidance and they lobbied strongly that this

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question be placed at the top of the PSB’s agenda. “NSC 10/5: The Scope and Pace of Covert Operations,” had explicitly stated that the administration needed an “integrated strategic concept for waging the Cold War”³⁰ and the operational branches wanted this matter addressed as quickly as possible. Frank Wisner, OPC’s Director of Plans, also wanted the issue resolved. Wisner’s position was complicated, however. Schooled under Bill Donovan, the Director of Plans had never been one to actively solicit political guidance, in fact, just the opposite. He had traditionally preferred as little interference in the operations he oversaw as possible. Yet the administration had never really sanctioned what he was doing in Eastern Europe; his strategy of actively supporting East European resistance movements had run parallel with the administration’s official policy of doing next to nothing in Eastern Europe.³¹ Moreover, his new boss, Bedell Smith, had taken away OPC’s independent status in 1950: he was also threatening to move paramilitary operations over to the Department of Defense. Thus, what Wisner wanted, in the spring of 1951, was a green light, politically to move ahead more aggressively, and his request for strategic guidance must be understood within this context. The so-called vagueness he now despised was actually a pretext for the passivity and inaction he opposed.

On 21 May 1951, he drafted a memo to the PSB in which he argued that the “lack of well-defined national objectives (below the NSC level) and an overall strategic plan for achieving these objectives” was the primary problem facing the administration. He went on to warn that if this issue was not addressed, American covert operations would continue to be conducted in an “ad hoc manner.”³² Gray took his request seriously and he immediately assigned the job to the Office of Plans and Policy.³³ In August 1951, a panel, which was designated “Panel B,” was instructed to examine all relevant NSC papers and psychological operation plans, prepare an inventory of Cold War weapons, and discuss the present status of US psychological operations.³⁴

Initially these projects were to be handled by two subgroups. Panel “B-1” was to analyze NSC documents and “identify present US aims, purposes and approved programs,” and Panel “B-2” was to concentrate on the Soviet side of the equation by summarizing psychological operations used by the USSR against the United States.³⁵ However, two days later, after a couple of follow-up meetings, Gray changed his mind and decided instead, to break the project down into three sub-groups. Group I, which included Samuel Berger from the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) and Col. Kintner from Defense, was to develop an inventory of all possible Cold War weapons. Group II, which consisted of Joseph Phillips from the PSB, Melvyn Ruggles from the Office of Intelligence Research within the State Department, and Fisher Howe, the State Department’s Deputy Assistant for Intelligence, concentrated on the major intelligence questions facing the administration. Group III, the largest of the three sub-panels, consisted of Lt. Col. Tobias Philbin from the PSB, Everett Gleason from the NSC, Charles Noyes from Defense, Samuel McKee from G-2, and Robert Schaetzel from the Division of Economic Affairs within the State Department.³⁶ They were charged with “codifying” existing policies, and identifying “the gaps

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in, or conflicts between, subsidiary policies or interpretations of basic policies.”³⁷ In providing direction to this group, however, Gray made it clear that it was not their job to “judge whether policy was sound, they were to assume that it was – their goal was merely to identify existing policy.”³⁸

“In order to impose a sense of urgency on Panel ‘B,’ a deadline of 30 days was tentatively approved.”³⁹ However, it was quickly extended to ninety days.⁴⁰ Under the new deadline, Group I was able to draw up a list of “weapons” that could be employed in the Cold War. The list was broken down into four categories: political, economic, military and propaganda. However, the State Department hated the initial draft of the paper and they cut it down from 100 to seventy pages; they later insisted that the next draft be cut further. The final draft consisted of only thirty pages; however, State still vetoed it. Ultimately, the report became the butt of numerous jokes because it listed the Yale Glee Club as an important weapon for winning the Cold War.⁴¹ Group II was a bit more successful in completing their task. Fisher Howe prepared a commentary which highlighted the combined intelligence resources of the government. Two new projects were then set in motion: the first outlined perceived Russian and East European aspirations; and the second listed the perceived aspirations of the West Europeans and Americans.

As with Group I, Group III’s job proved infinitely more difficult than originally envisioned, as the State Department tried to undermine the project from the start.⁴² Ostensibly, State intervened because they felt that Team III failed to adequately separate psychological policy from national objectives.⁴³ At the time, they argued that there was an important difference. Initially Group III was charged with three objectives: to identify what the United States was trying to accomplish in the Cold War, the strategy to be employed, and the capabilities required to achieve these objectives. However, they faced a number of problems: firstly they found it impossible to differentiate between psychological objectives and national objectives; secondly, they discovered that the languages used in the existing directives was both “general” and “overlapping”; and thirdly, they realized that large and general aims were mixed with rather specific aims in the NSC papers.⁴⁴

In order to secure an agreement, the men initially decided to simply reiterate American objectives as they appeared in the NSC papers. However, this failed to appease State, which was livid that the project had been sanctioned in the first place. Eventually the group’s timetable had to be extended well beyond its initial deadline. As time slipped by, the group’s mandate was so watered down that the final report only dealt with the escapee question, rather than Cold War strategy as a whole.⁴⁵ Thus, it was so limited in scope that it failed to be of much use.⁴⁶ Instead of dealing with the thorny issue of what NSC objectives meant in terms of operational criteria, they avoided the controversy altogether.⁴⁷ In doing so, they failed to answer the questions that had dogged operational planning to date.⁴⁸

As Panel B floundered, in September of 1951 Gray set up “the Director’s Group” in order to develop a “strategic concept” for waging the Cold War. NSC

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10/5 had explicitly stated that the administration needed to develop a “strategic concept” in order to guide operational planning.⁴⁹ The Director’s Group consisted of an elite staff of “wise men,” and it quickly became Gray’s pet project. Admiral Leslie Stevens, a PSB board member who had recently headed the joint Subsidiary Plans division within the JCS, was appointed to head the group. Like Magruder, Stevens had done some time on the 10/2 Panel and, in his new position, he had intimate knowledge of all ongoing covert operations and the problems they faced. Other members of the group included: Professor Frederick Barghoorn of Yale University, a specialist on Russian psychological warfare; Palmer Putnam, from PSB; William Kennedy, vice-president of the Ford Foundation and Wallace Carroll, a journalist who was an expert on psychological warfare, and who occasionally did consulting work for State and Defense.⁵⁰ Two other names were considered but were not on the final selection list; they were George Kennan and James Burnham, the fathers of “containment” and “liberation,” respectively. Because of pre-existing commitments both men declined to participate in this particular project.⁵¹

Although Gray initially charged the group with developing a strategy for waging the Cold War, this question proved to be too controversial so, at Admiral Steven’s suggestion, the problem was narrowed down to: “How can the US win the Cold War?” This question was then sub-divided into two more questions: “What is US policy vis-à-vis the USSR? And what programs can we establish to achieve this policy?” Stevens argued, at the time, that this issue “immediately raises the important question of US aims and objectives which have been given very little attention and whose solutions … seem to be necessary before you can get very far.”⁵² Like Panel B, Stevens immediately decided that the answer to the first question could be easily located in the NSC policy papers. However, after digesting these documents he was forced to conclude that, while American objectives were to reduce the power and influence of the Soviet Union to limits which no longer constituted a threat to the international community, “a clearer statement of what those limits might be, would be very helpful in the formulation of a general strategic plan.”⁵³

He noted that, in the light of the ambiguous nature of American policy, two schools of thought had sprung up. He identified the first school as consisting of those individuals who wanted to pursue a more active course of action, designed to break the “hold of Bolshevik power over the USSR and its satellites.” The second group, he opined, was content with a more moderate, albeit less defined, course of action, designed to encourage the gradual mellowing of Soviet power. He also pointed out, that in this latter case there were also a number of differences of opinion on how this would come about.⁵⁴ John Sherman, another member of the PSB, clarified the problem facing the group when he wrote that it was “very difficult to digest [the NSC] papers without losing their sense. They present their conclusions in broad settings and historical perspectives which really must be read along with the conclusions in order that the latter be fully understood.” He concluded that, in reading the documents, it was not clear whether US objectives were,

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to reduce Russian military power … or to bring about a democratic regime … or to overthrow the present government … or to divorce the satellites … or to keep the present regime in power, but with a changed attitude toward the rest of the world?⁵⁵

Sherman had hit the nail directly on the head. In the recent past, all of these objectives had been read into the national security policy papers; yet from an operational perspective, the failure to address the question – what was the administration’s ultimate objective in the Cold War – had a detrimental impact on the ability of the covert operators to chart a consistent course of action.

Ever cognizant of the problems which the Director’s Group would face as it tried to deal with this problem, while at the same time trying to protect the project from the ongoing jurisdictional dispute, Gray decided to have each member draw up their own interpretation of American Cold War strategy. He naïvely believed that it would then be possible to collate the five plans into a final paper which could then be sent around to each agency and department for consideration. Given the controversy over the meaning of NSC directives within each of their departments, however, three of the five authors confined themselves to merely reiterating the possible strategies that could be pursued once American policy was clarified.⁵⁶

The reports were completed between September and November of 1951. With tongue in cheek, Palmer Putnam titled his missive, “Ye Strategic Concept for Ye Cold Warre, (Being a dissertation on dyverse subjecks) [sic].” In the report he crystallized the dilemma facing the PSB. He wrote that, before a workable strategic plan could be devised, the administration had to decide what its primary target was: Was it the Soviet Union or the satellites? And within this context, he inquired; should American resources be geared toward stay-behind operations or toward disrupting and overthrowing the Soviet government? He concluded his analysis by pointing out that all of these questions had to be weighed against American capabilities and the risk of war.⁵⁷ The reports submitted by Wallace Carroll, Frederick Barghoorn and William Kennedy also pointed to the need to clarify American objectives. However, Carroll, Stevens and Kennedy also called for dramatic action. Barghoorn’s analysis was much more muted in tone.

In his paper, Carroll argued that the Truman Administration had to reduce NSC policy to its “clearest possible terms,” and decide once and for all, whether it wanted to coexist with the Kremlin or destroy the Soviet regime altogether. Carroll clearly favored the latter alternative and lobbied for an immediate campaign designed to liberate East Germany.⁵⁸ He argued that although the US was already “exerting various pressures” in this country, “nobody had told the operators” what they were supposed to achieve. Moreover, he pointed out that although a number of covert operations were already under way in other satellite countries, these campaigns, “had not been well directed toward strategic ends and [the US] never adequately explored [all of] the possibilities” in this theater. At no point on the globe, he concluded, was the United States “bringing concentrated pressure to bear with the aim of winning a decisive advantage.”⁵⁹

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The third report, written by Admiral Leslie Stevens, offered a much more detailed and aggressive strategic plan. He argued that, since the “containment” of the Soviet Union would not remove the communist threat, it was necessary that the United States “destroy Soviet power.” However, he went on to add that Kennan’s caveat in NSC 20/1, which was that the US must destroy Soviet power without risking general war, made this task somewhat difficult. It was akin, he argued, to “trying to prevent a squid from squirting ink, while you destroy it.”⁶⁰ Not dissuaded, however, he went on to outline a phased plan, premised on launching a worldwide drive for peace that was designed to provide a smoke screen behind which the United States could undertake operations designed to destroy the fabric of the Soviet police state. He argued that the peace campaign should be “carried out as a high-hearted crusade, gay, dashing, gleaming, even hilarious – a crusade to let in the light.”⁶¹

He also provided a time-line for the completion of his “crusade.” Beginning immediately, he argued that the United States should execute a worldwide campaign for peace and disarmament, “with teeth.” As this campaign was going on, he also maintained that all communist movements outside the Iron Curtain should be “mopped up,” and operations “Overload and Delay” should be initiated. “Overload” and “Delay” came out of an MIT study sponsored by the State Department. The goal was to so overload the Soviet decision-making apparatus with minor requests that it could not get anything done.⁶² Stevens went on to note that these tasks should be completed by the end of 1952, at which time the US could turn its attention to driving the Soviets out of some of the satellites. Once this was accomplished, sometime in 1955, he surmised, the US should set up governments in exile to facilitate planned uprisings in Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR proper. By 1956 the worldwide communist movement should have collapsed. At this point the United States could begin to trade with Russia and the former satellites.⁶³

William Kennedy picked up on many of the themes developed by Stevens. In his paper he outlined “six possible planks in a platform of psychological warfare.” First, he argued that the government should expand on its “tradition of violent and dramatic reaction to Soviet aggression” by taking swift “calculated risks” in order to win the Cold War. Second, he suggested that the US “POISON [Soviet] TENTACLES,” by creating “an atmosphere of suspicion of Titoism around the leader of every Communist party outside Russia.” Third, picking up on Steven’s point he advocated developing operations similar to those outlined in Overload and Delay. Fourth, he maintained that the PSB should promote the “Vlasov Legend,”⁶⁴ which he believed could function as a “psychological atom bomb.” Fifth, Kennedy also recommended that the government launch a peace offensive that focused on American progress and prosperity. Finally, he wrote that the United States should and could, “SLUT TOO!” In this context, he advocated a series of coups designed to throw the Soviets off balance.⁶⁵

The final paper by Yale Professor Frederick Barghoorn, was much more subdued. Relying primarily on the “balance of power” model of international relations, Barghoorn argued that the US should increase the power of the

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Western world in order to balance Soviet power. He argued that this was the only approach in which American security could be achieved and war avoided. He specifically vetoed the destruction of the Soviet system by physical force as too costly. Thus he advocated encouraging Titoism in Eastern Europe and helping to encourage a revolution within Russia by “weakening and disorienting the elite,” and by creating a counter force to Soviet power.⁶⁶

Before Gray had a chance to collate all the reports, however, Wallace Carroll submitted another report, which he argued was designed to raise American sights, fix the top priority and get the board thinking on offensive lines. Carroll believed that the administration had “fussed too long” over questions of objectives and priorities; he maintained that the Cold War was simply not that complicated. US objectives were simple and straightforward: to build-up a healthy international environment and to “roll back” Soviet power. He again argued that the US should focus its attention, in the short term, on liberating East Germany.⁶⁷

The daunting task of combining the five drafts into a final paper was given to Robert Cutler, the new deputy director of the PSB. Putnam and Kennedy were also involved in the final drafting process; once again, however, a controversy developed over the central question to be addressed. This issue was so contentious because it represented a microcosm of the ongoing dispute over the jurisdiction of the board: the broader the question, the wider the board’s mandate. Conversely, the more narrow the question, the more limited the role of the board. After a great deal of argument, Cutler decided to limit the focus of his study to the following question: “to what extent, and by what means, can we secure the retraction of Soviet power and influence?”⁶⁸

For three days, he labored under the most difficult of circumstances; every time he produced a draft, his fundamental assumptions were watered down. In the end, he was forced to concede that the difficulties inherent in this project were just too great to construct a coherent statement of national strategy. Instead, all he could do was present a “series of suppositions about policy”; issues that he argued needed clarification before an overall strategic concept could be formulated.⁶⁹ In order to help resolve these matters, he asked that State and CIA turn over all information pertaining to covert operations designed to retract Soviet power and influence.⁷⁰ Both departments refused to do so.

Unable to secure the information he needed, Cutler began his analysis by outlining American objectives as they appeared in the NSC policy papers. Backtracking from some of the more aggressive rhetoric in the strategy papers submitted by the director’s group, he conceded that the United States “was not presently prepared to affirmatively undertake certain courses of action” to reduce the power and influence of the Soviet Union or its grip on the satellites. He argued that these objectives should not be given up all together, but added an important qualification: “When and where appropriate, in light of US capabilities and the risk of war,” these goals should be pursued. This new caveat was significant because it implied that covert operations – once conducted with no clearly delineated limitations imposed on them – now had to take into

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consideration both American capabilities and the possible Soviet reaction. Cutler ended the report by lobbying for limited covert operations in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and East Germany.⁷¹ Left unanswered, however, was the question: To what end should these operations be directed?

On 15 November1951, a copy of Cutler’s paper was sent to State, Defense and the CIA for comments. In an attempt to defuse a hostile reaction to the paper, Gray attached a cover letter in which he stated that the PSB was not trying to make national strategy and that the paper was designed only as a working draft with the goal of clarifying certain unresolved issues.⁷² Despite Gray’s qualifications and the fact that the final draft did represent a significant step backwards from some of the initial proposals submitted by the “Director’s Group,” “the paper caused a fire storm of the first magnitude in the policy circles at State.”⁷³ Joseph Phillips, a new member of the Policy Planning Staff, argued that, not only was the PSB trespassing on their jurisdictional toes, but also it was impossible to formulate a strategic concept from which operations could flow. In their eyes, the paper was not only “quite dangerous” but “vague” as well.⁷⁴

C.B. Marshall summed up the State Department’s reaction. Repeating Kennan’s concerns over “NSC 35: Measures Required to Obtain US Objectives,” written three years earlier, Marshall argued that those working on the strategy paper had taken American objectives as outlined by the NSC at face value. They “viewed them as stating not simply general aspirations – not simply desiderata toward which our policy should be aimed – but as goals to be achieved in a predetermined order in a precise period of time.” Moreover, he went on, they read the objectives “in the precise sense of military usage – as purposes to be fulfilled in some measurable interval through the execution of a series of explicitly defined actions.”⁷⁵ He stressed that the desire for a strategy paper, “appears to stem from the faulty assumption that foreign policy objectives are measurable in time and scale like military objectives and that a government can achieve control of factors that bear on a tactical situation.” This was not the case, he exclaimed. Yet indulgence in the belief was “the source of trouble in the conduct of policy in general and in the State-PSB relationship in particular.” He concluded that the Director’s group was “laboring under illusion that everything could be put in a nutshell – that the future could be reduced to something that could be put in a brief case.” Marshall went on to decry the desire for “pat and simple answers to things that are imponderable and almost infinitely more complex and contingent.”⁷⁶ He concluded by telling Nitze that he should refuse the PSB’s request for any information dealing with State’s efforts to undermine the Soviet Union.

At a subsequent PSB meeting later in the month, Admiral Leslie Stevens agreed to prepare another statement on “the method” employed in constructing a strategic concept.⁷⁷ However, this paper was so contentious that he was forced to redraft it eleven times! Finally, Stevens decided to call together all of the senior advisors from each department to resolve the situation. The meeting took place on 5 December 1951. In the room were: Stevens, Charles Bohlen (who had recently been appointed as a special counselor to the President), Nitze,

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Magruder, and Wisner. Bohlen took the floor and, echoing Kennan’s argument three years before, he argued that it was impossible to construct a strategic plan for waging the Cold War. Of course, Stevens, Magruder and Wisner disagreed. Unable to resolve the two disparate positions it was decided that each side would draw up two new papers – the first would stress “the most desired approach” and the second was to outline the most “politically practical approach” – for a total of four papers in all.⁷⁸ The four papers would then be incorporated into one final draft.⁷⁹

Those involved in this project became known as “the strategic concept panel.” Included were: Wisner, Magruder, Bohlen, Nitze, Charles Stelle (from the State Department) and Stevens.⁸⁰ The make-up of the new panel was significant because it did not include a majority of PSB members. Indeed, the State Department and the CIA eventually took control of the project. However, problems again arose when trying to define the central question to be asked. As a result, the parameters of the study were narrowed down even farther and the central problem addressed in all four papers became: “what can usefully be said about the ways and means of bringing about a retraction of Soviet power and influence?”

Although he was happy with the narrow focus of the paper, Nitze also wanted to make sure that certain limitations were placed on covert operations. After participating in the debates over strategy, he worried that certain members of the PSB and their cohorts at OPC, had misinterpreted the strategy he had outlined in NSC 68. It was clear, he concluded, that transforming the Soviet system and reducing the span of its control had become the number one objective for the operational branches and the military.⁸¹ He was right. A number of people in OPC and PSB believed that the administration’s number one objective was to place a “maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power.” Its next objective was to “strengthen the free world’s orientation toward the United States and resist Soviet domination.” And its last objective was: “to develop underground resistance forces to facilitate covert and guerrilla operations and to provide a basis for the expansion of these forces during a time of war.”⁸²

However, Nitze was slowly coming to realize that the pragmatism and flexibility of policy that the State Department had lobbied so strongly for over the past three years, had produced a number of dire consequences, particularly in terms of operational planning. Namely, it had given excessive freedom to the covert operators. In order to reign in operations he began to argue that covert operations should be used only under four conditions: when the means were consistent with the American way of life; when the US did not incur the general risk of war; when the strength of the Western alliance was not reduced; and when they would not generate a psychological climate “unmanageably hostile” to the United States.⁸³ These limitations, their inherent subjectivity notwithstanding, became an integral part of the four new strategy papers that were drafted over the first months of 1952.⁸⁴

Despite the significant steps undertaken to clarify the critical underlying issues, however, the drafting of the four papers progressed very slowly. Nitze

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and C.B. Marshall continued to be a thorn in the side of those actively trying to draw up a workable strategy for waging the Cold War. In response to their repeated interference, Gray threatened to take the matter directly to the President.⁸⁵ Realizing there was more than one way to skin a cat, Nitze suddenly reversed his opposition to the project and the Policy Planning Staff became very helpful, too helpful in fact. According to Lilly, they “so inundated the group with information that they could not think strategically, much less write about a long range concept.”⁸⁶

In January of 1952, Gordon Gray left the PSB and returned to Chapel Hill. Raymond Allen, the former Ambassador to the Soviet Union, became the second director of the PSB. After Gray’s retirement, the project slowed to a “snail’s pace” largely because of State’s obstruction but, according to Tracey Barnes, the new CIA representative on the PSB, the real reason for the “slow and ponderous pace” at which the strategy paper was moving was, that “State, while outwardly in agreement that something be done, has no real desire to accomplish the result.”⁸⁷ Yet State’s plodding did have one unintended result. As time went on, a more moderate tone was slowly beginning to take hold within the PSB. This change in rhetoric was evident in a number of the board’s other projects.

Charles Stelle, the author of the State Department’s paper on the “most desired approach” to achieve US objectives in the Cold War, finally released his draft of the strategy paper in early 1952. Therein he argued that American covert operations designed to secure the retraction of Soviet power and influence had to take into consideration their effect on the Soviet structure of power, US capabilities to affect change in this theater, and the possible Soviet military response. He concluded that, based on these criteria, the United States could undertake only large-scale covert operations in Albania, Bulgaria and East Germany. However, he stated that West Germany would have to be rearmed before any of these operations could be undertaken. All other operations in Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union, he stated, should be put on the backburner until the United States had completed the military build-up called for in NSC 68.⁸⁸ Once the quest for “preponderant power” had been achieved, he wrote, aggressive covert operations could be reinitiated.

Four months later, the CIA finally completed its paper. In contrast to Stelle’s somewhat optimistic proposal, the CIA’s paper was much more muted in tone. Historian, Greg Mitrovich, believes that it reflected the growing concern within CIA itself over the fate of ongoing covert operations in Eastern Europe.⁸⁹ Dated 15 April 1952, it stated: “the liberation of the Russian people is not considered to be a feasible undertaking for the next several years.” And it concluded that while the chances of an effective detachment of one or more of the satellites is regarded as more feasible, “barring developments not presently foreseen, this is not considered a likely or near term possibility.” The paper went on to lament: “that it is difficult, at best, to estimate the effectiveness of isolated covert operations without knowing the overall framework into which they might fit and the

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amount of mutual related overt effort that will be applied against the same target.”⁹⁰ In essence, what the author was saying was that it was impossible to mount successful covert operations without the benefit of a coherent strategy. Isolated covert operations without the requisite support and backup had little or no real chance of success without the support of a coordinated effort throughout the government. Since this was not forthcoming at that present time, he saw no use in continuing operations which he believed were doomed to failure.

After receiving the two additional reports from the CIA and the State Department, which had not been declassified, Stelle was then asked to draft another paper incorporating the major assumptions from all four drafts. Two months later, he was still mired in the final draft of the strategy paper. The dilemma he faced was crystallized in the PSB’s annual report on the effectiveness of American psychological strategy to date: the report stated that the central dilemma facing those charged with executing American covert operations was that the NSC had not formally decided whether it was possible to live with the Kremlin or not. The author went on to argue that the failure to answer this one question, “even for planning purposes, has led to the adoption of varying sets of assumptions,” by those involved in the execution of the Cold War. He wrote:

the psychological operations of the United States directed toward the achievements of policy objectives set forth in NSC 20/4 … have been adversely affected by the failure of the United States to develop a valid and practical strategic objective. This failure has prevented the development of a worldwide overt and covert psychological operations program which supplement and complement each other.⁹¹

Yet, instead of advocating a more narrow interpretation of American objectives, the author suggested that a “too literal interpretation of what is meant by containment” had hampered operational planning. He then went on to lambast the “poor timing” of American covert operations designed to liberate Eastern Europe, which had been undertaken to date. He stated emphatically: “no initial program should be undertaken until it can be predicted with reasonable assurance that the Western World is prepared to support the operations of the disaffected group, with military force if necessary.”⁹²

Two days after this summary appeared, Mallory Browne, the director of the PSB’s Office of Review, decided to enter the fray. Although it is not clear why Browne chose to air his concerns at this time, one can only surmise that he was dissatisfied with the direction that Stelle’s paper was taking. In contrast to the more moderate tone being developed by what was left of the director’s group, Browne’s thesis reflected the political discourse of liberation now being touted by the Republicans.⁹³ By the spring of 1952, the election was just getting underway and the foreign policy of the Truman Administration was increasingly coming under fire. Browne had also visited Europe earlier in the year and had come back with the impression that the satellites could be “stirred to action.”⁹⁴

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These two factors may have also had an effect on his decision to press for a more aggressive national strategy.

In his proposal, Browne argued that, in order to accomplish the objectives outlined in NSC 20/4, within the next “five years,” it was necessary to shift to the offensive. He advocated that an “open” strategy of “liberation,” designed to free the satellites, should be initiated within the next two years. He believed that this strategy required:

less of an official change of policy than a frank recognition of what is really implicit in our existing policy alternatives: a) abandoning containment and openly espousing liberation; b) scrapping – not necessarily in public but in our strategic planning – the passive, wishful thinking of ‘coexistence’ and adopting a more positive approach that acknowledges the basic necessity of overthrowing the Kremlin’s regime; c) discarding our present strategy of fighting a delaying action in the Cold War … and substitute a fully planned and phased global strategy of offensive underground fighting.⁹⁵

While the majority of those who commented on the paper lauded this shift, they questioned the tactic of openly espousing “liberation.”⁹⁶ Sherman, for example, argued that “the recommendation for abandoning containment and “openly” espousing liberation of the satellites is believed to be undesirable … However, liberation remains a valid and private goal.”

Sherman also pointed out that Browne’s plan did not incorporate a strategy of “Titoism” or other such “divisive strategies.” He added that a “more balanced” treatment of the problem would clarify the ultimate goal of American policy: specifically whether or not liberation connoted revolution inside the USSR and the extent to which the revolt on the satellites was conditioned on weakening the Soviet Union.⁹⁷ Arthur Cox seconded his comments; he wrote: “I thought we all agreed around here that open espousal of liberation was an extremely bad strategy, particularly in terms of … the blow it might deal our friends behind the Iron Curtain, if it elicits a premature action on their part.” He went on to suggest that “a US policy of liberation [three or four words deleted] must be predicated on a long range program of non-military action, [and] on the assumption that our policy is based on the winning the Cold War while keeping it cold.” However, he agreed with Browne that the most important issue was “to get an agreement within the US government to abandon containment and adopt a policy of liberation.”⁹⁸

Browne was not a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Indeed, the day after his paper appeared, the PSB released its planning priorities for the coming year. Its priorities were listed as: to exert psychological pressures, direct and indirect, calculated to reduce Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe and ultimately to liberate occupied and satellite regions from Stalinist control; to develop direct psychological pressures and generate harmful tensions within the USSR, between the USSR and its minor satellites, and between the USSR and the Chinese Peoples Republic in order to reduce communist capabilities or to lower the aggressive dynamism of communist leaders.⁹⁹

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When taken together, all of the papers produced by the PSB during its first year of operation underscore the complete lack of unanimity that existed within the administration over the meaning and interpretation of American Cold War policy. There simply was no agreement on what American objectives were or what strategy should be pursued to achieve these objectives. That said, it appears that the ongoing controversy had forced the State Department to begin to deal with the question. In June 1952, Charles Stelle, the State Department representative on the PSB, argued that the US could not achieve the retraction of Soviet power and influences by overthrowing the Soviet government nor should covert operations directly challenge “the dignity and vital interests of the Soviet State.” He concluded: that given these significant limitations, “it is well within the realm of possibility that Soviet power and influence will not be reduced to the limits which no longer constitute a threat to US security.” Thus, he concluded, a definitive strategy for the operations outlined in NSC 10/5 may be “impossible to construct.”¹⁰⁰ However, he then added that it was still possible to advance “certain general categories of possible action … from which an interim strategic concept could be developed.” Within this context, he concluded that all covert operations designed to achieve American objectives as outlined by the NSC, had to take into consideration five criteria: effectiveness, feasibility, acceptable risk, flexibility, and phasing.¹⁰¹

The final draft of the “strategy paper,” which had been narrowed in scope even further, was circulated on 5 August 1952. Rather than providing an integrated strategic concept for Cold War planning, however, this paper dealt explicitly with covert operations. Neither the VOA nor RFE was mentioned. Therefore the coordination issue, which had been such an important part of the project in the first place, was simply not addressed. As George Morgan lamented, singling out covert operations as the main focus of the paper not only ruled out the possibility of an integrated strategy, but caused a distortion of our strategic perspective, because it implied that our main reliance should be on the covert.¹⁰² In order to reach this consensus, the paper had become so “meager in content, [that] it hardly did more than echo the problem.”¹⁰³

“PSB D-31: A Strategic Concept for a National Psychological Program With Reference to Cold War Operations Under NSC 10/5,” was finally approved by the PSB in October 1952, one month before the Presidential election. Consisting of only three pages, it did represent an important shift from the original assumptions that had dominated strategic planning in 1951.¹⁰⁴ It stated:

without adequate capabilities, the risks involved [in executing American covert operations in Eastern Europe] are clearly disproportionate to the possibilities of success. The time required to develop the necessary capabilities is so great the nature of an acceptable solution cannot be determined with sufficient accuracy to serve as a guide.¹⁰⁵

Despite its weaknesses, Paul Nitze was pleased with its tone. He argued that it “marked significant progress over the illusions current in this field last

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autumn.”¹⁰⁶ In terms of operational guidance, the paper suggested that covert operations should be developed with only three goals in mind:

to weaken the Kremlin’s control over the internal assets of the Soviet controlled bloc, and increasingly occupy the Kremlin with problems in this area; to undertake direct action to reduce subversive Soviet influence in those areas of the free world that are the most threatened; and to pursue covert manipulation of key elements in unstable countries of the free world to increase the stability and utility of the objectives of US foreign policy in these countries.¹⁰⁷

Although the gap between aspirations and capabilities had begun to narrow, and important qualifications were placed on covert operations, the PSB was never really able to clarify American objectives toward Eastern Europe nor was it able to fully reconcile the competing visions of national strategy. For his part, Frank Wisner merely commented that he hoped it would produce additional top level thinking on these questions.¹⁰⁸ His boss, Bedell Smith, did, however, press for the paper’s immediate approval, arguing that it was “extremely useful” in so far as strategic guidance for covert operations was concerned. He argued, that although “the guidance is in fact meager, CIA feels that it has had no guidance and this little bit would be of a real help.”¹⁰⁹

As the debates that surrounded the strategy paper began to subside, the PSB again found itself on the defensive. The State Department continued its unrelenting attack on the organization, and over time, both the military and the CIA began to waiver in their support. Although both organizations initially supported the PSB, because they saw it as an effective tool to “force more action out of State,”¹¹⁰ when this assumption proved erroneous, they too began to campaign against it. As Edmund Taylor later argued, in the final analysis, the PSB “suffered more harsh oppression at the hands of the intelligence community than those of their older and more traditional oppressors at State.”¹¹¹ Indeed, given the debacle that surrounded the drafting of the strategy paper, it should come as no surprise that DCI Smith took a leading role in arguing for its demise. Legendary for his short temper and dislike for slipshod work, Smith considered the “PSB staff incompetent and its work irrelevant.”¹¹² From his perspective, the PSB’s number one priority was to provide strategic guidance to the CIA in general, and OPC in particular, and in this task they had failed miserably.¹¹³

The situation continued to deteriorate when Alan Kirk replaced Raymond Allen as the third director. Under his direction, the PSB essentially became a “holding operation,” and virtually nothing new was accomplished. Kirk was viewed as a “caretaker” and, despite the fact that the board grew in membership, met more frequently and drafted more papers, its effect on American strategic planning actually decreased.¹¹⁴ When Kirk assumed office, a number of changes in personnel were also made: Edmond Taylor replaced Wallace Carroll as the assistant director for plans and policy and Tracey Barnes also came in as the new

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Deputy Director.¹¹⁵ In an attempt to address Smith’s concerns, Allen also set up the 10/5 Panel in the spring of 1952. Like its predecessor, the 10/2 Panel, it consisted of representatives from State and Defense – Robert Joyce, Magruder and Stevens – as well as two new members from the PSB and one from the CIA. Their job was to review the “desirability and feasibility” of all covert operations.¹¹⁶

Unfortunately, as they set about trying to determine the “desirability” of ongoing covert operations, they faced many of the same dilemmas as those working on the strategy paper. In April 1952, they drafted a memo to Wisner, which asked: does US policy “include or exclude efforts under any circumstances to overthrow or subvert governments of the satellites of the USSR?” They went on to note that: “if US policy excludes such efforts, then any OPC projects directed, primarily, or largely toward those ends should be eliminated or retained only on the grounds that such preparations would give the US freedom of decision.”¹¹⁷ Wisner, no doubt, was not amused, and although it is unclear how he responded, it is clear that those on 10/5 Panel did not get the answers they were looking for. One month later, the chair of the 10/5 Panel asked the PSB to clarify several key phrases in the NSC papers. Specifically, he asked: does the retraction of Soviet power and influence “include or exclude liberation either of those now within the Soviet orbit or others.” Secondly, he queried: “what does the phrase risk of war mean?”¹¹⁸ Mired in the same problems that dogged the drafting of the strategy paper, it is unclear whether these requests were ever answered.

On 13 October 1952, Frank Wisner argued that the PSB’s role, “to approve, guide and assess covert operations, had not achieved the desired.” Nor, he opined, had the PSB’s review procedure ever been used. He acknowledged that to date “the only program and project review has been wholly within the CIA.”¹¹⁹ A few days, later Smith finally concluded that the PSB was not equipped to handle the job, and he created another body to undertake what he believed to be the real job of the PSB: providing strategic guidance to OPC. This group, which consisted of Admiral Kirk, Robert Joyce, Wayne Jackson and John Magruder, was dubbed the “Murder Board” because of its role in slashing covert operations. Over one-third of all ongoing covert operations were eventually eliminated.¹²⁰ According to Ludwell Montague, however, the operations that were closed down were “by definition a multitude of micro projects of doubtful or marginal value. They did not amount to one third of the actual work in progress.”¹²¹

The “Murder Board” began operating just as the rumors of the PSB’s demise began circulating. By mid-1952 PSB had very little support within the administration. Moreover, the media began to publicly criticize the board and its officers.¹²² Although, over its two-year existence, it considered more than forty-four projects, for which thirty-six panels were organized, in the end it failed to completely bridge the gap that existed between policy and operations. Nor did it deal effectively with the thorny question of American Cold War aspirations versus its capabilities to effect change in Eastern Europe. As a result, contradictory and competing strategic visions continued to inform the development of covert

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operations for the remainder of Truman’s presidency. The controversy over American Cold War strategy continued and it became an integral part of the debates that surrounded the drafting of NSC 135 – the last statement of national policy drawn up by the Truman Administration. It is to this story that we now turn.

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8
The War of the Potomac

The debates over American Cold War strategy which were fought out in and around the Psychological Strategy Board during 1951 and 1952, became a microcosm of the larger controversy that engulfed the Truman Administration as a whole, as two schools of thought clashed over the meaning and interpretation of American Cold War policy. Although both groups had been jockeying for position since 1948, previously their differences had been glossed over by the ambiguous language used in the national security policy papers. However, in the aftermath of NSC 68, an overly optimistic and hastily adopted strategy of “rollback” crystallized the growing discrepancy between those who wanted to pursue aggressive operations designed to liberate areas under communist control and those who, for the time being at least, wanted to maintain the status quo. The failure of the Psychological Strategy Board to completely resolve this question ensured that the final year of the Truman presidency was spent trying to reconcile “the contradictions, clashes of view, and disarray” implicit in its Cold War policy.¹

Just as policymakers began this process, however, their efforts were complicated by the 1952 presidential campaign. Determined to distance himself from the foreign policy of the Truman administration, Republican presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower and his anointed foreign policy spokesperson, John Foster Dulles, made the containment–liberation dichotomy part of their campaign platform. Publicly articulating some of the themes being debated within the government, Dulles initiated an impassioned attack on what he characterized as the “passive, reactive and immoral” strategy of containment. In its place, he and Eisenhower promised a new “active” and “dynamic” public policy of liberation.²

Rather than encouraging the Democrats to admit their support for a more activist policy, Republican rhetoric seemingly had the opposite effect. Indeed, the debates over national strategy, which took place during 1952, culminated in a subtle, albeit important, retrenchment of the policy positions outlined in both NSC 20/4 and NSC 68/2.³ This policy retrenchment reflected a growing disillusionment with the effectiveness of traditional covert operations, designed to liberate Eastern Europe. Therefore, as Truman prepared to hand the reins of power to his successor, the strategic gap appeared to be narrowing. Yet, given the Republican victory it would take another year before the full implications of this shift were made clear.

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Debates over American Cold War strategy within the State Department all but ceased in the period immediately following the release of NSC 68. From 1950 through 1951, covert operations in both Europe and Korea dramatically increased, and with the singular exception of Walter Bedell Smith’s efforts to rein in paramilitary operations and clarify American strategy, policymakers’ faith in Frank Wisner’s ability to “rollback” Soviet power remained virtually unchecked.⁴ As a result American covert operations designed to “exert internal pressure on the Soviet system including the separation of the satellites from the USSR,” were increased sixteen-fold.⁵ However, as American operations began to disintegrate, a number of policymakers began to question the merits of these efforts. Not surprisingly, one of the first to do so was George Kennan. In the spring of 1951, he gave a number of speeches in which he urged “modesty” and “moderation” in American Cold War policy.⁶

Yet Kennan’s calls for restraint were matched by a new bellicose attitude in the White House as key members of the President’s staff began to press for a clearly defined public statement of national policy that would have a “more emotional appeal.”⁷ With this in mind, Charles Murphy, Special Counsel to the President, and his two assistants, George Elsey and David Lloyd, drafted a number of presidential speeches that called for the “overthrow of the Soviet regime and the liberation of the satellites.” Although these references were later removed, after being sharply criticized by the State Department, certain members of the President’s staff continued to push for “a more effective formulation of foreign policy goals” which moved beyond the public rhetoric of containment.⁸ The question is why? Unfortunately, the answer is not yet clear.

All but absent from my story thus far is the man at the centre of it all: President Harry Truman. While there is a general consensus among historians that Truman did favor a more activist policy toward Eastern Europe, there is very little documentary evidence available which supports this.⁹ Indeed, during the research for this book, I did not come across one document that outlined the President’s position on the strategic debates which engulfed his administration. As a result, while I believe that Truman’s personality and ideology probably predisposed the President to take an aggressive stance toward Eastern Europe, and this may help explain the shift in White House rhetoric in the spring of 1951, I am forced to conclude that Truman never brought the full power of the presidency to bear on the one problem that was tearing his administration apart. Unlike the debates over the creation of Israel, which occurred in 1948, Truman failed to play an instrumental role in guiding the administration’s Cold War policy.¹⁰ Therefore, the final factor that worked against the development of a coherent strategy was the ineffectiveness of President Truman. Indeed, the argument between the President’s White House staff and the State Department underscores what has been my central argument throughout this book: the United States simply did not have a coherent or unified strategy for waging the Cold War.¹¹

As the strategic debate swirled around them, the Policy Planning Staff continued to refuse to clarify American strategy, even to those individuals who

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would have benefited from such knowledge. For example, as they prepared to brief Max Milkan and his team, who were working on the MIT Soviet Vulnerability Study – a report whose sole focus was to determine which communist weakness American psychological and political warfare operations should and could exploit – Ray Thurston, Carleton Savage and Charles Burton Marshall all argued that, in so far as US objectives were concerned, the project leaders should not be told more than “a high school graduate who reads the New York Times.”¹² It should not be surprising then, given State’s attitude, that the MIT group stated in their final report, which was submitted seven months later, that the administration needed to clarify both its interests and its objectives. They argued that, in order for political warfare operations to be effective the government must reach a consensus on these two issues. At the present time, they concluded, no such consensus exists.¹³

Taking as their point of departure the maintenance of the status quo, or the public policy of “containment,” the MIT study went on to argue that, given the ambiguity clouding US planning in the area of psychological warfare, there was a danger that “implicit promises of liberation or of imminent subversive operations [might] slip into our propaganda efforts.” This, they believed, was “both dangerous and destructive,” particularly because it would expose American sources in Eastern Europe without yielding any positive value.¹⁴ It is doubtful whether those working on the project knew how timely their cautionary note was. In parallel with the report’s release, the Soviet government began a systematic crackdown which exposed American operations in Albania, the Ukraine and Poland.¹⁵ Moreover, as State Department historian Chris Tudda has shown, American rhetorical diplomacy did play an important role in the unrest that took place in Eastern Europe.¹⁶

Despite the unwillingness of the State Department as a whole, to publicly clarify American strategy, the documentary record indicates that from mid-1951 onward, certain individuals within the department, when confronted with the fallout from the rhetoric of NSC 68, became less and less willing to consider a mandate for the rollback of Soviet power and the liberation of Eastern Europe. As these voices of restraint gained support, so too did their determination to provide more guidance to the Office of Policy Coordination.¹⁷ Although the reasons for this shift are unclear, factors such as the dramatic failure of ongoing operations, perceptions of a shift in the nuclear balance of power, combined with the fact that the majority of those who had pressed for such operations in the first place (George Kennan, Robert Lovett, James Forrestal, and John Davies) had left government service, suggest possible explanations.¹⁸ It also appears as though Charles Bohlen’s return to Washington after serving almost two years in the American embassy in France, was equally significant. While historians have only recently begun to chronicle Bohlen’s influence on US policy in the early fifties, a consensus is building that he did play a significant role in the “transformation” in strategic thinking which occurred in the final year of the administration.¹⁹

Bohlen had been concerned with the direction of US policy for some time. While in Paris, he had voiced serious misgivings about some of the underlying

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assumptions in NSC 68, only to be told that a fundamental revision of the document was not possible at that time.²⁰ Biding his time until his return from Europe, his opportunity finally arose in July 1951, when Truman ordered the NSC senior staff to review the world situation in light of the ongoing conflict in Korea. Reinforcing NSC 68’s position, “NSC 114: The Status and Timing of Current Programs of National Security,” took Nitze’s conclusions a step further, arguing that in light of the Korean War, the United States was in an even more precarious position than it had been two years before.

After reading this report Bohlen voiced his concern.²¹ His critique was based on the premise that both papers had mistakenly identified Soviet intentions in the postwar world. He argued that:

the only issue at stake was whether or not the NSC 68 analysis of the Soviet Union is sufficiently accurate to serve as a guide for the US government’s interpretation of Soviet actions and for an estimate of probable future Soviet moves. My entire position is that it is not: that it is not a true picture of how the Soviet Union operates insofar as I have observed and studied it.²²

In contrast to what he understood to be Paul Nitze’s position in NSC 68, Bohlen believed that the Soviet government was primarily concerned with its own security, not world domination.²³ He felt that this distinction was important because it spoke to the American ability, or perhaps more importantly their inability, to effect changes within the Soviet system.²⁴ Specifically, he argued that, barring the actual overthrow of the Soviet government, which he believed was clearly beyond American capabilities, the United States could not bring about the collapse of Communism. Moreover, he added that, it was unlikely that the situation would change in the future, “Nor does it appear likely,” he concluded, “that an increase to any higher level of strength, which the free world could maintain over an extended period would significantly change this prospect.²⁵

This was a significant challenge to the prevailing thinking within the administration, therefore, in an unexpected twist, his analysis brought into sharp focus the emerging skepticism with some of the more radical assumptions implicit in NSC 68, particularly in terms of America’s operational capabilities. Although Bohlen’s critique did not deal explicitly with covert operations per se, part of his thesis rested on the assumption that NSC 68 had created a great deal of “false hope” that the United States could have a significant effect on events in Eastern Europe. When these expectations failed to materialize, he pointed out that a “defeatist attitude” had set in, and this attitude now characterized official planning in Washington.²⁶

His timely critique set in motion a series of events that ultimately led many in the administration to question the vision of “liberation” which had been read into NSC 68 and ultimately, the “unreality of commitments” that this vision engendered.²⁷ During the drafting of NSC 114, NSC senior staff first discussed the significance of the language employed in the previous policy papers. During

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the spring and summer of 1951 the steering committee debated whether terms such as “liberation” or the “retraction of Soviet power and influence” were appropriate and/or useful in terms of policy planning. As a result, those working on the project became intimately aware of the different interpretations of American means and objectives that existed within the administration.

At one mid-1951 Policy Planning Staff meeting, in which the question of American objectives was raised, John Ferguson, the deputy director of the Policy Planning Staff, and Carleton Savage, a staff member also involved in the project, pushed for a stronger statement of national policy. However, they met strong resistance from Ray Thurston, the deputy director of East European Affairs and Dorothy Fosdick – the only woman to serve on the Policy Planning Staff during Truman’s presidency and the only member with a doctorate – who wanted to adopt more moderate language. During these discussions, Paul Nitze remained on the fence, pointing out that although the US wanted the satellites to revolt some day, they did not want them to do it now.²⁸ The discussion which ensued, offered no hope of reconciliation. In the end, the issue remained unresolved and NSC 114 merely re-affirmed American objectives as outlined in NSC 68.²⁹

Yet the debates that characterized the drafting of this statement suggest that, by the summer of 1951, there was still no unity of thought within the State Department on how to conceptualize American strategy toward Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. These divisions went beyond the public articulation of policy to an in-house disagreement over the heart of American Cold War policy. Although the stalemate in Korea continued to inform State’s views, the dramatic failure of American covert operations in Eastern Europe also played a part in the disillusionment with “liberation.” As George Morgan, the deputy director of the PSB lamented, in the midst of these discussions, the American ability to affect change in this theater was evaporating and there was no way to increase it in sight. He concluded that the US should avoid any “phraseology suggesting more hopeful continuation along present lines,” and instead, should “stress the need to invent and develop new capabilities.” In response to Morgan’s suggestion, both the CIA and the State Department agreed that it was time to try and make “containment really work.”³⁰ It is not clear though, what they meant by this, nor to what extent this shift in strategy, if that was indeed what it was, was made known to OPC. Given the continuing growth of covert operations which took place during this period and the ongoing debates over US strategy, the evidence suggests that the issue was not resolved.³¹

Ultimately, the process toward a fundamental re-appraisal of American policy was facilitated by an overwhelming dissatisfaction with NSC 114. Indeed, the debate over this document went well beyond the language employed to describe American Cold War objectives. For a number of reasons, neither State nor CIA was happy with its conclusions and therefore a new report, NSC 114/2, was completed in October 1951.³² Although historian Melvyn Leffler argues that NSC 114/2 reflected a broad consensus on the part of the Defense and State Departments, he neglects to mention the debates that characterized its drafting, and that, in the end, it was “so controversial that it was withdrawn from

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the NSC Senior Staff before consideration by the Council.”³³ In the face of this controversy, Bohlen pressed for a “more balanced and exhaustive study to be undertaken.”³⁴ Finally, in March 1952, Truman relented and requested that both NSC 68 and NSC 114/2 be re-appraised “from the ground up,” in the light of a revised intelligence estimate of Soviet atomic capabilities.³⁵

The drafting of what eventually became NSC 135 was placed under Bohlen’s direction. Although the project was initially envisioned as, neither as broad as NSC 68, nor as narrow as NSC 114, given Bohlen’s dissatisfaction with the existing documents, it is not surprising that he decided that a fundamental reevaluation of American policy was in order. Work on the paper began in April 1952, the same month that the State Department took over the drafting of the PSB’s “strategic concept” paper discussed in the last chapter. The cross timing of these two projects should not be ignored. In fact, they remained inextricably linked together. Not only were the same individuals involved on both projects, but a lack of a consensus over means and objectives, dominated the development of both papers.

The basic issue for those working on NSC 135 became: how can the US win the Cold War?³⁶ For many of those in the State Department working on the assignment, this was the first time they had come face to face with the strategic visions of “rollback” and “liberation” that had been read into previous NSC papers.³⁷ From their perspective, a detailed analysis of NSC 68 and NSC 114 indicated “that American strategy has moved away from containment to the overthrow of the Soviet Union.” As Ray Thurston concluded, if this were true, “it means the US has consciously or unconsciously decided on war.”³⁸ Thus, the drafting of this document brought into stark focus the rhetorical significance of the assumptions underpinning NSC 68 and the extent to which they differed from the public perception of containment, still held by a number of high ranking government officials.

As both the State Department and the Psychological Strategy Board began to debate American strategy, the Republican Party began to press openly for a more aggressive Cold War strategy. The outside pressure on the administration began in 1950 after the US News and World Report published a three part series on the so-called fall of China. Thereafter, Republicans leveled a number of scathing criticisms on the State Department. Their attention shifted from China to Eastern Europe, in the spring of 1951, after Congressmen Kersten introduced House Resolution #89, which called for the United States government to provide assistance to the captive peoples of the USSR.³⁹ The passage of the Kersten Amendment later in the year provided the President with $100 million dollars to spend on covert operations designed to subvert the Soviet bloc. Included in the package, were provisions for the organization of an émigré army to be used for the liberation of the satellites and the support of underground resistance organizations within the Soviet Union itself.⁴⁰ Although there had been a number of people within the government who had been pressing for the adoption of similar measures since 1949, in the face of being handed the machinery to do so, many stopped short of embracing it. Even Allen Dulles acknowledged the problems

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with this proposal. He crystallized the dilemma facing the administration when he pointed out that while the US certainly wanted to keep the hope of liberation alive, did it really want to do something “as provocative as having legions sitting there ready to go in, but not able to go in?”⁴¹ Dulles’ ambivalence suggests how complex this issue was.

Given the unwillingness of the Truman Administration to wholeheartedly embrace his program, Kersten became more and more vocal in his attacks. His vitriolic speeches in the House of Representatives soon alienated a number of the Foreign Service personnel whose primary window into American policy had come from George Kennan’s public exposition of “containment.” Therefore, while the Republican rhetoric failed to move the Truman Administration toward a more aggressive strategy, it did expose the discrepancies between the public perception of American policy, still held by many in the government, and the “reality” of American policy, which existed somewhere betwixt and between the contradictory and conflicting strategic impulses which had informed the administration’s thinking to date.

Republican rhetoric also had a dramatic effect on America’s allies. The Europeans were becoming more and more alarmed with what they perceived to be the new thinking in Washington.⁴² As a result, the State Department soon found it had an unlikely ally in its attempts to rein in OPC. Beginning in 1951, the senior officials within the British government became increasingly alarmed by American covert operations designed to destabilize the governments in Eastern Europe. As these operations continued to unfold, the British began to pressure the United States to curtail their presence in Eastern Europe. In a private meeting with top officials from the Truman Administration in January of 1952, British diplomats argued that unless something was done to curtail OPC, Frank Wisner and his team would continue to go beyond the agreed upon positions on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – a point that the Policy Planning Staff was now willing to concede.⁴³

European fears were publicly documented after The Economist ran an article entitled “Containment Plus” in April 1952.⁴⁴ The article called for the American government to adopt a new aggressive policy toward the Soviet Union. A few weeks later, however, in response to the article, The Economist ran an editorial that argued that a dangerous two-tiered policy existed in Washington: one level that functioned as unofficial policy designed to support resistance groups in the Soviet bloc through covert operations, while a second public policy refused to acknowledge that these campaigns existed. The author concluded that if this was true, it meant that not only were there two policies in Washington, but that American and British policies were dangerously out of step.⁴⁵

However, just as the State Department began to think seriously about shifting the direction of its Cold War strategy toward a more moderate course, it faced pressure from the Republicans to do just the opposite. By the spring of 1952, the presidential campaign was well under way and the Republicans began to seriously challenge Truman’s foreign policy.⁴⁶ Until this point, their attention had been focused on the hunt for domestic communists. Seizing on the conviction of

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Alger Hiss in January 1950, however, they gradually transferred their domestic red-baiting tactics into an organized attack on the Truman Administration in general, and its foreign policy in particular. Senator Joseph McCarthy facilitated this transition. His continued attacks allowed the Republicans to successfully blur the lines between domestic communists, Soviet spies and the men who formulated the policy of “containment” in the government.

Over the course of the next year, McCarthy, Kersten and Congressman O.K. Armstrong led the assault against what they characterized as the “timidity of the chief executive” and the “subversion among his subordinates.”⁴⁷ Despite the apparent success that this approach appeared to be having, the Republican Party still needed to devise a political platform that could be sold to the American people as a viable alternative to the policies of the Truman Administration. Determined to avoid the mistakes made in 1948, the party leadership began to search for a way to separate itself from the Democratic ticket.⁴⁸ Liberal-Internationalist-Republicans, like Henry Luce, C.D Jackson and Bill Donovan, had always been outspoken in their support of liberation or rollback. However, it was not until the Republican Party merged these rhetorical symbols with the call for a clearly formulated foreign policy based, in part, on a psychological and political warfare campaign designed to destabilize the Soviet bloc, that they developed a coherent platform on which to challenge the Democrats. The marriage of these three ideals – a coherent national policy, a public strategy of liberation and increased psychological and political warfare operations – found their nexus in the politicization of Dwight Eisenhower.

The coupling of psychological warfare and liberation made sense for Eisenhower; psychological warfare, in particular, appealed to Republican ideological sensibilities. Many conservatives considered the Republican Party to be a bulwark against Democratic excesses, which they believed included: a powerful central government, excessive defense expenditures, higher taxes and larger deficits.⁴⁹ From their perspective, psychological warfare provided a “low cost option to defend and spread freedom,” while ensuring that “the economic and institutional foundations of liberty at home” remained secure.⁵⁰ Furthermore, as Bruce Cumings has argued in his study of the Korean War, the idea of “roll-back” or “liberation” also had great appeal for conservative-Republicans for many of the same reasons.⁵¹ In short, a strategy that relied primarily on psychological or political warfare appeared to many conservatives as “the magic pill that would end the Cold War without conflict.”⁵² However, neither of these options would work unless a clearly defined strategy held them together. Therefore, throughout the campaign, and into his first year in office, Eisenhower consistently emphasized the importance of strategic clarity. Given his military background, it is not surprising that Ike personified this aspect of military culture.

One of the first meetings between Republicans and the psychological warriors occurred in February 1952, when a conference on psychological warfare was held in Washington. Sponsored by the American Legion, it included a number of prominent conservatives, including O.K. Armstrong, a group of Jesuit

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priests and Baptist ministers, a collection of émigrés from the satellite countries and a select few government officials.⁵³ Although at this time the participants refrained from overtly challenging the foreign policy of the Truman Administration, three months later their tactics changed. Realizing the strength of their newfound position they went on the offensive. For two days in May of 1952, C.D. Jackson, who had just left his job as director of Radio Free Europe (RFE), organized a private conference on political warfare at Princeton University. Twenty-eight people from State, CIA, PSB and the National Committee for A Free Europe (NCFE) attended the conference and the clash between the strategic camps was finally brought into the open.⁵⁴

On the surface, the meeting was designed to bring together the top minds in the field to discuss the overall purpose and direction of the American Cold War effort. Lurking below the surface, however, lay a political agenda designed to provide the new President, who many hoped would be Eisenhower, with a blueprint for offensive psychological operations designed to win the Cold War. As George Morgan later wrote, he believed the meeting

was another serious symptom of the rising tide of public pressure for a spectacular political warfare offensive based partly on unrealistic conceptions of what political warfare can achieve, partly on the American urge to get going, even if we don’t know whither, and partly on desperation.⁵⁵

Starting from the premise that an “absolute paucity of guidance” existed in Washington, C.D Jackson put the case of Radio Free Europe, front and center.⁵⁶ Taking the stage, he told the audience that no one in the United States government had ever had the chance that RFE had in the last twelve to eighteen months. He boasted that there were three criteria for successful psychological operations: “adequate funds … [a] no holds barred [attitude] … and no questions asked … [and] we had them all.”⁵⁷ He went on to note that when his organization was set up it was given the mandate “to do ‘something,’” but he added,

not only did we do something we were on our way to IT. We went further, faster, than anyone dreamt possible … [However] I don’t know how many times, but certainly close to ten times, our guys [went] to Washington and in their very friendly and helpful talks with the Central European Desk in the State Department have said, “look, tell us what to do.” And those guys honestly said, “we can’t tell you what to do. Go ahead and do what you want to do…. We will tell you if you are getting into trouble.”⁵⁸

Thus, he concluded that the only problem his men had faced was the lack of direction coming from Washington. Indeed, he argued that during his tenure the only guidance his organization had received was “the occasional negative.”⁵⁹

Charles Bohlen attended the conference, representing “the ghost of the opposition.” Outnumbered and on the defensive, however, Bohlen refused to accept the position offered by the psychological warriors. Embracing the same

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themes first introduced by George Kennan during the drafting of NSC 20/4, Bohlen argued that many of those at the conference failed to understand the nature of American foreign policy. He began his rebuttal by suggesting that it was very unfortunate that so many military terms had crept into the diplomatic vocabulary. In contrast to the position offered by C.D. Jackson, Bohlen argued that, while in “regular warfare you have both an absolute commitment and relatively tangible and calculable factors … in so-called political warfare such fixed points are generally absent.” Hence, he concluded, “demands for formulating a ‘strategy’ and taking the ‘offensive’ are apt to imply a basic misunderstanding of what is possible.” He added that, while “everybody agrees … that you ought to seize the initiative when you can, [the problem remains] what initiative will really be effective.”⁶⁰

Bohlen’s was a lone voice, and he was easily drowned out by the clamors for a more aggressive strategy. Given the partisan atmosphere the delegates concluded the meeting by citing the “official negligence” of the Truman Administration. In a scathing critique of the government, they added that its “foreign policy has failed to enunciate a policy determination to work for the liberation of the captive peoples.” Without such a policy, they argued that American propaganda efforts were “seriously handicapped.” The conference statement released at the end of the meeting concluded that “a policy of mere containment” … has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with a more dynamic policy of liberation.⁶¹

By articulating the complaints voiced by psychological warriors over the preceding four years, while simultaneously pushing for a clearly defined public policy of liberation, the conference underscored the differences in American strategic thought that continued to exist within government circles. However, much like the earlier statements of national policy drafted by the NSC, the so-called “Princeton Manifesto” provided very little in terms of actual guidance, although, at the time, it was hailed as doing so. As Robert Lang, an employee from RFE argued, for two and a half years RFE had been acting irresponsibly. They had “been floating in the air.” However, the Princeton statement, he concluded, “limits us, and allows us to be responsible.”⁶² George Morgan, the deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board later conceded that, “the fact that the operators who were screaming for guidance were apparently satisfied with a very mild statement, seemed to show how much they had been frustrated by a lack of any word from on high, which would give them a sense of purpose.”⁶³

Not everyone was happy with the “Princeton Manifesto,” however. When the news of the meeting reached the State department, a number of people, albeit not all, “hit the ceiling.”⁶⁴ While the majority of those present, decried what they believed to be the politicization of policy through rhetoric, those with operational experience like Robert Joyce, argued for some type of statement clarifying American objectives in Eastern Europe.⁶⁵ The controversy that ensued, underscored the lack of consensus within the Truman Administration over the nature of American policy in general, and the relationship between containment and

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liberation in particular. For example, both David Bruce and John Fergeson pushed for some sort of statement along the lines of the “Princeton Manifesto,” that would clarify American policy. However, Charles Burton Marshall and Carleton Savage, believed that the administration should not give in to outside pressures, and they therefore refused to agree to the project.⁶⁶

The discussion became heated when the PSB hinted that it might adopt the “Princeton Manifesto” as its own strategic concept. Throughout June, it remained unclear whether State would “give in” and adopt the platform, or whether they would be able to withstand the pressure. As one staffer lamented, “the department should not unwittingly, through the PSB route, buy a policy in a poke – especially when there are definite signs that it is a confused and utopian policy, reflecting simply a collection of hopes not yet analyzed to see whether they hang together.”⁶⁷ The lack of unanimity underscores how deeply divided the administration was. Ironically, despite the State Department’s reluctance to release a public statement clarifying American objectives, all involved in the discussion agreed with Nitze that they had to do more to “wet nurse” OPC/CIA.⁶⁸ Yet it remained unclear how precisely they planned to do this.⁶⁹ As C.B. Marshall mused, the common denominator in all of the discussions was the failure of those involved to “go to the mat” on the subject. Ideally, he believed the staff “should face the problem head on, instead of giving half poor advice to the President.”⁷⁰

Aside from contributing to a deteriorating working environment within the administration, the debates over national planning that took place in the spring and summer left the government open to the criticism that it did not have a consistent foreign policy for waging the Cold War. Not surprisingly the Republicans seized on the government’s indecisiveness and began to exploit it during the election campaign. Indeed, throughout 1952, C.D. Jackson gave a number of speeches in which he lambasted the Truman Administration for its lack of clarity in foreign policy.⁷¹ Creating an impression that Truman did not have a coherent policy was not difficult given the internal divisions that existed within the government. And by 1952 only 25 percent of Americans believed that the administration had a “definite policy toward Russia.”⁷² In contrast to the vague policy statements offered by the Democrats, Republican rhetoric, which alternated between simplistic visions of isolationism, preventive war, and liberation had much more appeal. For example, 76 percent of all Americans favored a policy of liberation. Yet only 4 percent of those who favored liberation, planned to vote for the Democrats in the next election.⁷³

As I suggested earlier, the rhetoric of “liberation” was the brainchild of archconservative intellectual, James Burnham, who had become the darling of the Republican Right.⁷⁴ According to Cumings, while in 1947 Burnham’s prescriptions were “widely thought to be hysterical if not insane,” by 1951 many of his views had been integrated into the mainstream.⁷⁵ Picking up on a number of themes he had first introduced in 1950, Burnham continued his public critique of the Truman Administration’s foreign policy in 1952. In Containment or Liberation? He argued that a policy of containment was no more than the “bureaucratic

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verbalization of a policy of drift.”⁷⁶ In its place he offered an alternative policy, which he now named “liberation.” In 1952, “liberation” became an important rhetorical symbol used to separate the Republican platform from that of the Democrats. The fact that it was thought to be different from the policy of “containment” was an important part of its allure. Indeed, given Eisenhower’s uncertain political alliances it became essential that he develop a campaign that separated his agenda from that of the previous administration, which he had served so faithfully. Furthermore, “liberation” had additional appeal for Ike because it provided him with an olive branch to extend to the right wing of the Republican Party, a constituency whose support he desperately needed in order to secure the presidential nomination. Adopting a public strategy of “liberation” allowed him to address both of these issues at one time.⁷⁷

The primary spokesperson for this strategic vision became John Foster Dulles. Like Eisenhower, Dulles had bi-partisan credentials that also had to be handled in some way. However, unlike Eisenhower, who embraced “liberation” largely because it made sense politically, Dulles embraced it because it appealed to his moral and religious sensibilities. According to historian Richard Immerman, Dulles championed a public strategy of liberation because he believed that “containment” had been an affront, not only to US history, but also to its Christian heritage.⁷⁸ Although he had held a number of posts within the Truman administration he had always been a vocal critic of the Democrat’s foreign policy. In fact, he began his attack on “containment” the same year that he was appointed by the President to negotiate the end of the American occupation of Japan. Gradually, his influence within the government began to wane in the face of what were characterized as a number of “irresponsible statements,” and by 1952 he, like Burnham, was working for the Eisenhower campaign.⁷⁹

Dulles developed his strategic vision in a book titled War or Peace in 1950.⁸⁰ He elaborated on this theme in an article for Life magazine in May of 1952. The article essentially served as the Republicans’ official challenge to the Truman Administration’s “passive and reactive” policy of “containment.”⁸¹ Like Burnham, Dulles offered in its place an “active” and “dynamic” public policy of “liberation.”⁸² Similar to the rhetoric of containment, first articulated by George Kennan in the “X article,” Dulles’ vision of liberation was imprecise, however. Furthermore, like Kennan, he never made an attempt to clarify his argument. Indeed, during the drafting of “A Policy of Boldness,” his editor, Emmett John Hughes, tried to get him to be more specific about what he meant. However, as Hughes later argued, while they “would chase the proposition around and around … it never required substance beyond his affirming the desirability of it.”⁸³ With the exception of his call to break off diplomatic relations with the satellites, in “A Policy of Boldness,” Dulles brought nothing new to the table. For example, of the new alternative options he cited, the Truman Administration was actively conducting operations in six of the seven areas.⁸⁴

There can be little doubt, however, that his thinking on this question was heavily influenced by his brother, Allen, who was actively involved in planning

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covert operations in Eastern Europe. The close relationship between the brothers suggests that Foster was privy to a number of operational details. Although the record remains sketchy on Allen’s role, there is evidence to suggest that he not only read the article in Life before it appeared, but offered an important clarification which was then incorporated into the final draft.⁸⁵ Moreover, this might explain why he renamed his strategy, “liberation” in 1952, and why he was unable to articulate a dramatically new approach to the problem. There simply was very little that could be done to effect change in this theater that had not already been tried by the Truman Administration.

Allen Dulles was not the only member of Truman’s inner circle who privately supported Dulles’ call for a public strategy of “liberation,” however. After reading “A Policy of Boldness,” Gordon Gray, who had by this time retired from his post as director of the Psychological Strategy Board, wrote a congratulatory letter to the author in which he stated that “I very much liked your point about containment. I argued very strongly, during the period that I served as director of the PSB, that containment was not enough. However, I am not sure that I succeeded in convincing anyone but myself and my associates on the board.” He concluded that, as a result, his time on the PSB was one “of complete frustration.”⁸⁶

The irony of the situation was that John Foster Dulles, James Burnham, George Kennan and Paul Nitze were all influenced by the same competing tendencies in American strategic thought. As a result, there was very little difference between the strategic vision advocated by Dulles and Burnham, named “liberation,” and that advocated by Kennan and Nitze, named “containment.” That said, it should come as no surprise that the State Department did not appreciate Dulles’ repeated attacks. As the Republicans continued their onslaught, policymakers became more and more frustrated with what they perceived to be an unwarranted criticism against which they could not defend themselves. Haunted by the specter of Joe McCarthy, there was growing concern within the government that Dulles’ rhetoric would add fuel to the fire, and that the American people would really come to believe that its officials were, as Nitze put it, “commie loving.”⁸⁷ Noting his frustration with the repeated calls for a public policy of liberation, the director of the Policy Planning Staff complained that something had to be done “to spike [that] goddamn idea.”⁸⁸

In order to counter the Republican onslaught, Nitze offered to show Dulles drafts of both NSC 68 and 114. He believed that if Dulles understood the true nature of American policy he would be forced to curtail his attacks. Not surprisingly, however, Foster refused the interview, no doubt, as Nitze surmised, because he knew it would have limited him in the political debate.⁸⁹ Determined not to give up in this regard, a meeting with key members of the Senate was subsequently organized by the Psychological Strategy Board. The meeting was designed to educate the Congressmen on some of the pitfalls involved in an open policy of liberation. However, this seemed to accomplish very little and the attacks on the administration continued.⁹⁰

In the end, the President took matters into his own hands and offered to have the CIA brief Eisenhower on ongoing operations in Eastern Europe. Like Dulles,

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Eisenhower also refused the interview, arguing “it would be unwise to the point of causing general confusion if I should accept.”⁹¹ Truman, of course, was livid and according to historian Stephen Ambrose a lifelong rift between the two men resulted.⁹² Although, on the eve of the election, a number of Truman’s advisors finally relented and announced that US Cold War policy did go “beyond what is ordinarily described as containment,”⁹³ the concession came too late. The politicization of policy through rhetoric was so great that for the next fifty years the “containment” consensus went relatively unchallenged.

Yet, in a strange twist of historical irony, as the Republican Party worked to construct an image of the Democrat’s policy as “containment,” the Truman Administration moved toward a less aggressive strategy. Although the drafting of NSC 135 took place during the height of the 1952 election campaign, despite the vitriolic rhetoric and the hostile working environment, policymakers continued a slow move away from the strategic assumptions that had come to dominate national planning in the aftermath of NSC 68. This transition was in large part facilitated by Charles Bohlen’s belief that the United States did not have the capabilities to seriously effect change in the Soviet sphere of interest. Not everyone was happy with this trend, however; for their part, the Policy Planning Staff remained perplexed by Bohlen’s position. Paul Nitze argued that, “what Chip appears to object to is an attempt to analyze Soviet intentions beyond these very broad generalizations.” He added: “surely the State Department has the obligation to give somewhat more precise guidelines for dealing with the problems confronting the United States government?”⁹⁴

Irony aside, Nitze’s initial concern soon gave way to genuine alarm, however, as he became more and more concerned that any re-evaluation of American policy, along the lines Bohlen was contemplating, would undermine the military defense build-up he had worked so hard to achieve.⁹⁵ He need not have worried; Bohlen was not interested in the defense expenditures, which he believed were essentially on target.⁹⁶ Rather, his concerns dealt with what he perceived to be the erroneous assumptions underpinning America’s ability to wage Cold War on the Soviets. In the end, this too troubled Nitze. Despite the hard line he had taken with the PSB on its strategy paper, the Director of the Policy Planning Staff was not ready to completely abandon covert operations designed to liberate Eastern Europe.

Although in NSC 68, Nitze had presented US policy in terms of a triad of objectives that took into consideration all contingencies, including containment, liberation, Titoism and rollback, he had never clarified how these ideas would fit together. In the summer of 1952, he finally did. He argued that American policy consisted of a hierarchy of objectives,⁹⁷ and, he insisted, “as the free world develops, opportunity will arise for inducing or compelling a retraction of Soviet power, not, of course, without risk, but at acceptable risk.”⁹⁸ However, the sticking point for Nitze was that certain conditions on the ground had to be met before the transition from one stage to the next could take place.⁹⁹ Where he differed from Bohlen, was that he wanted the NSC papers to incorporate language that allowed for such a transition, while at the same time conceding, no doubt

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much to Dulles’ dismay, that at present the United States simply did not have the capabilities to effect serious change in Eastern Europe. As he put it, he was in favor of the CIA “doing things” and taking certain risks behind the Iron Curtain, but only if they could produce results with limited means.¹⁰⁰

Unfortunately, the subtle nuances in his thinking had never been spelt out in terms of operational directives. As a result, those charged with executing Cold War operations had read NSC 68 very differently. In contrast to Nitze, who now envisioned US policy being guided by a strategic hierarchy, OPC/CIA believed that American objectives should be pursued in unison. From their perspective, although the ultimate aim of American policy had always been to prevent communist aggression, their job was “to weaken the Stalinist regime, from within.” This meant that the operations personnel believed that, while “the objective of effectively impeding further Soviet expansion was a prelude to the covert offensive against the Stalinist regime itself … in so far as practicable, the two objectives must be pursued concurrently.”¹⁰¹ Arguably, their reading of NSC 68 was well within the parameters of American policy. In 1950, Nitze had written that US objectives should be to “foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system,” adding that “a change toward which the frustration of the design is the first and perhaps most important step.”¹⁰² It was this logic that led to the execution of overly optimistic and poorly planned paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe, designed to overthrow the satellite governments. And it was this loophole that Bohlen addressed in NSC 135.

When the first draft of NSC 135 appeared in July 1952, Nitze immediately voiced a number of objections. Seizing on what he believed to be a significant backtracking from the policy outlined in NSC 68, he protested that not only did the document underestimate the risks the United States faced, set down “inadequate” political and strategic goals, give “inadequate, unclear or mistaken guidance to those who must prepare specific national security programs,” but it also “effectively wrote off any chance of effectively challenging the Soviet system either through political action or containment.”¹⁰³ In other words, he declared that the document suggested that the United States could “neither rollback Soviet power nor hope that successful containment of Soviet power will produce any significant changes in the Soviet system.” “Our maximum actual objective,” he complained “becomes merely to deter general war and the undertaking of local aggression for an infinite period of time – probably permanently.”¹⁰⁴

It is important to note that many of Nitze’s criticisms of NSC 135 were founded on the same logic that John Foster Dulles had used, to sell “liberation.” Both men believed that a strategy of “containment” was designed to do nothing more than maintain the status quo. Neither man would ever be satisfied with this type of passive and reactive approach. Where Nitze and Dulles appeared to differ in 1952, however, was that Nitze was less willing to consider a mandate for the rolling back of Soviet power. Dulles was still a year away from reaching this conclusion. The irony of the situation was of course, that there had never been a policy of “containment” as Dulles and Nitze envisioned it. Nor did Dulles’ policy of “liberation” differ substantially for the strategy Nitze wanted to pursue.

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The final draft of NSC 135 was completed on 25 September 1952; it indicated that Bohlen was successful in his campaign to water down some of the excessive assumptions implicit in NSC 68. Although American objectives remained the same in both papers, a number of important caveats were added.¹⁰⁵ Specifically, NSC 135/3 stated:

When operations can be conducted on terms which may result in a relative decrease in Soviet power without involving unacceptable risks, the United States should pursue and as practicable intensify positive political, economic, propaganda and paramilitary operations against the Soviet orbit, particularly those operations designed to weaken the Kremlin’s control over the satellites. However, we should not overestimate the effectiveness of the activities we can pursue within the Soviet orbit, and should proceed with caution and careful weighing of the risk of pressing upon what the Kremlin probably regards as its vital interests.¹⁰⁶

For the first time since the National Security Council began formulating American Cold War objectives, it appeared to be conceding that Eastern Europe was a vital interest of the Soviet government. Implicit in this assumption was the recognition that the United States could not challenge Soviet vital interests without unduly risking war. This represented a significant shift in thinking from NSC 68, which had argued that the Truman Administration should take “dynamic steps to reduce the power and influence of the Kremlin,” both inside Russia and in other areas under its control.¹⁰⁷ Moreover, in case the subtleties of Bohlen’s approach were lost on the psychological warriors, the document insisted – no doubt in an attempt to address the Republican belief that covert operations were the “magic pill that would end the Cold War without conflict” – that “it should be recognized that measures of these types alone, however vigorously pursued against the Soviet orbit, cannot be counted on to drastically reduce” the Soviet threat.¹⁰⁸

Although historians have only recently begun to emphasize the importance of these subtle changes in language,¹⁰⁹ the significance of NSC 135/2 was readily understood at the time.¹¹⁰ For example, on reading the final draft of the document, the Policy Planning Staff conceded that it was clearly an effort to “restrain the hot heads,” who had been controlling the process since the release of NSC 68.¹¹¹ Their conclusions were reinforced in 1954, when the Small Committee proclaimed that NSC 135/2 was much more “pessimistic” and restrictive than NSC 68/2. It “no longer viewed as particularly possible or feasible the development of [a] political and psychological offensive to roll back the power of the Soviet Union which had been implicit in NSC 68/2.”¹¹²

This strategic retrenchment was eventually re-affirmed by NSC 141. The same month as the NSC signed-off on NSC 135, Truman directed the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Director of the Mutual Security Agency to examine whether American resources under existing programs were sufficient for waging a protracted struggle. The final draft of the report was submitted on

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19 January 1953, Truman’s last day in office. It underscored the conclusions in NSC 135/3 by arguing that, “the capability of the United States and other free nations to conduct covert operations against the Soviet regime is, and will continue to be limited.”¹¹³ Thus, in his final months in office, Harry Truman oversaw a subtle, albeit important, shift from the positions outlined in NSC 20/4 and NSC 68. These strategic shifts underscored a growing disillusionment among senior policymakers with aggressive covert operations, designed to rollback Soviet power and liberate Eastern Europe. Yet, despite the significant changes embodied in NSC 135/3, a number of questions remained: specifically, to what end should covert operations now be directed? Moreover, it remained unclear whether these modifications at the policy level would be transferred into sufficient strategic guidance for the psychological warriors; and what effect, if any, they would have on ongoing covert operations?

Although the annex on political warfare in NSC 135 remains classified, the annex on psychological operations does offer some interesting insights into this question. Indeed, it suggests that this shift in policy was reinforced by additional strategic guidance. For example, in Annex 6 of NSC 135/3, it was argued that, since the United States was not making significant progress in the psychological field toward the objectives of retraction and reduction of Soviet power as laid out in NSC 20/4 and that the “short term prospects for an improvement in this area are negligible,” American Cold War strategy, the report suggested, should concentrate on building up resources and capabilities in the western world.¹¹⁴ This represented a reversal from Annex 5 in NSC 68/3 which had argued that the “hopes for the ultimate liberation [of the Soviet and Satellite peoples should be] nourished [one line deleted] … while refraining from premature action.”¹¹⁵

None of this was, however, enough to affect ongoing covert operations. According to the Small Committee, NSC 135 “lacked that definitive statement of guidance, or concept, which might clearly determine where the emphasis, priorities and choices between contradictory approaches lay.”¹¹⁶ From their standpoint, NSC 135 was plagued by many of the same problems which characterized previous NSC policy papers. It simply did not spell out, with sufficient clarity, American strategic priorities in Eastern Europe. Therefore, the available evidence indicates that despite the subtle transformation in NSC policy, in terms of the day-to-day execution of covert operations, very little changed. The paramilitary campaign in Albania, for example, continued until 1954.

That said, there was also a powerful force at work within the CIA itself which would reinforce many of the conclusions underpinning NSC 135. Although during 1951 and 1952, Bedell Smith continued to do everything he could think of, to slow the growth of paramilitary operations in Eastern Europe – including vetoing planned operations, setting up the “Murder Board” and putting a freeze on the recruitment and training programs until more specific guidance was forth-coming – his efforts had, on the whole, been largely unsuccessful.¹¹⁷ In October 1952, however, he finally received some help from an unexpected source. On leaving his position at OPC, Franklin Lindsay, Wisner’s deputy, submitted a memorandum to Allen Dulles in which he argued that the Soviet security appar-

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atus “has made [it] virtually impossible” to mount, either an “organized clandestine resistance capability” or successful guerrilla warfare operations in the foreseeable future.¹¹⁸ Thus, he concluded that the United States should abandon its old techniques in this theatre. He specifically singled out paramilitary operations, which he argued were both “inadequate and ineffective.” Instead, Lindsay recommended that the government stop debating national policy and begin concentrating on developing new instruments to disrupt the Soviet system.¹¹⁹ He offered a number of suggestions including long-term operations designed to burden the Soviet security system through technical sabotage, disruption and manipulation.¹²⁰ Although to this day, it remains unclear what effect Lindsay’s memorandum had on ongoing operations, it suggests that the top brass within the CIA was also divided over the merits of these campaigns.

Moreover, the story does not end here; indeed, according to Burton Hersh and Peter Grose, the following year, in the spring of 1953, Lindsay persuaded Allen Dulles, now Director of Central Intelligence, to fund what Richard Bissell called “a no-holds barred study of techniques, procedures that could be used to roll-back communists in Europe.”¹²¹ Unfortunately, the so-called “Lindsay Memorandum” has been shrouded in mystery; the Central Intelligence Agency has been unable to locate the document in question.¹²² Historians are therefore forced to rely on accounts provided by Hersh and Grose. In the report Lindsay is said to have argued, “that there was not any collection of gimmicks that you could use” to rollback Soviet power from Eastern Europe. According to Bissell, when Lindsay presented his findings to the new DCI, it looked as if Dulles would have a heart attack. Clearly disturbed by Lindsay’s argument, Allen Dulles apparently spent the whole day going over his report, continuously voicing his concerns over its thesis. Noting his frustration, he lamented that you simply could not say things like that.¹²³

Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner had invested their careers in their ability to effect change behind the Iron Curtain. They had overseen countless operations designed to rollback Soviet power and liberate Eastern Europe. Despite the dramatic failure of these campaigns they were still not ready to give up hope that something could be done to challenge Soviet hegemony in Europe. However, it was becoming more and more apparent that many of these campaigns would have to be abandoned. Although a ground swell was building in the administration to do just this, the subtle changes in policy, exhibited in NSC 135 and NSC 141, failed to address this question head on. As Truman prepared to hand the reins of power to incoming President Eisenhower the clash between the various strategic camps continued. The rhetoric of liberation had become too entrenched within policy circles. Moreover, it still thrived within the operational culture of OPC. Thus, the “War of the Potomac” continued.

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Conclusion

In late December 1952, psychological warfare expert C.D. Jackson, penned a memo to incoming President Dwight D. Eisenhower in which he argued that the four organizations presently conducting psychological operations were, “highly competitive – in fact to the point of sabotage.” He concluded that the real reason for this “fratricidal warfare” was not mutual dislike or empire building but, rather: the government did not have a plan for conducting the Cold War. “Therefore, each organization [was] desperately casting about trying to stake out some kind of claim.”¹ This, of course, was not a new criticism, having been first leveled by a number of high-ranking military officials in 1948. It was subsequently picked up and expanded upon by a majority of those within both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Psychological Strategy Board. In 1951 and 1952, the Truman Administration spent a great deal of time and effort trying to resolve this issue. Although significant steps were ultimately made to narrow the gap which existed between policy and operations – aspirations and capabilities – liberation and containment – the issue remained unresolved.

The failure of the Democrats to deal with this problem, in any substantive manner, ensured that the debate over American Cold War strategy would continue to hamper operational planning into the next administration. Indeed, only three months into office, Eisenhower and his advisors came face to face with the implications of the strategic divisions which still existed within the policymaking and operational circles. Although the United States had been working on a contingency plan to deal with Stalin’s death since 1948, when “the single most important event since V-J day” finally happened, the government was unprepared. As historian James Marchio has pointed out, the controversy which surrounded the American response to this event “illustrated just how much disagreement existed within the Eisenhower Administration over the goals of US foreign policy and the means by which to achieve them.”²

The question of how to frame the President’s response to the death of the Soviet leader, became a lightning rod for those who wanted to pursue a harder line in Eastern Europe and those who wanted to pursue a more moderate course. According to Emmett Hughes, Eisenhower’s speech writer, the central dilemma was: Should the president’s speech “be aimed at the Soviet satellites, to stir their insurrection? Or quite the contrary; [should] it be aimed over their heads, to

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Moscow, to bring the Soviets into a field of East/West negotiation?” As he pointed out, “it [could not] do both.”³ Unfortunately, the administration was divided on the question. Psychological Warriors C.D. Jackson, Walt Rostow and the Director of the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) Harold Stassen, all pressed for an aggressive speech that would highlight the President’s commitment to the peoples of Eastern Europe, however, the State Department intervened and urged caution.⁴ The heated debates which ensued, emphasized the need to resolve the dispute between the two strategic camps.

When Eisenhower finally delivered his speech on 16 April 1953, over a month after Stalin had passed away, it was a far cry from the rhetoric espoused by the PSB two years earlier. It was also, as columnist Drew Pearson pointed out at the time, a “backtracking from the pledge for a more dramatic foreign policy, made during the election.”⁵ Although Eisenhower had campaigned on a platform of “liberation,” when he entered office it was by no means clear how this rhetoric would affect his administration’s foreign policy. Nor was it clear what effect the strategic retrenchment outlined in NSC 135 would have.⁶ The controversy over how to respond to Stalin’s death forced the new President to put the question at the forefront of his agenda. Indeed, during his first year he undertook three initiatives designed to clarify US strategy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

First, Eisenhower ordered Robert Cutler to review both the Truman Administration’s foreign policy and the entire Cold War bureaucracy that had been put in place prior to 1953. In his final report Cutler outlined a three-pronged program designed to resolve the problems which he believed had co-opted the policy process under Truman. First, he suggested that the National Security Council be revamped and that the President take a more active role in the council’s day-to-day operations. In order to ensure that the council’s policy was carried out, Cutler also created a new advisory position; a “Special Assistant for National Security Affairs,” to help guide the president on matters of policy. Finally, he argued that Eisenhower should have access to a “Special Assistant for Cold War Affairs,” who would concern himself only with the implementation of Cold War policy.

Second, the President appointed a panel under the direction of William H. Jackson to examine the effectiveness of American psychological warfare programs since the end of World War II. Also involved in the project were C.D. Jackson, who had come over from his post as president of Radio Free Europe (RFE), and Wayne Jackson. Although the group clearly had a political agenda and many of its conclusions were foreordained, they quickly identified the crucial problem that had affected all areas of the Truman Administration’s strategic planning.⁷ The aptly titled “Jackson Committee” argued that one of the reasons behind the failure of American covert operations – defined therein as those operations “intended primarily to contribute to a reduction of Soviet capabilities and a retraction of Soviet power” – was that there existed a “serious gap between the formulation of general objectives and the detailed actions required to give effect to them.”⁸ The authors of the report believed that the Truman

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Administration had “failed to take adequate account of the capability factor by advocating courses of action which exceeded the present capabilities of the United States.” In the future, they suggested, a “distinction should be clearly made between policies and objectives with respect to which the United States can act, and those which we as a nation aspire.” They specifically singled out political warfare, in this regard, arguing that in this case “it is important that the US avoid confusion between its specific objectives and its aspirations.”⁹

To ensure that American objectives and capabilities remained in sync, the Jackson Committee maintained that the PSB should be abolished and a new Operations Coordination Board (OCB) set up in its place. According to Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, the OCB was designed to bridge the gap “between the formation of general objectives and the detailed action needed to give effect to them.”¹⁰ Thus, the mandate of the OCB was in many ways similar to the PSB, but unlike its predecessor, the OCB was not saddled with having to develop a Cold War strategy within the rubric of psychological warfare operations. Indeed, the committee made it clear that psychological strategy could not be separated from national strategy.

Not content with another bureaucratic shuffle, however, the President also took it upon himself to resolve the dispute between the dueling strategic visions that had peaked during the 1952 election campaign and continued to inform public discussion of Cold War policy. Indeed, during January of 1953, the strategic debate again took center stage after George Kennan publicly rejected American efforts to “promote the internal disintegration of Soviet power.” During a speech to a Scranton, Pennsylvania, Bar Association, Kennan argued that the United States should “be extremely careful of doing anything, at the government level that purports to affect the government system of another country, no matter what the provocation may seem.”¹¹

Not surprisingly, the speech was picked up by a number of journalists who argued that, in the speech, Kennan was explicitly criticizing John Foster Dulles’ policy.¹² Although Kennan later went on the record and stated that there was “very little difference, if any” between his policy of “containment” and Dulles policy of “liberation,” it was to no avail and the press continued to speculate on the rift between the so-called “father of containment” and the new Secretary of State.¹³ Given the brewing controversy, Dulles announced that he would discuss the issue with Kennan, and a few days later, both men announced publicly that the question was resolved.¹⁴ Yet Kennan was ultimately denied a post in the new administration.¹⁵

No doubt partially in response to the public debate between Kennan and Dulles, in June 1953, Eisenhower announced that the top minds in his administration, and a number of outside consultants, would take part in the “Solarium Exercise,” which was designed to address the question of American means and objectives in the Cold War. Those who participated represented a full spectrum of “strategic visions” that existed within the administration. Eisenhower began the exercise by breaking the participants down into three groups or teams. Task Force A was ordered to devise a strategy that would encourage the retraction of

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Soviet power, without “materially increasing the risk of general war.” Task Force B was instructed to develop a strategy that would hold the line and prevent any further Soviet expansion. The third group, Task Force C, was ordered to develop a strategy that would “produce a climate of victory encouraging to the free world.” In order to facilitate this objective, American strategy would include operations designed to “disturb and weaken … [and] create maximum disruption and resistance throughout the Soviet bloc.”

The traditional argument has always been that Task Force A embodied George Kennan’s strategic vision of “containment,” while Task Force C embodied the more aggressive visions of “liberation or rollback” advocated within OPC and the PSB. However, as historian Greg Mitrovich points out, the lines were not that clear cut or simple. He believes that Task Force A “went well beyond the traditional conceptions of containment.” Indeed, he suggests that the “objectives of Task Force A were consistent with the ‘rollback’ policies espoused by Dulles during the 1952 campaign and usually attributed to Task Force C.”¹⁶ Where Task Force A and C differed, Mitrovich argues, was that Task Force A did not believe that war was imminent or that “time was running out” for the United States. Thus, they saw no urgent need to immediately pursue overly aggressive covert operations designed to reduce Soviet power. They believed that Soviet strength would erode over time, without “aggressive” destabilization efforts. Conversely, Task Force C maintained that time was working against the United States and if the administration did not do something immediately to reduce the Soviet threat, the window of opportunity would close, leaving the United States forever on the defensive.¹⁷

In essence, the differences between Task Force A and C embodied the interpretive differences between George Kennan and Paul Nitze. Both Nitze and Kennan supported covert operations designed to encourage the retraction of Soviet power and influence. However, Nitze had pushed for aggressive operations designed to destabilize the Soviet system because he believed that conflict between the US and the USSR was inevitable. Conversely, Kennan had initiated covert operations against the Soviet Union because he believed it was not. The irony of the situation was that neither man had looked critically at the capabilities needed to effect change behind the Iron Curtain. The failure to deal with this question went to the heart of the strategic dilemma that plagued the Truman Administration.

As the Solarium Exercise got under way the full extent of the divisions between the various schools of thought was brought home in the third week of June 1953, when riots erupted in East Germany. The job of formulating a response was given to the PSB. One of its last projects, “PSB D-45: An Interim United States Psychological Plan for the Exploitation of Soviet Unrest in Satellite Europe,” was completed on 29 June 1953. It later became NSC 158.¹⁸ Taken in historical context, the plan signaled a reversal from the hard line position advocated in the second term of the Truman Administration.¹⁹ As historian Christian Ostermann has argued, the crisis in East Germany revealed that liberation “lacked any coherent operational basis for its implementation.”²⁰ Yet,

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despite the strategic retrenchment embodied in NSC 158, key questions continued to divide those involved in the Solarium Exercise. On 16 July 1953, the three groups met to present their ideas to the President; the goal was to collate the various strategies and to then formulate a coherent statement of national policy on which operations could be based. Not surprisingly, however, those participating in the exercise failed to reach an agreement.

For over six weeks, the National Security Council debated the merits of all three reports. Although some of the more aggressive campaigns called for by Task Force C were ultimately rejected, by October the two sides were still dead-locked. According to historian Scott Lucas, State was now advocating that covert operations concentrate on operations that would encourage the Soviets to negotiate with the United States, while the Department of Defense continued to push for the break-up of the Soviet bloc.²¹ In the end, the State Department emerged victorious. As C.D. Jackson later lamented, “the be-careful-or-you’ll-start World War III boys continued to come out from under the carpet of the State Department and managed to sabotage all the really bold proposals.”²²

In the last weeks of October, the administration released “NSC 162/2: Review of Basic National Security Policy.” This document provided the “policy umbrella” for “NSC 174: United States Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe,” released two months later. NSC 174 dealt directly with the satellites. Both policy papers refined American objectives toward Eastern Europe, and placed additional limitations on the types of covert operations that could be conducted.²³ Indeed, American objectives outlined in these two papers represented an important shift away from the blank check approach implicit in both NSC 20/4 and NSC 68/2. For example, although NSC 162/2 stated that United States policy was to “prevent Soviet aggression and to create and exploit troublesome problems for the USSR,” it added an important caveat. It read, the “measures to impose pressure on the Soviet bloc should take into account the desirability of creating conditions that will induce the Soviet leadership to be more receptive to negotiated settlements.”²⁴ Moreover, both documents put the primary emphasis on building the unity and strength of the western world, while at the same time keeping the door open for a negotiated settlement with the Soviets. The willingness to consider negotiation was a dramatic reversal from the early foreign policy of the Truman Administration. During Truman’s presidency American policymakers operated on the assumption that no permanent modus vivendi could evolve.

NSC 174 also stated that American objectives were to “encourage and assist the satellite peoples in resistance to their Soviet-dominated regimes, and maintain their hopes of eventual freedom from Soviet domination while avoiding incitement to premature revolt, [or] commitments on the nature and timing of any US action to bring about liberation.”²⁵ However, while the ultimate goal remained the “liberation” of the satellites, the report made it clear that the government was not willing to “take the extreme steps” that would be necessary to achieve this objective.²⁶ As one analyst concluded after reading a draft of NSC 174, “US actions directed against the Soviet bloc are automatically limited

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because they must be exercised within this framework.”²⁷ Within a year, the last paramilitary operation in Albania was completed, and to my knowledge, no further paramilitary campaigns were launched in Eastern Europe. As historian James Marchio has argued, “by the end of 1954, a combination of factors, including poor operation results,” prompted the Eisenhower Administration to revise its approach to Eastern Europe. He concluded that, thereafter, successive US governments stressed, “evolutionary rather than revolutionary change.”²⁸

In the end, however, evidence is mounting which suggests that Eisenhower was no more successful than his predecessor in addressing the underlying problem which characterized American strategic planning during this period. Indeed, despite the significant retrenchment embodied in NSC 162/2 and NSC 174, the gap between American aspirations and its capabilities remained. As the Small Committee concluded in 1954, as statements of national policy, these documents “appear to raise, even more than similar statements in preceding policies, certain basic questions.” For example, they asked, “does the United States really have any long-term or even short-term capability to bring about a reduction and retraction of Soviet power and influence. Or is this no longer a feasible objective?”²⁹ Moreover, Department of State historian Chris Tudda, has suggested that the Eisenhower Administration was never able to reconcile its rhetoric with its objectives. Instead, he suggests that its “rhetorical diplomacy” consistently “overwhelmed” its “confidential policy.” He believes that, although the Republicans ultimately rejected “liberation,” they continued to make “ambiguous and dangerous statements about Washington’s ‘responsibility’ to the captive peoples.”³⁰ The inability to address this fundamental issue suggests that Republican policymakers failed to resolve the same underlying tension in American strategic thinking that had haunted the Democrats. The central question is, why?

There is, of course, no easy answer to this question. Each postwar US government has had to address the gap between aspirations and capabilities, policy and operations, liberation and containment, in their own time and place: Truman and Eisenhower in Eastern Europe and China, John F. Kennedy in Cuba, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, Ronald Reagan in Lebanon, George Herbert Walker Bush in Iraq and William Clinton in Bosnia. And today, the problem is as relevant as it was fifty years ago. Although the Soviet Union is no longer considered a threat to American interests, US foreign policy is still plagued by the same type of competing strategic tendencies.³¹ Despite George W. Bush’s attempt to provide a grand strategy for waging the so-called “war on terror” in 2003, and again in 2005, his administration has failed to develop a coherent, unified or effective strategy to deal with the crisis.³² Indeed, the gap between aspirations and capabilities has actually widened during his tenure in office.³³ More importantly, many of the central tenets that underline Bush’s national security strategy are eerily reminiscent of the strategies in play during Harry Truman’s first years in office. During the late forties and early fifties there were a number of military leaders and psychological warriors who lobbied for unilateral action in Eastern Europe and a pre-emptive attack on the

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Soviet Union. There were also those who were contemptuous of international rules and obligations. Yet, their strategic vision was ultimately rejected as both reckless and foolhardy. When subsequent presidents embraced these themes, thousands of lives were lost and the ideals of freedom and democracy virtually disappeared in the countries targeted. Indeed, the only time in US history, when the gap between policy and operations actually narrowed, was when an American president recognized the limits of US power. As C.B. Marshall mused in February of 1953, developing a foreign policy is not about figuring out what a nation would like to do, but rather determining “what a nation is going to do.” It is not simply a matter of goals, he concluded, it “is a matter of matching capabilities and purposes in a carefully calculated and time-phased program, which keeps means and purposes in continual balance.”³⁴ Integral to achieving this balance is a clear statement of national policy which effectively reconciles aspirations with capabilities, and a coherent and unified strategy for pursuing one’s objectives. Without these fundamental elements in place, different strategic visions will continue to manifest themselves, and the operational branches of the American government will probably continue to pursue their own objectives irrespective of national policy considerations.

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Notes

Introduction

1 On the controversy, see Benjamin F. Ornate, “What Did Truman Say About the CIA?” Studies in Intelligence, CIA, vol. 17, (1973): pp. 9–11. File 59, Box 6, Record Group (RG) 265, National Archives College Park (NACP); Thomas Troy, “Truman on the CIA,” Studies in Intelligence, CIA, 21–38, File 69, Box 7, RG 265, NACP; Hayden Peake, “Harry S. Truman on CIA Covert Operations,” Studies in Intelligence, CIA, 31–41, File #89, Box 7, RG 263, NACP, (National Archives College Park).

2 Harry Truman, the Washington Post, 22 December 1963, reprinted in Peake, pp. 40–1.

3 Souers to Truman, 27 December 1963, and Truman to Souers, 17 January 1964, cited in Troy, “Truman on the CIA,” p. 38n.

4 Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994, pp. 529–31.

5 Dulles cited in Benjamin F. Onate, “What Did Truman Say About the CIA?” p. 10.

6 Dulles to General Counsel of CIA, 21 April 1964, reprinted in Onate, ibid. p. 10.

7 Of the limited information available on American covert operations in Eastern Europe, Albania is the most frequently discussed. See Michael Dravis, “Storming Fortress Albania: American Covert Operations in Microcosm, 1949–1954,” Intelligence and National Security (1992), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 425–42; Kim Philby, My Silent War, London: Grove Press, 1968; Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 393–400; and Christopher Peebles, Twilight Warriors, Covert Air Operations Against the USSR, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2005.

8 Nicholas Bethell, The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby’s Biggest Coup, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984.

9 I would like to thank Saimir Llodja for drawing my attention to Blair’s comments and for sending me the relevant article. “Tony Blair: Our Failure With Enver Hoxha,” Korrieri (The Messenger) 2 March 2004. All the Albanian newspaper sources came from Saimir Llodja, and his niece Llijana Llodja, a student at Dalhousie University, is responsible for their translations.

10 There are a number of memoirs available which discuss these operations. The best work is written by James McCargar under the pseudonym, Christopher Felix. See, Christopher Felix, A Short Course in The Secret War, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001. See also Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action, Boulder: Westview, 1977 and Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Toronto: Little Brown & Co., 1984.

11 The CIA still refuses to acknowledge that these campaigns took place. However, over the years a number of details have surfaced. Although the majority of studies dealing with American covert operations briefly allude to these campaigns, no definitive study

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is available to date. The best books available on these operations are: Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: America’s Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994; John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War Two, New York: William Morrow, 1986; John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. See also, Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995; and Trevor Barnes, “Democratic Deceptions: American Covert Operations in Post-War Europe,” in David Charters and Maurice Tugwell, Deception Operations: Studies in East/West Context, Washington: Brassey’s, 1989; Trevor Barnes, “The Secret Cold War: The CIA and American Foreign Policy in Europe, 1946–1956 – Part Two,” The Historical Journal, 1983, vol. 25, no. 2.

12 See George Morgan, “Comments on the Strategic Concept Paper,” Harry S. Truman Library (hereafter HSTL), RG Psychological Strategy Board, (hereafter PSB) File 26; Robin Winks, 413 and Stephen E. Ambrose and Richard Immerman, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 237–40.

13 Prados, op. cit., p. 60.

14 James McCargar, who worked closely with Philby on Operation Valuable, disagrees. He argues that while Philby probably informed Moscow of the operation he would not have been able to provide the type of details necessary, in a timely fashion that would have resulted in “the immediate capture” of those who entered the country. Instead, McCargar argues that it was Albania’s neighbors, the Greeks in particular, who had their own objectives, which blew the operation. See James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix) in Felix, op. cit., p. 286.

15 Donald Maclean was identified as the Soviet spy “Homer” by the Venona transcripts in 1951. Philby alerted both Maclean and Burgess of Maclean’s imminent arrest and Burgess decided, on his own initiative, to defect with Maclean. Because of his friendship with Burgess, Philby immediately came under suspicion. Herb Romerstein, The Venona Secrets: Exposing America’s Cold War Traitors, Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2001 and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

16 Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross, London: Trafalgar Square, 1994, pp. 187–8.

17 The Soviet Union first broadcast its suspicion of American involvement in March 1951. Daily Digest, March 27, 1951, HSTL, RG NSC/CIA, Box 4, File OCI.

18 Grose, op. cit., p. 165.

19 Rositzke, op. cit., pp. 36–7, 172; Grose, op. cit., p. 163. Yuri Modin, Philby’s handler in Washington, has also suggested that Philby’s intelligence was crucial to undermining these campaigns. On this subject, see Kim Philby, My Silent War, London: Grove Press, 1968; Verne W. Newton, The Cambridge Spies: The Untold Story of Maclean, Philby and Burgess in America, New York: Madison Books, 1990, p. 249; Philip Knightly, The Master Spy, London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, p. 161. Richard Aldrich, however, disagrees. He maintains that Philby arrived in Washington only a month before the first operational group went ashore, and therefore would not have been privy to all of the operational details. See Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2001, pp. 164–5.

20 Felix (aka James McCargar), p. 48.

21 Emphasis in original, Rositzke, op. cit., p. 17.

22 Hersh, op. cit., 237.

23 McCargar, op. cit., p. 148.

24 Grose, op. cit., p. 161.

25 On average, Albanian commandos were given two hours of parachute training a day

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for two weeks, “Testimony of paramilitary agent Muhamet Hoxha, Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Newspaper), 14 February 2005. On the other points see Dravis, op. cit., 425–42.

26 Abram N. Shulsky, Silent Warfare: Understanding the World of Intelligence, Washington: Potomac Books, 1991.

27 Although this is slowly beginning to change, the traditional monographs on this period have avoided the impact of these operations on American Cold War planning. See for example, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Post War American National Security Policy, London: Oxford University Press, 1992; Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992; David McCullough, Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992; and Arnold Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

28 I have borrowed the term “strategic visions” from Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II, The Roaring of the Cataract, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.

29 “NSC 20/4: United States Objectives Toward the Soviet Union,” HSTL, President’s Secretary’s Files (PSF) NSC Papers, Box 14, File # NSC 20/4.

30 George Herring, LBJ and the War in Vietnam: A Different Kind of War, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

31 Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, California: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 9, 19.

32 See Sarah-Jane Corke, “Bridging the Gap: Containment, Covert Action and the Search for the Missing Link in American Cold War Policy,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, December, 1997, vol. 20, no. 4, 45–65; Scott Lucas, “Campaigns of Truth,” International History Review, May, 1996 and Edward P. Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board and Its Predecessors; Foreign Policy Coordination, 1938–1953,” in Vincitorio L. Gaetano ed., Studies in Modern History, New York: St John’s Press, 1968.

33 Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA, Declassified Documents Reference System (hereafter DDRS) Dalhousie University, On-Line Data Base, Gale Group, Document # CK3100464467, p. 113.

34 It is interesting to note that it was the Reagan Administration and its DCI, William Casey who secured the building of the statue of William Donovan located in the lobby of the CIA’s headquarters. On the impact of the Donovan Tradition on Reagan’s foreign policy, see Thomas Powers, “The Under-Ground Entrepreneur,” Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda, New York: Review of Books, 2002.

35 Harry S. Truman, “The Psychological Strategy Board,” 4 April 1951, Policy Planning Staff Papers, Box 11a, Political and Psychological Warfare, 1950–1953, RG 59, NACP.

36 Anthony Leverio, the New York Times, May, 1952.

37 The extent to which the Eisenhower administration was successful on this front remains a matter of historical debate. For an example of those who believe that Eisenhower’s strategy was not coherent, see Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, New York: New York University Press, 1999, pp. 163–98. Conversely, for an example of those who believed that the Republican administration developed a coherent strategy, see Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 3, 52, 78. It is important to remember that this debate reflects the traditional historiography on the Eisenhower presidency. On this subject, see Stephen Rabe, “Eisenhower Revisionism: The Scholarly Debate,” in Michael J. Hogan, America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign

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Relations Since 1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 300–24; see also, Ronald Kreb, “Liberation a la Finland: Re-examining the Eisenhower Administration Objectives in Eastern Europe,” Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 20 September, 1997, vol. 20: Klaus Larres, “Eisenhower and the First Forty Days After Stalin’s Death: The Incompatibility of Détente and Political Warfare,” Diplomacy and Statecraft, July 1997, vol. 6; Valur Ingmudarsun, “Containing the Offensive: ‘The Chief of the Cold War and the Eisenhower Administration’s German Policy, “Center for the Study of the Presidency, http://cspresidency.org/lingimund.htm

James Marchio, “Resistance Potential and Rollback: US Intelligence and the Eisenhower Administration’s policies Toward Eastern Europe, 1953–1956,” Intelligence and National Security, April 1995, vol. 10; Christian Ostermann, The United States, the East Germany Uprising of 1953 and the Limits of Rollback, Cold War International History Project, Paper # 6, Washington: Cold War History Project, December, 1994.

38 Carnes Lord and Frank Barnet, eds, Political Warfare and Psychological Operations: Rethinking the US Approach, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1989, pp. XIII, 14. See also, Rositzke, op. cit., p. xiiv.

39 The Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA has played an important role in facilitating research in this area. In March 1994, they sponsored a conference on The Origin and Development of the CIA in the Administration of Harry S Truman. Later in the year they released an edited volume of CIA documents from the Truman Administration. The Origins and Development of the CIA in the Administration of Harry S. Truman, A Conference Report. Center for the Studies of Intelligence, Washington: CIA History Staff, 1994, pp. 80, 84. See Michael Warner ed., CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman. Washington: CIA History Staff, 1995. See also,: Glen W. La Fantasie, C. Thomas Thorne Jr., and David S. Paterson, eds, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Washington, US Government Printing Office, 1996. The second instalment of documents which was to be released in a microfiche collection were instead scanned and put on the internet. See http://www.foia.state.gov/(collection on the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency). However, the CIA has come under fire from the historical Advisory Committee for their unwillingness to declassify relevant materials dealing with American covert operations. In 1998, in a letter to Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, historian Warren Kimball, Chair of the Advisory Committee on Historical Documentation, argued that

if sufficient documentation cannot be declassified to provide the broad outlines of those covert activities, then any US government documentary compilation about our foreign policy in situations where such activities took place will be so incomplete and misleading as to constitute an official lie.

(emphasis added)

Warren Kimball to Madeline Albright, 3/6/1998, H-DIPLO, 4/20/98, http://h-net2.msu.edu/~diplo.HAC98.htm. See also, Rita M. Baker, “Annual Report of the Historical Advisory Committee,” H-DIPLO, 11, August 1997.

40 For an overall survey of intelligence studies, see Richard Aldrich, “‘Grow Your Own’: Cold War Intelligence and History Supermarkets,” Intelligence and National Security, Spring 2002, vol. 17, no. 1, 135–52: John Ferris, “Coming in from the Cold War: The Historiography of American Intelligence, 1945–1990,” in Michael J. Hogan ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, London: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 562–99.

41 Gaddis’ most significant work is Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Therein, he argued that there was no contradiction between the concepts of containment and liberation. See John Lewis

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Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Post War American National Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 47. As early as 1978, however, historian Eduard Mark challenged Gaddis for neglecting elements of “rollback” in Kennan’s thinking. Gaddis did eventually modify his thinking and argued that John Foster Dulles was not the first to think about liberation, as this had been implicit in Kennan’s work and quietly endorsed by Truman. See Eduard Mark, “The Question of Containment: A Reply to John Lewis Gaddis,” Foreign Affairs, 1978, vol. 56, no. 2 and John Lewis Gaddis, “Gaddis responds,” Foreign Affairs, 1978, vol. 56, no. 2.

42 After Eduard Mark, the next scholar to challenge the containment consensus was PhD student John Yurechko. His dissertation was completed in 1980. See John Yurechko, “From Containment to Counter-Offensive: Soviet Vulnerabilities and American Policy Planning, 1946–1953, PhD Dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, 1980. Ten years later, another scholar followed Yurecko’s lead. See James Marchio, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953–1959,” PhD Dissertation, American University, 1990, pp. 25, 33, 45, 49–50.

43 Roberto Menotti, Rapporteur’s Report, “George F. Kennan, the Cold War and the Future of American Foreign Policy,” Center for International Studies, School of International Relations, Santa Barbara: University of Southern California, 1997.

44 Walter Hixson was the first scholar of the Cold War generation to challenge the containment consensus and rename American strategy liberation/rollback, terms he used interchangeably. See Walter Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. See also, Scott Lucas, “Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board and American Ideology,” International History Review, May, 1996.

45 On “wedge strategy,” see Lees, Lorraine, Keeping Tito Afloat: The US, Yugoslavia and the Cold War, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. On the use of the term “preponderance of power, see Leffler, Melvyn, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, California: Stanford University Press, 1992.

46 The exception is Bruce Cumings, who I believe has written the best account of the debates over American strategy that occurred during these years. See Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Volume II, The Roaring of the Cataract, New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1990.

47 See Sarah-Jane Corke, “History, Historians and the Naming of American Cold War Strategy: A Postmodern Reflection on Strategic Thinking in the Truman Administration,” Intelligence and National Security, 2001, vol. 16, no. 3. My thinking on this question was mostly influenced by Bruce Cumings, “Revising Post-Revisionism or the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History, 1993 vol. 17, no. 4, 539–69.

48 In constructing this argument I have relied on the arguments made by a number of “postmodernist” scholars. I am especially indebted to Bruce Cumings, “Revising Postrevisionism, or the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History, 1993, vol. 17, no. 4. See also, Mark Poster, David Campbell and Keith Jenkins. See Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; Keith Jenkins, Why History: Ethics and Postmodernity, London: Routledge, 1999; and David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

49 Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: US Foreign Policy Since 1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. For a fuller discussion of Ninkovich’s views, see Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power: A History of the Domino Theory in the Twentieth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

50 Cumings, op. cit., p. 17.

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51 Robert Berkhofer Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse, Boston: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 49.

52 Here I am not only referring to the wars which are taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which thousands have lost their lives, but to the language wars that have engulfed our political culture since 11 September 2001. See as an example, President George W. Bush’s attempt to “slam” revisionist historians and histories. “Bush slams Iraq war ‘revisionism,’” BBC News, news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/Americas/4429000.stm> (accessed 11 November, 2005).

1

Dancing on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel

1 Arthur Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, p. 2.

2 Richard Dunlap, cited in Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 3.

3 I would like to thank Bob Domanski for alerting me to this. See www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/9/10.29.98/Nuremberg.html

4 Much of Donovan’s philosophy was given voice, in the spring of 1940, when Republican ideologue Henry Luce published his now famous essay, “The American Century” in Life Magazine. See Henry Luce, “The American Century,” in Michael Hogan, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy: US Foreign Relations in the American Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

5 See Anders Stephanson, “The Cold War as American Ideology,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory, London: Frank Cass, 2000, p. 86.

6 Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars: America’s Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, New York: New York Review of Books, 2002.

7 David Fogelsong, “The Roots of Liberation: American Images of Russia in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953,” The International History Review, March 1999, vol. 31, no. 1, 65.

8 Ibid., pp. 65, 69.

9 For an excellent discussion of the difference, see Norman and Mindy Cantor, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, New York: Perennial Books, 1998.

10 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Toronto: Little Brown & Co., 1984, p. 143.

11 Richard Harris Smith, OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency, Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1972, p. 3.

12 Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000, p. 16; and Powers, op. cit., p. 8.

13 Powers, op. cit., p. 7.

14 George Brown Tindall, America: A Narrative History, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1999, p. 1306.

15 Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency From Washington to Bush, New York: Harper Collins, 1995, p. 76.

16 Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, Declassified Documents Reference System, Dalhousie University, Document # CK3100464602.

17 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 27: See also, Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War, New York: William Morrow, 1997, pp. 18–19, 35–7; Waldo Heinrichs, “The United States Prepares for War,” George C. Chalou, (ed.), The Secrets War: The

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Office of Strategic Services in World War Two, Washington, DC: National Archives & Records Service, 1992, p. 10.

18 Although today, we know that fifth column activities were “virtually all fantasies,” in 1940 they were believed to have played an integral part in the speed with which Hitler was able to conquer France and the Low Countries. Roosevelt was determined not to have German subversive activities repeated on American soil, should the war extend across the Atlantic. Bradley Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Basic Books, 1983, p. 12.

19 Andrew, op. cit., p. 100.

20 Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA, Declassified Documents Reference System, (DDRS) Dalhousie University, Document Number CK 3100464601.

21 Burke, op. cit., pp. 7, 92, 156.

22 Darling, op. cit., p. 41; Bradley Smith, op. cit., pp. 215–17; and Thomas Troy, op. cit., p. 140.

23 Richard Harris Smith, The OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Intelligence Agency, Berkeley: University of California, 1972, p. 7.

24 Smith, ibid.

25 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” 21 December 1951. DDEL, RG White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Secretariat Series, Box 6, File #PSB, p. 6.

26 Ibid.

27 Arthur Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990, p. 9.

28 Lilly, op. cit., p. 4.

29 Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 61.

30 Lilly, op. cit., p. 4.

31 Robert Sherwood quoted in Richard Harris Smith, op. cit., p. 23.

32 Bradley F. Smith, op. cit., p. 70.

33 Breckinridge Long, quoted in Smith, ibid., p. 23.

34 Lilly, op. cit., p. 4.

35 Sherman Kent once characterized OSS morale operations as “dreadful buffoonery.” Sherman Kent, “Reflections of Some of the Problems With US Intelligence,” NACP, RG 263, File HS/HC 791; see also, Darling, op. cit., p. 41; Troy, op. cit., p. 140; and Smith, op. cit., p. 202.

36 David Bruce, “The National Intelligence Authority,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 1946, MLPL Allen Dulles Papers, Box 28, File COI 1941, See also, Allen Dulles, “Speech to the Erie Country Bar Association,” 4 April 1959, Buffalo, New York, MLPI, Allen Dulles Papers, Box 21, File Speeches, 7–8.

37 Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and Covert Action, Boulder: Westview Press, 1977, p. XVI.

38 Lilly, op. cit., p. 10.

39 Ibid.

40 JSPG 808/11 Psychological Warfare Organization Within the Armed Forces, NACP, RG 218, File Section 5.

41 SANNAC 304/15: Report of the Subcommittee for the Special Studies and Evaluation on Psychological Warfare, 13 July 1948, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File HS/HC 801; see also JSPG 808/11: Psychological Warfare Organization Within the Armed Forces, NACP, RG 218, File Section 5.

42 Bradley F. Smith, op. cit., pp. 218–19, 286.

43 Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2002, p. 40; see also, John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 71.

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44 According to historian Eduard Mark, during 1944 and 1945, the OSS spent more time in Romania than in any other country in Eastern Europe, during the whole of World War II. Eduard Mark, “The OSS in Romania, 1944–1945: An Intelligence Operation of the Early Cold War,” Intelligence and National Security, April 1994, vol. 9, no. 2, 320.

45 Ibid., p. 322; see also Ranelagh, op. cit., pp. 70–1.

46 See Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 61.

47 Ranelagh, op. cit., p. 71.

48 Thomas, op. cit., pp. 18–19.

49 Summary of field reports from Lt. Commander Frank Wisner, CIA, 5 April 1945, DDRS, Dalhousie University, http://www.galenet.com/servlet/SRC/Document#CK300299530

50 Arthur Schlesinger, in Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 23.

51 See Betty Abrahamsen Dessants, “Ambivalent Allies: OSS’s USSR Division, the Department of State and the Bureaucracy of Intelligence Analysis, 1941–1945,” Intelligence and National Security, October 1996, vol. 11, no. 4, 722.

52 On the origins of the CIA and the role of the Cold War in its creation, see Bradley Smith, “The American Road to Central Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, vol. 12, no. 1, 1–20; and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, “Why was the CIA Established in 1947?” Intelligence and National Security, January 1997, vol. 12, no. 1, 21–40.

53 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950.” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412.

54 Harry S. Truman to James Brynes, 20 September 1945, NACP, RG 263, File HS/HC 341.

55 On the history of the SSU, see Michael Warner, “The Strategic Services Unit: The War Department Declines an Enhanced Foreign Intelligence Capability,” Unpublished Paper, Society for Military History, 20 April 1996, Rosslyn, Virginia; Nelson MacPherson, “CIA Origins as Viewed From Within,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 10, no. 2, April 1995.

56 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412. 25.

57 David F. Rudgers, Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943–1947, Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000, p. 37.

58 Ibid., p. 38.

59 Michael Warner, “The Strategic Services Unit: The War Department Declines an Enhanced Foreign Intelligence Capability,” Unpublished Paper (A Presentation to the Society of Military History, Rosslyn, Virginia, 20 April 1996), p. 9.

60 Ibid., p. 10.

61 McCloy to Magruder, 26 September 1945, FRUS/IE, p. 236.

62 “Establishment of A Clandestine Collection Service For Foreign Intelligence,” NACP, RG 263, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 11, File #6.

63 See Hoover to Attorney General Clark, 6 September 1945, FRUSIE, p. 31.

64 Virginia Military Institute Year Book, 1909, Virginia Military Institute Archives. I would like to thank Nick Dauphinee for sending me these records.

65 John Magruder to Herbert Jacob, 24 April 1941, Virginia Military Institute Archives. I would like to thank Nick Dauphinee for sending me this document.

66 I would like to thank David Eaton for pointing this out to me.

67 “For Mr. Lyon State Department,” no date, CIA FOIA Request, http//:www.foia.gov/search

68 On Allen Dulles, see James Srodes, Allen Dulles, Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc, 2000; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allan Dulles, Massachusetts:

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University of Massachusetts Press, 1996; Leonard Mosely, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978.

69 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles, vol. I, p. 21, DDEL.

70 Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, New York, Houghton, Mifflin, 1994, p. 118. Dulles even co-authored a book in 1939 titled Can America Stay Neutral? His answer was, of course, a resounding no.

71 Ibid., pp. 145–7.

72 Allen Dulles, in Burton Hersh, The Old Boys; The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons 1992, p. 116.

73 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Boston: Little Brown, 1984, p. 155.

74 Helms, op. cit., p. 72.

75 Ibid. It is important to note that SSU’s budget was eventually reduced during the last few months of 1945. Memorandum From the Director of the Strategic Services Unit, Department of War, (Magruder) to Assistant Secretary of War, (McCloy) 25 October 1945, FRUS/EI, p. 243.

76 John Prados, The President’s Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War Two, New York: William Morrow, 1986, p. 18.

77 Nine were from Morale and three from SO, and they all went to SI. See Memorandum From the Director of the Strategic Services Unit, Department of War, (Magruder) to Assistant Secretary of War, (McCloy) 25 October 1945, FRUS/IE, p. 243.

78 Lilly, “Psychological Operations,” HSTL, RG PSB Box 15, File 091.412, p. 19. It is also important to note that the great majority of OSS records were transferred to the SSU for safe keeping at the end of the war. McDonald, op. cit., p. 87.

79 Memorandum for Major General S. Leroy, “Assets of the SSU for Peacetime Procurement,” 15 January 1946. NACP, RG 263, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 11, File #6.

80 To Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, Report of the Survey of the Strategic Services Unit under CIG Directive No. 1., NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File #3.

81 Capt. Thomas Cullen, Fortier Committee Report on SI, undated, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File # 3.

82 Memorandum for Major General S. Leroy Irwin, “Assets of the SSU For Peacetime Intelligence Procurement,” 15 January 1946, NACP, RG 263, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 11, File #6.

83 Memorandum for Major General S. Leroy Irwin, “Assets of the SSU For Peacetime Intelligence Procurement,” 15 January 1946, NACP, RG 263, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 11, File #6. See also, Samuel Klaus, Fortier Committee report on X-2 Branch, undated, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File #3.

84 Magruder to McCloy, 15 November 1945, FRUS/IE, 247; see also, Michael Dravis, “The Strategic Services Unit,” Unpublished paper presented at the SHAFR Conference (Washington 1997), p. 7.

85 Magruder to McCloy, 25 October 1945, FRUS/IE, 243; see also, Dravis, ibid., pp. 6–7.

86 Michael Warner, “Prolonged Suspense: The Fortier Board and the Transformation of the Office of Strategic Services,” The Journal of Intelligence History, vol. 2, no. 1, Summer 2002, 70.

87 According to Warner, the primary threat to the SSU during this period came from G-2 in the War Department. Warner, The Strategic Services Unit: The War Department Declines and Enhanced Foreign Intelligence Capability, p. 10; see also, Magruder to Patterson, 4 February 1946, FRUS/IE, p. 252.

88 Samuel Klaus, Fortier Committee report on X-2 Branch, undated, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File #3.

89 Fortier Committee, SSU, 17 February 1946, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File HS/HC 807; see also, Magruder to Secretary of War, “Request for the Determination of the Future Status of the SSU,” NACP, RG 263, Box 13, HS/HC 803.

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90 Central Intelligence Directive No. 1: Survey of the Activities of the Strategic Services Unit, 19 February 1946, FRUS/IE, pp. 267–8.

91 Lt. General William W. “Buffalo Bill” Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage, Michigan: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991, pp. 235–6.

92 Ibid., p. 237.

93 Ibid., p. 241.

94 Michael Warner, “Prolonged Suspense: The Fortier Board and the Transformation of the Office of Strategic Services,” The Journal of Intelligence History, Summer 2002, vol. 2, no. 1, 67. On the SSU’s role in the Greek Civil War, see Eduard Mark, “Greece,” h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu 13 September 1998. Lilly, DDEL, Volume III, 29–30. On the SSU’s role in India, see Richard Aldrich, “American Intelligence and the British Raja: The OSS, the SSU and India,” Intelligence and National Security, Spring 1998, vol. 13, no. 1, 132–65. According to the Fortier Committee Report there were approximately 27 SSU agents in Berlin and 190 in Germany as a whole. The report also alluded to the fact that the SSU had contacts with the Polish Resistance forces. See John Magruder to Robert Lovett, “Memo, Special Intelligence,” NACP, Box 263, Thomas Troy Papers; Fortier Committee, 27 February 1946, Box 13, HS/HC 807; see also, Assets of the SSU for Peacetime Intelligence Procurement,” NACP, RG 263, Box 13, HS/HC 803; Initial Outline Plan for World Coverage by the SSU,” ibid.

95 Quinn, op. cit., p. 253.

96 “Initial Outline Plan for World Coverage by the SSU,” NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File HS/HC 803: Fortier to Souers, 14 March 1946, FRUS/IE, p. 266; Wright, “Memo,” 11 July 1946, FRUS/IE, p. 282.

97 Although Quinn takes credit for setting up the division, in his memoirs, Harry Rositzke also takes credit for suggesting that SSU include a section to handle Soviet matters. See Rositzke, op. cit., p. 7.

98 Samuel Klaus, Fortier Committee report on X-2 Branch, undated, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File #3.

99 Rositzke, op. cit., p. 6.

100 Burton Hersh, op. cit., p. 178.

101 Ibid.

102 Helms, op. cit., p. 64.

103 Ibid., p. 70.

104 Ibid., pp. 413–15, 440–5.

105 Loch K. Johnson, “Spymaster Richard Helms: An Interview with the Former Director of Central Intelligence, Intelligence and National Security, Autumn 2003, vol. 18, no. 3, 26.

106 It is clear that that SSU did have a number of contacts within Eastern Europe and was in contact with underground resistance organizations and exile groups. See Aldrich, op. cit., p. 143.

107 Edward Lilly, “Psychological Operations,” op. cit., p. 22; and Major General S. Leroy Irwin, “Assets of the SSU for Peacetime Intelligence Procurement,” 15 January 1946, RG 23, Box13, File HS/HC 803.

108 For evidence supporting this point, see Office Memorandum, United States Government, Memorandum for the Record, 26, February 1952, CREST, NACP.

109 Anne Karalekas, “History of the Central Intelligence Agency,” in William Leary, The History of the CIA: History and Documents, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984, p. 18. As the Fortier Committee argued in 1946, the SSU functions “without any authoritative directive … Thus, there are no de jure operating functions … (however) de facto operations continue.” Fortier Committee to Souers, 14 March 1946, FRUS/IE, pp. 262–3.

110 Hersh, op. cit., p. 186.

111 Sydney Souers Interview, in Ralph E. Weber, ed., Spymasters: Ten CIA Officers in their Own Words, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

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112 Helms, op. cit., p. 79. On Vandenberg’s influence, see Charles R. Christensen, “An Assessment of General Hoyt S. Vandenberg as DCI,” Intelligence and National Security, October 1996, vol. 84, no. 4, 754–64.

113 Souers interview in Weber, op. cit., p. 5.

114 Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 14.

115 Darling, op. cit., p. 113.

116 Memo: Irwin (Interim Director of the SSU) to McCloy, 28 January 1946, FRUS/IE 250; Irwin, “Request for Determination of the SSU,” 4 February 1946, RG 263, Box 13, File HS/HC 803, Item #8.

117 Hersh, op. cit., p. 184.

118 Fortier Committee to Souers, 14 March 1946, FRUS/IE, p. 265.

119 To Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, Report of the Survey of the Strategic Services Unit under CIG Directive No. 1, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File #3.

120 The SSU wasn’t “officially” disbanded until 11 April 1947, and there are documents which still bear SSU designation as late as 1950. I would like to thank Nick Dauphinee for pointing this out to me. See Memorandum From the Director of the Strategic Services Unit (Quinn) to the Assistant Secretary of War (Petersen), 11 April 1947, FRUS/IE, p. 309.

121 See John Lewis Gaddis, The Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, p. 30.

122 See for example, Louis Halle, The Cold War as History, New York: Harper & Row, 1967, p. 63.

123 Central Intelligence Group Directive No. 1: Survey of the Activities of the Strategic Services Unit, February 1946. FRUS/IE, p. 268.

124 See Eduard Mark, “The War Scare of 1946 and its consequences,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1997, vol. 21, no. 3, 383–416.

125 Ibid.

126 Darling, p. 103.

127 Trevor Barnes, “Democratic Deception: American Covert Operations in Postwar Europe,” in David A. Charters and Maurice Tugwell, Deception Operations: Studies in the East-West Context, London: Elsevier, 1990, pp. 297–324; Barnes is also on the record, pointing to a memorandum by Vandenberg to Truman, in which he implies that the CIG was about to undertake some small scale covert operations. It is also worth noting that in Darling’s history, of the ten pages on this subject, over 80 lines were deleted for security reasons. See Darling, pp. 115–21. However, in the transcripts of Arthur Darling’s interview with Van Royen, Van Royen said that both Forrestal and Patterson took action to instigate covert operations in both the spring of 1946 and the fall of 1947. See Darling interview with Van Royen, 23 October 1953, RG 263, Box 12, File NN3–263–94–010.

128 On this topic, see Marc Lazar, “The Cold War Culture of the French and Italian Communist Parties,” Intelligence and National Security, Summer 2003, vol. 18, no. 2, 213–24.

129 Lilly, DDRS Document # CK3100148808, op. cit., p. 40.

130 Central Intelligence Group Memorandum for the President, 26 November 1946, HSTL, PSF, Intelligence File, Box 250, File PSF CIF, Memorandum 45–8.

131 See Darling interview with Van Royen, 23 October 1953, RG 263, Box 12, File NN3–263–94–010. See also, Lilly, DDRS CK3100148808, op. cit., p. 48n18.

132 Lilly, American Psychological Operations. HSTL, RG PSB, Box 22, File 091.412.

133 A number of undercover networks using American businesses were set up, Lilly, ibid.

134 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 139.

135 (Emphasis in original document). Fortier Committee, SSU, 17 February 1946, NACP, RG 263, Box 13, File HS/HC 807.

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136 “PSB Meeting Minutes,” HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File minutes.

137 Peter Grose, op. cit., p. 40; see also, Ranelagh, op. cit., p. 114 .

138 For the story of the POND, see Christopher Felix (James McCargar), A Short Course in the History of the Secret War, Landham: Madison Books, 2001, pp. 168n1–169.

139 Peter Grose, op. cit., p. 42.

140 Hersh, p. 177.

141 During the immediate postwar years the POND had one officer in each country where operations were underway. Eventually, the State Department took over the operation. From 1947 to 1951 the State Department continued to run it unbeknown to the CIA. In late 1950 or early 1951 they finally revealed its existence to the CIA. It was subsequently closed down. See McCargar, p. ix, 169n1.

142 McCargar, op. cit., pp. 160, 166.

143 Ibid., p. 177.

144 Ibid., p. 177.

145 Ibid., p. 221.

146 Ibid., pp. 190, 194.

2

A strategic monstrosity

1 See Interview with Sidney Souers, NACP, RG 263, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 11, File HS/HC 400.

2 See Thomas Etzold, “American Organization for National Security,” in Thomas Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 5.

3 JCS, SANACC 304/15, Review of SANACC Studies Pertaining to Psychological Warfare,” NACP, RG 218/JCS/Central Decimal File/48–50, Box 202, File Section 3. Shane McCarthy, Minutes of the SANNAC Subcommittee on Psychological Warfare, 17 February 1948, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

4 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, RG PSB, Box 15, File 091.412, p. 37.

5 The term ad hoc was highlighted SANACC 304/15: “Review of SANNAC Studies Pertaining to Psychological Warfare.” 28 July 1948, NACP, RG 218/JCS/Central Decimal File/48–50, Box 202, File Section 3.

6 JCS, SANACC 304/15, “Review of SANACC Studies Pertaining to Psychological Warfare,” NACP, RG 218/JCS/Central Decimal File/48–50, Box 202, File Section 3. Shane McCarthy, Minutes of the SANNAC Subcommittee on Psychological Warfare, 17 February 1948, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

7 Anne Karalekas, “History of the Central Intelligence Agency” in William Leary, The History of the CIA: History and Documents, Alabama: University of Alabama Press 1984, p. 33.

8 Shane McCarthy, Minutes of the SANNAC Subcommittee on Psychological Warfare, 17 February 1948, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

9 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995 p. 24.

10 Unfortunately, it is not clear whether Wisner served in this position on a full time position or whether he alternated with another member of the State Department.

11 Edward P. Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board and Its Predecessors; Foreign Policy Coordination, 1938–1953,” in Vincitorio L. Gaetano (ed.), Studies in Modern History, New York: St. John’s Press,1968, p. 358.

12 See Shane McCarthy, Minutes of the SANNAC Subcommittee on Psychological Warfare, 17 February 1948, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

13 Geir Lundestad, American Non-Policy Toward Eastern Europe, 1943–1947, Universalism in an Area Not of Essential Interest to the United States, Norway: Univer-

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sitetsforlaget, 1978; Lloyd Gardener, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993; John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, p. 197; Eduard Mark, “American Non-Policy Toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1946: An Alternative Explanation,” Journal of American History, September 1981, vol. 68, no. 2; Eduard Mark, “Charles E. Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe: A Memorandum of 18 October 1945,” Diplomatic History, Spring 1979, vol. 3, no. 2, 201–14.

14 For historiographical surveys on this topic, see in part, Anders Stephanson, “The United States,” in David Reynolds (ed.), The Origins of the Cold War in Europe: International Perspectives, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 36; and Howard K. Jones and Randall Woods, “Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative,” in Michael Hogan, ed., America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 241.

15 Melvyn Leffler, The Specter of Communism, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917–1953, New York: Hill and Wang, 1994, p. 47.

16 Ibid.

17 Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War, New York: Penguin Press, 1977, 1990, pp. 10–12.

18 John Campbell, Oral History, The Oral History Project, HSTL.

19 For the orthodox argument, see Robert J. Maddox, “Roosevelt and Stalin: The Final Days,” Continuity: A Journal of History, 1983, vol. 6, 113–22. For two contrasting post-revisionist arguments, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982; and Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace, The Origins of the Cold War, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. In a personal postscript to this story, John Melby, author of the China White paper, told me that immediately after FDR’s death a rumor began circulating the White House that the President was in the process of drafting a strong warning to Stalin over Soviet intransigence in Poland. However, to my knowledge such a memo has never been located. Interview, John Melby, University of Guelph, 24 June 1992.

20 Robert J. Maddox, “Roosevelt and Stalin: The Final Days,” Continuity: A Journal of History, 1983, vol. 6.

21 Roosevelt was notorious for his poor decision-making procedures. For one of the most recent discussions, see Warren Kimball, Forged in War: Roosevelt and Churchill and the Second World War, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1997, pp. 18–19, 35–7.

22 Yergin, op. cit., p. 11.

23 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Year of Decisions, Volume I, New York: Time Inc., 1956, pp. 80–2, 110.

24 John Campbell Interview, Oral History Project, HSTL, Oral Histories, pp. 57–8.

25 Geir Lundestad, op. cit., pp. 15, 34, 103.

26 Eduard Mark, “Charles Bohlen and the Acceptable Limits of Soviet Hegemony in Eastern Europe,” Diplomatic History, September 1981, vol. 3, no. 2, 207–9.

27 Robert Messer, “Paths Not Taken: The United States, the Department of State and Alternatives to Containment,” Diplomatic History, Fall 1979, vol. 1, 304.

28 Ibid., pp. 304–8. A fourth report written by the (Joint Intelligence Service) JIS reached similar conclusions. See Mark V. Kauppi, “Intelligence Assessments of Soviet Motivations: JIS 80 and Kennan’s Long Telegram,” Intelligence and National Security, October 1984, vol. 9, no. 4, 622. It is important to note that all of the conclusions developed in these reports were predicated on the notion of American strength and Soviet weakness. According to Leffler, during this period “the only conceivable adversary to the United States did not have the capacity to attack

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American territory and had no ability to inflict damage on the American economy.” Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 6.

29 Gaddis, The United States and Origins of the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972, p. 357.

30 David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy, London: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 159; The Counselor of the State Department (Cohen) to the Secretary of State, 2 February 1946, FRUS, 1946, vol. 6, p. 67; Representative to Bulgaria to Secretary of State, 4 February 1946, vol. 6, pp. 70–1.

31 Frank Costigliola, “Reading for Memory,” in Michael Hogan and Thomas Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 299.

32 For Kennan’s frame of mind during the drafting of the telegram, see George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1967, p. 292.

33 George Kennan, “The Long Telegram,” reprinted in Kennan, op. cit., pp. 558–9.

34 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1969, p. 151.

35 John Lewis Gaddis, The Origins of the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972; Louis Halle, The Cold War as History, New York: Harper & Row, 1967; Leffler, “A Preponderance of Power,” California: Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 108–9.

36 Walter Hixson, George Kennan; Cold War Iconoclast, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

37 US Ambassador to the Soviet Union (Smith) to Secretary of State, 31 May 1946, FRUS 1946, vol. 6, p. 758.

38 See for example, Comments by Bidault, Memo from George Caffrey, American Ambassador to France, HSTL, PSF, Box 186, File – Foreign Affairs.

39 Joseph Sircusa, “Will the real author of Containment Please Stand Up? The Strange Case of George Kennan and Frank Roberts,” SHAFR Newsletter, September 1991, vol. 22, no. 3, 1–27.

40 “Memorandum by the Acting Department of State member Matthews to the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee,” Washington, 29 April 1946, FRUS 1946, vol. 1, p. 1169.

41 See Richard Pfau, “Containment in Iran, 1946: The Shift to an Active Policy,” Diplomatic History, Fall 1997, vol. 1, no. 4.

42 Secretary of State to Ambassador for Iran, 2 January 1946, FRUS 1946, vol. 7, p. 292; Memorandum of Conversation, Under Secretary of State (Acheson) 3 January 1945, FRUS, 1946, vol. 7, p. 295.

43 Vice Council of Tabris (Rossow) to Secretary of State, 5 March 1946, FRUS 1946, vol. 7, p. 340; Vice Council of Tabris (Rossow) to Secretary of State, 6 March 1946, vol. 7, pp. 342, 344.

44 Secretary of War, Robert Paterson to President Truman, 27 July 1946, HSTL, Clark Clifford papers, Box 16, File #5.

45 Pfau, op. cit., p. 364.

46 Memorandum of Conversation, Director of Near Eastern Affairs, (Henderson) 4 January 1946, FRUS 1946, vol. 7, p. 296.

47 Harry S. Truman Diary, 1947, 6 January 1946. www.trumanlibrary.org/diary/page5/htm

48 Clark Clifford, Council to the President: A Memoir, New York: Random House, 1991, p. 124.

49 Clifford Report, reprinted in Arthur Krock. Arthur Krock, Memoirs: 60 Years on the Firing Line, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968, p. 482. Clifford tells us that he and George Elsey later joked, that had their report been circulated, historians would have referred to American Cold War policy as one of restrainment. Clifford, ibid., p. 125.

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50 For the full story, see Clark Clifford, p. 129.

51 Truman, op. cit., p. 185.

52 J. Samuel Walker, Henry A Wallace and American Foreign Policy, New York: Greenwood Press, 1976, p. 92.

53 Ibid., p. 170.

54 Ibid., pp. 137, 143.

55 The letter was subsequently released to the press and reprinted in The New Republic. Henry A. Wallace, “The American Double Standard,” in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., The Origins of the Cold War, New York: D.C. Heath and Co., 1974, p. 39.

56 There is a great deal of controversy over whether the President read the speech. In his memoirs he denies doing so. However, both Wallace’s own diary and his remarks to colleagues suggest otherwise. See Walker, p. 63n3.

57 Irwin Ross, The Loneliest Campaign, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1968, p. 15.

58 Presidential Statement, 20 September 1946, Henry A. Wallace Papers, HSTL. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/1948campaign/large/docs/wallace/cam58–1.htm

59 Deborah Welch Larson, The Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985, p. 301.

60 James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix), A Short Course in The Secret War, Lanham: Madison Books, 2001, pp. 190–4.

61 Ibid., pp. 198–9.

62 Ibid., p. 199.

63 Eventually he was told to get twenty-five people out of the country, ten of whom were to be leading political figures and the rest could be of McCargar’s choosing. Ibid., pp. 210–12.

64 Grose, Operation Rollback, America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 44.

65 James Reston, “Must it be Their Necks or Ours?” The New York Times, 16 March 1947, p. 1.

66 Memorandum by Under Secretary of State (Acheson) to Secretary of State, 21 February 1947, FRUS, 1947, vol. 5, p. 30.

67 George Elsey to Clark Clifford, HSTL, George Elsey Papers, Box 17, File # Truman Doctrine.

68 Although he did not mention the Soviet Union by name, his references to the Yalta agreements and to Eastern Europe made it very clear to whom the president was referring. Harry S Truman, “The Truman Doctrine,” in Thomas G Paterson, ed., Containment and the Cold War, American Foreign Policy Since 1945, Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1973, pp. 15–16.

69 See “Truman Acts to Save Nation From Red Rule,” New York Times, 13 March 1947; Felix Belair Jr., “New Policy Set Up: President’s Blunt Plea to Combat ‘operation’ as World Peril,” The New York Times, 13 March 1947; John Gaddis believes that the Truman Doctrine was designed to be limited. John Lewis Gaddis, “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point,” Foreign Affairs, January 1974; Richard J. Barnet, “The Misconceptions of the Truman Doctrine,” in Thomas Paterson, The Origins of the Cold War, Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company, 1970, pp. 145–67.

70 On attempts by policy-makers to limit the speech’s implications, see Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, op. cit., p. 73.

71 McCargar, op. cit., p. 190.

72 See for example, Freda Kirchwey, “Manifest Destiny, 1947,” The Nation, 22 March 1947, pp. 317–19. For press accounts of how the speech was received, see “Editorial Reaction to Current Issues,” 18 March–22 April 1947. HSTL, PSF, Box 180. For an alternative perspective, see John Lewis Gaddis, “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning point,” Foreign Affairs, January 1974, p. 386.

73 “Truman Acts to Save Nations From Red Rule,” the New York Times, 13 March

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1947. See also, Felix Belair Jr., “New Policy Set Up: President’s Blunt Plea to Combat ‘Coercion’ as World Peril,” the New York Times, 13 March 1947.

74 Freda Kirchwey, “Manifest Destiny, 1947,” The Nation, 22 March 1947, pp. 317–19.

75 Joseph Barber, The Containment of Soviet Expansion: A Report on the Views of Leading Citizens in Twenty-Four Cities, Council on Foreign Relations, 6 April 1951, pp. 7, 14, 21.

76 See for example, David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of U.S. Foreign Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 150; Leffler, op. cit., p. 186; and Lundestad, op. cit., p. 408.

77 Walter Hixson, George F. Kennan, Cold War Iconoclast, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 56.

78 Allen Dulles, Speech to the Annual Meeting of the Associate Alumni at Brown University, “Foreign Relations: The Story Behind Our Russian Policy,” Newsweek, 27 July 1947, MLPU Allen Dulles Papers, Box 31.

79 See Joseph M. Jones, Fifteen Weeks, New York: The Viking Press, 1955.

80 Joint Strategic Survey Committee, United States Assistance to Other Countries from the Standpoint of National Security,” 29 April 1947, FRUS 1947, vol. 1, p. 749.

81 Robert Garson, “The Roles of East Europe in American Containment Policy,” The Journal of American Studies, 1979, vol. 13, 81.

82 See Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; and Alan S. Milward, “Was the Marshal Plan Necessary,” Diplomatic History, Spring 1989, vol. 13, no. 2, for the revisionist perspective. For the orthodox perspective, see Joseph S. Jones, Fifteen Weeks, New York: Viking, 1955; for a corporatist perspective, see Michael J. Hogan, The Marshal Plan: America, Britain and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

83 Kennan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 293.

84 Leffler, Preponderance of Power, op. cit., pp. 179–80.

85 George Kennan, in David Mayers, “Containment and the Primacy of Diplomacy,” International Security, Summer 1986, vol. 11, 145.

86 This was especially true of the early histories of the Cold War, which concentrated on covert operations. On the whole, these histories rejected “liberation and rollback” and instead labeled American policy containment. See for example, Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action, Boulder: Westview, 1977, p. xiii; John Prados, President’s Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II, New York: William Morrow, 1986, p. 15; Ray Cline, Secrets, Spies and Scholars, Washington: Special Learning Group, 1986, p. 118; Leonard Mosely, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network, New York: Dell Publishing, 1979, p. 381; and John Ranelagh, The Agency, The Rise and Decline of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 130.

87 For a realist, revisionist and post-revisionist account, see the following: Louis Halle, The Cold War as History, New York: Harper, 1967, p. 107; Walter Lefeber, America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–1984, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 63–4; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978, pp. 235, 323. For a summary of these schools of thought, see both: John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1983, vol. 12, no. 2; and Bruce Cumings, “Revising Postrevisionism or the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History, 1993, vol. 17, no. 4, 539–69.

88 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 423.

89 Given the debate that emerged over Cumings’ use of the word “gatekeeper,” to

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describe Gaddis’ role in perpetuating the post-revisionist argument, I feel I must provide a definition of what I mean by “godfather.” In this case I am not referring to a character made famous by Mario Puzo, but rather one who serves as a sponsor, in this case, for a particular idea or concept. On this point, see Karin Winkler, “Scholars Re-Fight the Cold War,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 2, Spring, 1994; Michael Hogan, “Introduction,” America and the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 9.

90 John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History, New York: Penguin, 2006.

91 Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. viii, xx.

92 Ibid., pp. vii, xx, 21, 34.

93 John Lewis Gaddis, “The Objectives of Containment,” in The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Provocations, Reconsiderations, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 28, 39, 42.

94 See Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 34, 47, 67; and Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 37, 83.

95 George Kennan, “Address to the Council on Foreign Relations, 15 February 1994,” in Walter Hixson, “Reassessing Kennan After the Fall of the Soviet Union: The Vindication of X?” The Historian, Summer 1997, vol. 59, 851.

96 Ironically, Gaddis concedes the dangers inherent in this type of all-encompassing approach. In 1978, four years before Strategies of Containment appeared, he wrote,

one of the characteristics most firmly rooted in the human mind is the desire to render the complex simple. Intellectual lassitude, the inexorable pressures of time, the belief that simplicity facilitates communication – these incline … [the historian] … toward reductionism.

Gaddis, Containment: Documents, 25. He addressed this issue again in 1982, when he introduced his readers to the lumper/splitter dichotomy. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, op. cit., p. viii.

97 Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, pp. 23–4. See also, David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

98 To begin to understand the evolution in Gaddis’ thinking, see the following: John Lewis Gaddis, “The Emerging Post Revisionist Synthesis,” Diplomatic History, Summer 1983, vol. 7, 171–90; John Lewis Gaddis, “The Tragedy of Cold War History,” Diplomatic History, Winter 1993, vol. 17, 1–16; and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

99 The first scholars to do so were Eduard Mark? in 1978, and John Yurenchko in 1980. See Eduard Mark, “A Question of Containment: A Reply to John Lewis Gaddis,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 56, no. 2, and John Yurechko, “From Containment to Counter-Offensive: Soviet Vulnerabilities and American Policy Planning, 1946–1953, PhD Dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, 1980.

100 Barton Bernstein, “Containment,” in Alexander DeConde, Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, New York: Macmillan, 1978.

101 Kennan used the word containment (to refer to the Soviet Union) five times in his article. George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” reprinted Paterson, Containment and the Cold War, op. cit., pp. 27–8, 32.

102 Kennan, ibid., p. 89. It must be noted that Kennan failed to elaborate on how the US would go about encouraging the break-up or mellowing of Soviet power. In later life

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he acknowledged that one of the serious deficiencies of his analysis was his failure to elaborate on the situation in Eastern Europe. Kennan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 358.

103 Beatrice Heuser, Western Containment Polices and the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 9; see also, Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 30.

104 “Stop Russian Policy for U.S.: Plan to Avoid War, Bloc Expansion, Wait for BreakUp in Kremlin, National Week, 25 July 1947, 17.

105 Ernest Lindley, “The Article by ‘X,’” The Washington Post, 11 July 1947.

106 “Foreign Relations: The Story Behind Our Russian Policy,” Newsweek, 21 July 1947; Arthur Krock, in The Nation: a Guide to Official Thinking About Russia, The New York Times, 7 July 1947. This same view was also held by the National Week. See for example, “Stop Russian Policy for U.S.: Plan to Avoid War, Bloc Expansion, Wait for Break-Up in Kremlin, National Week, 25 July 1947, 17.

107 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy, New York: Harper, 1947, pp. 17–18.

108 Ibid., p. 29.

109 Ibid., p. 38.

110 See for example, Joseph M. Jones to Walter Lippmann, 7 May 1947, papers of Joseph Jones, Box 1, HSTL. See George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1967, p. 361.

111 He went on to note that the US did not need any “aggressive strategic plans” as Russian withdrawal from Eastern Europe will occur on their terms. Russia, he concluded, will defeat itself. George Kennan to Walter Lippmann, George F. Kennan Papers, Mudd Library, Princeton, New Jersey.

112 Later in his life, Kennan stressed that neither liberation nor rollback were part of his thinking when he drafted the X Article. See for example, George Kennan to Gar Alperovitz, 11 January 1965. George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Box 32 Supplementary Matters, Clippings, 1947–1949, File 2B-outgoing letters; Kennan to David Howowitz, 17 January 1965, George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Correspondence Files of Outgoing Letters, Box 31, File 2-B, Outgoing Letters. He also made this point in a letter to Walter Lippmann in 1948, and to Norman Graebner in 1959. See George Kennan to Walter Lippmann, 6 April 1948 George F. Kennan papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Box 17, Writings and Publications; and Kennan to Norman Graebner, 16 May 1959, Kennan Papers, Box 32, Supplementary Materials, File 2-B, 1959, Outgoing Letters.

113 In a letter to Mr. Brant-Peltier, dated 28 January 1957, Kennan stated that talk of liberation, as an alternative to containment, was “simply childish.” Kennan to Mr. Brant-Peltier, 28 January 1957, Kennan Papers, Box 32, Supplementary Matters, File 2-B, Outgoing Letters.

114 George Kennan to Joseph G. Whelan, 3 July 1949, Kennan Papers, Box 32, Supplementary Matters, File 2-B, Outgoing Letters; and Kennan to Mr. Brant-Peltier, 28 January 1957, Kennan Papers, Box 32, ML.

115 Transcript on Press Statement on Assessment of Foreign Policy, 23 June 1950. George Kennan Papers, Writing and Publications, January 1950 to 27 October 1950, File 1-D-9, Mudd Library, Princeton University.

116 George Kennan, Transcript of Proceedings, George Kennan on Assessments of Foreign Policy. Friday, 23 June 1950. Kennan Papers, Writings and Publications, January 1950 to October 1957. Mudd Library, Princeton University.

117 Walter Lippmann, op. cit., p. 18.

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3

The inauguration of political warfare

1 Amy Zegart, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC, California: Stanford University Press, 1999, p. 186.

2 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” 21 December 1951, Eisenhower Library (hereafter EL), RG White House Office, NSC Staff Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Secretariat Series, Box 6, File #PSB.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 See Shane McCartney, Minutes of the SANNAC subcommittee Meeting, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

6 William Z. Slany, “Introduction to Political Warfare,” FRUS/IE, 616; and Memorandum from the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Souers) to Secretary of Defense (Forrestal), 24 October 1947, FRUS/IE. 627.

7 Ironically, Kennan’s role in this process was, for the most part, hidden until recently. Although a number of books have been written on his life, for the most part, the historiography on Kennan has not dealt with his role in this process. Kennan does not mention his role in the development of these activities in his memoirs, nor is there any information available in his private papers at the Mudd Library. There is some hope, that in the near future, his personal diaries will be made available to researchers. Historian John Lewis Gaddis, is also working on an authorized biography of Kennan which should be released within the next year. Gaddis’s work may clarify further, the extent to which Kennan participated in covert operations. To date, the most extensive coverage can be found in Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988; Wilson Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 178–212; Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 18–23; and Doug Selvage, “George Kennan and the Birth of OPC,” Unpublished Paper, Presented to the SHAFR Conference (Washington, 1996).

8 Kennan believed that there were a number of events that occurred in 1948 that changed the Soviets’ position on Eastern Europe. The first was their decision to pull out of OEC, and the second was their clampdown on Czechoslovakia. However, the two events which really forced their hand, he argued, were the formation of NATO and Tito’s defection. George Kennan, Transcripts on Foreign Policy.

9 George Kennan, “Problems of Diplomatic-Military Collaboration,” 7 March 1947, in Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maerz, Measures Short of War: The George Kennan Lectures at The National War College, 1946–1947, Washington: National Defense University Press, 1991, p. 131. In his memoirs, Kennan discusses his secret role in Portugal in ten lines. He writes that the operations were: “usually laughable, sometimes fantastic, [and] sometimes hair raising.” However, he concludes that these stories belong in “a different sort of book, if in any at all.” He never clarified his role. George Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950, Boston: Little Brown, 1967, p. 143.

10 Selvage, “George Kennan and the Birth of OPC,” op. cit., p. 1.

11 National Security Act, quoted in Zegart, op. cit., p. 82.

12 See Houston to Hillenkoetter, 25 September 1947, FRUS/IE, 623. Section 102-(d) (4) provided the CIA should perform “services of common concern” and section 102-(d) (5) instructed the CIA to “provide such other functions as the NSC might from time to time direct.” However, despite Houston’s assertions, there is a substantial body of information available to suggest that these clauses were drafted with two principles involved. Today, we know that the mandate for secret operations can be found in two clauses, both of which appeared in the National Security Act signed by

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President Truman in 1947. They are: “services of common concern” and “perform such functions and duties.” However, documentary evidence now indicates that the first passage referred only to the collection of secret intelligence and it was the second passage that referred directly to the conduct of covert operations. See Draft Report by Vandenberg, Appendix A – Draft NIA Directive, 20 June 1946, FRUS/IE, pp. 312, 331, 375; and Lawrence Houston to Hillenkoetter, 25 September 1947, FRUS/IE, 622.

13 Memorandum from Mosely (Secretary of SANNAC) to Lovett, 15 October 1947, FRUS/IE, pp. 624–5.

14 On the relationship that evolved between the JCS and the OSS, see Bradley F. Smith, The Shadow Warriors: OSS and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Basic Books, 1983, pp. 159–70.

15 See Hillenkoetter to SANNAC, 22 October 1947, FRUS/IE 626–7 and Wright to Hillenkoetter, 4 November 1947, FRUS/IE, pp. 630–2.

16 SR-15, January 1948, Documents of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1946–1976, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick, Reel 1.1.

17 See Marc Lazar, “The Cold War Culture of the French and Italian Communist Parties,” Intelligence and National Security, Summer 2003, vol. 18, no. 2, 213–24.

18 George C. McGhee, Special Assistant to Under Secretary of State, For Economic Affairs Memorandum of Conversation between Mr. Clayton and the Italian Prime Minister, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1947, vol. 3, p. 848. See also, Kennan, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 331.

19 George C. Marshall, “The Secretary of State to the Embassy of Italy,” 1 May 1947 and James Clement Dunn, The Ambassador to Italy (Dunn) to the Secretary of State, 3 May 1947, FRUS, 1947, vol. 3, pp. 888–92.

20 The first draft appeared a month earlier, but was subsequently redrafted with minor revisions, in November. See “NSC 1/2: The United States Position With Respect to Italy,” FRUS, 1948, vol. 3, pp. 724–6.

21 Ibid.

22 See David W. Ellwood, “The Propaganda of the Marshal Plan in Italy in a Cold War Context, Intelligence and National Security, Summer 2003, vol. 18, no. 2, 225–6.

23 This strategy was outlined in detail in NSC documents dealing with Italy. See “NSC 1: The Position of the United States With Respect to Italy,” 14 November 1947, Documents of the NSC, Reel 1. Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick. “NSC 1/2 The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy,” Documents of the NSC, Reel 1.4; “NSC 1/3 Position of the United States With Respect to Italy in Light of Communist Participation in the Government by Legal Means,” Documents of the NSC, Reel 1.

24 See Memorandum of discussions, 2nd NSC Meeting, 14 November 1947, FRUS/IE 638. One paragraph or 2 1/2 lines from this meeting still remains classified.

25 “NSC 4: The Coordination of Foreign Information Measures,” 17 December 1947, FRUS/IE, 640–2.

26 Darling interview with James Lay, NACP, RG 263 Box 12, File 25.

27 Author Peter Grose tells us that there were only three copies of tab b made; one stayed at the White House, one went to George Kennan and the other went to Hillenkoetter. “NSC 4/a: A Report to the NSC by the Executive Secretary of Psychological Operations,” 9 December 1947, HSTL, PSF, NSC, Box 203, or NACP, RG 263, Box 1, File NSC 4/a. See also, Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, p. 282.

28 The word “warfare” had been dropped again because of Marshall’s objections to the use of the term.

29 Souers began the push, in October of 1947. See Souers to Forrestal, 24 October 1947, FRUS/IE 629. See also, Draft Directive to DCI, undated (but forwarded with another document, dated 7 December 1947), FRUS/IE, pp. 645, 647. On this subject

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see also, Darling, “The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government,” NACP, RG 263, p. 259.

30 Arthur Darling, “The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government,” NACP, RG 263, pp. 259–60.

31 Darling, CIA as an Agency of Government, NACP, RG 263, Chapter 7, 16, 23. See also, Darling Interview with Hillenkoetter, NACP, RG 263, Box 12, File 26; and “Progress Report: The National Intelligence Problem, Historical Review of the Development of the Concept,” NACP, RG 263, Box 1, File HS/HC 8.

32 Frederick C. Oeschner, “Report #1: Interdepartmental 1 Coordinating Staff,” NSC 4, May 20, 1948, NACP, RG 273, Policy Planning Staff Papers, Box 1, File NSC # 4.

33 Annual Report for the ICS, NSC 4, December 31, 1948, NACP, RG 273, Box 1, File NSC 4 Background.

34 For a discussion of American operations in Italy, see James E. Miller, “Taking Off The Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948,” Diplomatic History, Winter 1983, vol. 7, no. 1; Salli Pisani, The CIA and the Marshal Plan, Kansas: Kansas University Press, 1991; Trevor Barnes, “Democratic Deceptions: American Covert Operations in Post-War Europe,” in David A. Charters and Maurice Tugwell, Deception Operations: Studies in the East–West Context, London: Greenwood Press, 1990, pp. 297–324; Elizabeth and M.J. Marvick, “US Propaganda Efforts and the 1948 Election Campaign,” in William Daugherty, A Psychological Warfare Casebook, Baltimore: Arno Press, 1955; and Pero Mario Del, “The United States and Psychological Warfare in Italy, 1948–1955,” Journal of American History, 2000, vol. 87, no. 4, 1304–34.

35 See also Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown, Scholars and the Secret War, 1939–1961, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 38–81; and Pisani, op. cit., pp. 111–15.

36 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” p. 43. Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, Document # CK 3100148811.

37 Trevor Barnes, “Democratic Deceptions: American Covert Operations in Post War Europe,” in David A. Charters and Maurice Tugwell, Deception Operations: Studies in the East–West Context, London: Greenwood Press, 1990, p. 302.

38 According to historian Christopher Andrew, NSC 4/a also provided the OSO with $10 million to conduct covert operations in Italy. He believes that this money came from captured Nazi war funds. Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, London: Harper Collins, 1991, p. 172.

39 Wendy L. Wall, “America’s ‘Best Propagandists’: Italian Americans and the 1948 ‘Letters to Italy’ Campaign,” in Christian G. Appy, Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000, p. 97.

40 Miller, “Taking Off the Gloves,” op. cit., pp. 49–50.

41 Lilly, op. cit., pp. 43–4. “The Charge in Italy to the Secretary of State,” 28 January 1948, FRUS 1948, vol. 3, 822–3; See also, Elizabeth and M.J. Marvick, “US Propaganda Efforts and the 1948 Election Campaign,” in William E. Daugherty, A Psychological Warfare Casebook, op. cit., p. 321.

42 J. Graham, Assistant to the Personal Representative of President Truman to Pope Pius XI to the Secretary of State, 11 December 1947, FRUS 1948, vol. 3, p. 745. The full extent of the Catholic Church’s involvement in this campaign was still classified as of 2005. See Lilly, op. cit., pp. 43–4; and Miller, The United States in Italy, op. cit., p. 237.

43 FRUS 3(1948) George C Marshall to the Embassy in Italy, 24 March 1948, p. 866.

44 Dunn to Secretary of State, 15 April 1948, FRUS 1948, vol. 3, p. 875; see also, Marvick, op. cit., p. 322.

45 See Robin Winks, op. cit., pp. 380–1, Harry Rositke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and Covert Action, New York: Readers Digest, 1997, p. 149.

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46 McCargar, op. cit., p. 132.

47 Gerald Miller, A History of the Office of Policy Coordination (Freedom of Information Request to the author).

48 Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, London: Andre Deutsch, 1994, p. 285. American covert operations continued in Italy until 1976, however, there is still a great deal of information on these operations which remains classified. This is despite the fact that the CIA’s report on Greater Openness, released in 1990, argued that information on the Italian elections should be released quickly. See “Declassification,” The Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Washington, Spring 1991, vol. 1, 31.

49 Activation of the Special Procedures Group, 29 March 1948, FRUS/IE, 657–8. See also, Darling, op. cit., p. 262.

50 Memorandum From the Intelligence Survey Group to Souers, 13 May 1948, FRUS/IE, 682.

51 Doug Selvage, “George Kennan and the Birth of OPC,” Unpublished Paper, Presented to the SHAFR Conference, Washington, 1996.

52 See Cassidy to Dulin, 11 March 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 647.

53 Selvage, op. cit., 3.

54 Department of State briefing Memorandum, 17 December 1947, FRUS/IE p. 647.

55 Ibid., 4; Darling, op. cit., p. 265.

56 Unfortunately, there is no additional information on this subject. But clearly the State Department was conducting black propaganda operations independently of the CIA. See Cassidy to Darling, 27 April 1948, NACP, RG 263, Box 14, HS/HC 807 Item #18.

57 Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist and Spymaster, New York: Random House, p. 150.

58 Ibid., p. 149.

59 See Hillenkoetter to James Lay, 24 May 1948, NACP, RG 263, Box 14, File HS/HC 807, Item #23. See also, Darling, op. cit., p. 264.

60 Darling, op. cit., p. 261.

61 Selvage, op, cit., 3. All of the controversy still remains deleted from Darling’s “published” history of these events. See Darling, NACP, RG 263, Chapter 7.

62 By 1948 Kennan had reached the pinnacle of his power. His smile was equated to that of the Mona Lisa, and according to New York socialite Gretchen Richardson, he had the “look of Apollo.” Of course, she also referred to General George McArthur as “an exact model of Zeus.” See Gretchen Richardson, “Inscrutable: Middle West Supplies Model ‘Greek Gods,’” Minneapolis Star, 14 July 1947, Kennan Papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Clippings, Box 32.

63 See Mary McAuliffe, “President Truman and the Four Directors of Central Intelligence,” The Origins and Development of the CIA in the Administration of Harry Truman, Centre for the Study of Intelligence, A Conference Report, Washington, 1994, 7.

64 John Melby, Interview with author, 2 February 1988.

65 Darling, op. cit., p. 223.

66 Arthur Darling, “The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government,” NACP, RG 263, File Chapter 7, 40.

67 John Paton Davies to George Kennan, July 15, 1952, MLPU, Kennan Papers, Box 29, File 2-A 1952, A-N.

68 PPS Memorandum, “The Inauguration of Political Warfare,” 4 May 1948, FRUS/IE, 668.

69 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412.

70 Anne Karalekas, History of the Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence Series, (California, 1977); see also, John Ranelagh, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 115.

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71 This fact was recognized by Kennan in his Memorandum, “The Inauguration of Political Warfare,” FRUS/IE, 669. However, it is important to note that not everyone agreed. James McCargar, for example, did not view these operations as political warfare, which he argued, “has more to do with war than politics.” For McCargar, these operations were solely political. See James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix), A Short Course in the Secret War, Lanham: Madison Books, 2001, p. 138.

72 Darling, op. cit., p. 266.

73 See Hillenkoetter to Souers, 5 May 1948, Hillenkoetter to Souers, 6 May 1948, Hillenkoetter to Souers 11 May 1948. FRUS/IE, 674, 676, 677.

74 Peter Grose, Operation Rollback, America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 96.

75 Apparently, this idea came from two former OSS agents, Franklin Lindsay and Charles Thayer, who had sent Kennan a confidential memorandum on the subject of émigrés in September. The two men were consultants for the State Department. Both would later join the CIA. See Grose, op. cit., pp. 94–6.

76 George Kennan, “The Inauguration of Political Warfare,” 4 May 1948. FRUS/IE, pp. 670–1.

77 Grose, op. cit., p. 98.

78 Ibid.

79 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” Harry S. Truman Library (hereafter HSTL), RG Psychological Strategy Board (hereafter PSB), Box 22, File 091.412, p. 42.

80 Darling, op. cit., p. 264.

81 Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 66.

82 John Prados, President’s Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War Two, New York: William Morrow and Co., 1986, p. 37.

83 Forrestal to Souers, 26 March 1948, FRUS/IE 655; see also Darling, NACP, RG 263, File Chapter 7, 37; and Miller, “The Office of Policy Coordination,” op. cit., p. 30.

84 Lilly, op. cit., p. 47.

85 Ranelagh, op. cit., p. 166.

86 Memorandum by Cassidy, undated, May 1948, FRUS/IE, 666.

87 However, there is substantial evidence suggesting that whatever guidance was provided by the Policy Planning Staff it was minimal, to the extent that Cassidy did not even know the names of either George Kennan or his policy liaison officer, John Patton Davies. In a memo from Cassidy he referred to Kennan as Mr. Cannon and John Davies as Charles Davies. See Cassidy to the Deputy Chief of the Special Procedures Group, Dulin, 11 March 1948, FRUS/IE, 647. Furthermore, Hillenkoetter is on record saying that guidance from the State Department was not forthcoming during this period. See Hillenkoetter to Souers, 5 May 1948, 1948, FRUS/IE, 774.

88 Lilly, op. cit., p. 60.

89 Ibid.

90 Lilly, op. cit., p. 58.

91 Interview with Robert Blum, NACP, RG 263, Box 12, File 25.

92 He adds that after the report was released it was generally understood that he would have to be replaced. The question of course is then, why did it take eighteen months for that to occur? The answer, according to Souers, was that Truman hated Louis Johnson and because he knew Johnson would be appointed Secretary of Defense, he kept James Forrestal in place long after everyone knew he was in no shape to continue. Souers, Interview with Montague, NACP, Thomas Troy Papers, Box 12, File 25.

93 Memorandum from the Interim Intelligence Survey Group to Souers, 13 May 1948, FRUS/IE.

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94 Kennan to Lovett and Marshal, 19 May 1948, FRUS/IE, 684. It is somewhat curious that this point was deleted from the published version of Darling’s history, for reasons of national security. See Darling, op. cit., pp. 269–70. However, it can be found in the version located at the National Archives. See Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency: An Instrument of Government, NACP, RG 263.

95 Kennan to Lovett, 8 June 1948, RG 59, “Political and Psychological Warfare,” Box 11a.

96 It is interesting to note that two plans for political warfare were considered at this meeting. However, even the name of the other one remains classified. We are told that an “alternative (word deleted)” was submitted. See Darling, NACP, RG 263, File Chapter 7, 49. See also interview with Hillenkoetter, NACP, RG 263, Box 12, File 26.

97 While Cassidy was forced to do nothing, columnist Drew Pearson publicly exposed the plan to drop propaganda leaflets and Mickey Mouse watches over the Soviet Union. This further ensured that these operations would be put on hold indefinitely. Ironically, at the time, Cassidy suggested that the US use Pearson and invite him to the drop. Cassidy suggested that there would be two drops, one in which Pearson would cover, and a second secret drop, in which different propaganda would be released. His request was denied. It is however, worthwhile to note that when these activities finally took place in 1952, Drew Pearson was there. See Darling, NACP, File Chapter 7, 61.

98 It is interesting to note that Hillenkoetter never believed that there was any link between the Dulles report and the push for NSC 10/2. Darling, however, was not so sure. Darling, NACP 263, File Chapter 7, 45–6.

99 Hillenkoetter believed that the CIA should keep black propaganda but all other covert operations – including sabotage and physical subversion should go to the JCS. Hillenkoetter to Souers, 6 May 1948, FRUS/IE 675; Hillenkoetter to NSC, 24 May 1948, FRUS/IE, 278. CIA in-house historian, Gerald Miller argues that Hillenkoetter at no time wanted these operations. He was facing enough problems with the day-to-day organization issues which plagued the CIA in its early days. Miller, 29.

100 Hillenkoetter to Lay (Hillenkoetter’s emphasis), 11 May 1948, NACP, RG 263, Box 14, File HS/HC, 807, Item #22.

101 Hillenkoetter to Lay, 9 June 1948, NACP, RG 263, Box 14, File HS/HC, 807, Item #25.

102 Meeting Minutes 12th NSC Meeting, 3 June1948, FRUS/IE, 687–8.

103 Proposed Directive, NSC 10 Series, 4 June 1948, FRUS/IE, 701.

104 Darling, “The CIA as an Instrument of Government,” NACP, RG 263, File Chapter 7, p. 58.

105 Hillenkoetter to Lay, 11 May 1948, RG 263, Box 14, File HS/HC, 807, Item #22.

106 Proposed Directive, NSC 10 Series, 15 June 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 707.

107 When one reads these meeting minutes, it appears as though the military is losing the argument; then the next thing we know is that the advisory panel is no longer included. One can only surmise that they went off the record to resolve the dispute. See Meeting Minutes, 13th NSC Meeting, 17 June 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 711.

108 Darling, “The CIA as An Instrument of Government,” NACP, RG 263. File, Chapter 7, p. 56.

109 “NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects,” in Michael Warner, ed., The CIA Under Harry Truman, CIA Cold War Records, History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency: Washington DC: 1994, pp. 215–16.

110 Lilly, op. cit., p. 48.

111 See Kennan to Lovett, 19 May 1948, Kennan to Lovett, 25 May 1948, Memorandum 12, Meeting of the NSC, 3 June 1948, FRUS/IE, pp. 685, 690. Apparently, Senator Bridges, a Republican from New Hampshire, had promised $50,000,000 for

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covert operations. Memorandum for the President, Discussion of the 11th NSC Meeting, 20 May 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 686.

112 Kennan to Lovett and Marshal, 16 June 1948, FRUS/IE, pp. 703–4.

113 It is unclear where the two men went. Galloway remained at the CIA until at least August of 1948. See Daily Agenda, 31 August 1948, CREST, NACP.

114 Kennan to Lovett and Marshall, 16 June 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 709.

115 “NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects,” in John Lewis Gaddis and Thomas Etzold, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 125.

116 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Boston: Little Brown, 1984, p. 154.

117 Sherman Kent, “Some Reflections on the Problems of US Intelligence,” RG 263, Box 11, Document # HS/HC 791, 1.

118 See Dulles, Jackson, Corea to Sydney Souers, 13 May 1948, NACP, RG 263.

119 Memorandum for the Record, 3 June 1948, RG 273, NSC, Box 2, File NSC, 10/2.

120 “ORE 58–48: The Strategic Value of the USSR of Soviet Conquest of Western Europe and the Near East Prior to 1950,” 30 July 1948, Declassified Document Reference System, Fiche # 166, Document # 2437.

121 Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 32.

122 It read that each of the undersigned “acknowledges that this memorandum comprises an accurate record of the conversation and further that the views set out correspond to their conception of the manner in which the activity shall operate.” See Memorandum of Conversation, 6 August 1948, FRUS/IE, pp. 719–22.

123 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 42.

124 Memorandum of Conversation, 6 August 1948, FRUS/IE, pp. 719–22. The question which arises is, why did Hillenkoetter agree to this procedure? Was he so frustrated by the process to date that he did not want to have any part in it? We will never know. In the Lilly report located at the Eisenhower Library, we are told that Hillenkoetter deliberately took himself out of the process because of the ongoing controversy with Kennan. However, this passage was subsequently crossed out, so the record remains unclear. Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” DDEL. White House Office, NSC Staff Papers 48–61, OCB Secretariat Series, Box 6, 21 December 1951, File PSB.

125 According to Warner, as events unfolded, Hillenkoetter became increasingly frustrated, and as a final recourse, he placed OPC’s unvouchered funds under a budget office under his direction. His objective was to try to control Wisner by controlling his assets. Unfortunately, despite the DD/P’s initial displeasure with the tactic “it hardly infringed” on his “freedom of action. “Warner, CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination from NSC 10/2 to NSC 68,” Society of the Federal Government’s Annual Conference, March 1948, Unpublished Paper, 3. This draft was subsequently published; see Michael Warner, “The CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination: From NSC 10/2 to NSC 68,” Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, Summer 1998, vol. 11, no. 2.

126 Lilly, op. cit., p. 51.

127 Anne Karalekas, The History of Central Intelligence, New York: Aegean Press, 1977, p. 47.

128 Ibid.

129 Ibid.

130 “Memorandum for the DCI, Historical Background of the Functioning for the NSC 5412/2 Special Group and its Predecessors. DDEL. WHO. OSANSA. 1952–1961,” NSC Series, Policy Papers, Box 10.

131 Selvage, op. cit., p. 9. Barnes, “The Secret Cold War: The CIA and American Foreign Policy in Europe, 1946–1956 Part Two,” Historical Journal, vol. 25, no. 3,

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656, and Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, p. 291.

132 Karalekas, op. cit., p. 46.

133 Ed Applewhite, quoted in Thomas, op. cit., p. 11.

134 Ibid., p. 47.

135 In his discussion of the problems plaguing OPC, Lilly argues that it was also hampered by “policy uncertainties.” See Lilly, “American Psychological Operations DDEL.” However, in the report found at the Truman Library, this sentence was changed to, “OPC was hampered by personnel training and technical uncertainties.” Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, RG PSB, Box 15, File 091, 412.

136 Tom Braden, quoted in Ranelagh, op. cit., p. 221.

137 Gerald Miller, “A History of the Office of Policy Coordination, Freedom of Information Request to the Author,” 1998, p. 33.

4

An elucidation of imponderables that defy close analysis

1 John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 112.

2 Although it may not be readily apparent, I owe Bruce Cumings an intellectual debt of gratitude for helping me move toward this position. See Bruce Cumings, “Revising Post-Revisionism, Or the Poverty of Theory in Diplomatic History,” Diplomatic History, 1993, vol. 17, no. 4, 539–69.

3 See Betty Abrahamsen Dessants, “Ambivalent Allies: OSS’s USSR Division, the Department of State and the Bureaucracy of Intelligence Analysis, 1941–1945,” Intelligence and National Security, October 1996, vol. 11, no 4, 722, and Hugh DeSantis, The Diplomacy of Silence: The American Foreign Service, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, 1933–1947, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1979, pp. 20–2.

4 George Kennan, “Organization for National Security, Mudd Library, Kennan Papers, Box 9, Writings and Publications, File 1-B-99, 1960.

5 The Policy Planning Staff, Foreign Service newsletter, December 1950, Mudd Library, Kennan Papers,

6 Emerson to Ogburn, 31 May 1951, RG 59, PPS 1947–1953, Lot File 64D563, Subject File, Box 11a, Political and Psychological Warfare, File Planning.

7 James Lay to Harry Truman, 12 December 1952, HSTL, WHO, NSC, STP, 48–61, Box 17, Subject File 2.

8 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration and the Cold War, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 46. Although Leffler concedes that there were substantial problems in the development of policy, he also argues that, beneath the surface, it did have more purpose: the search for preponderant power. And in the end, he argues that there were few differences between the various government offices over American objectives. Leffler, pp. 56, 97.

9 PSB, “The Functional Relationship of the NSC to the President,” 16 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File #33, Staff Coordination.

10 Dillion Anderson, “The President and National Security,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1956.

11 Sidney Souers, “Policy Formation For National Security,” American Political Science Review, June 1949.

12 Dillion Anderson, “The President and National Security,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1956.

13 James Webb, “The NSC,” NACP, RG 59, Policy Planning Staff Papers, Subject File, Box 11, File NSC.

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14 PSB, “The Functional Relationship of the NSC to the President,” 16 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File #33, Staff Coordination.

15 Paul Nitze, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, 86th Congress, 26–27 May 1960, Part VI, Committee on Government Operations, US Senate.

16 T. Hoopes, “Organization of the National Security Council: Role of the NSC Staff,” DDEL, WHO, NS SP, 1948–1961, E Section S F, Box 11, File Jackson Committee. File Misc.

17 T. Hoopes, “Organization of the National Security Council: Role of the NSC Staff,” DDEL, WHO, NS SP, 1948–1961, E Section S F, Box 11, File Jackson Committee. File Misc.

18 Interview with General George C Marshall (emphasis in original), NSC Study, 19 February 1953, DDEL, WHO-OSANSA, Box 6, File NSC Official File, 2/1953 (5).

19 Paul Nitze to C.B. Marshall, Meeting in the Secretaries Office on NSC Reorganization, 16 February 1951, RG 59, Policy Planning Staff, 1947–1953, Lot 64D563, Box 11a, Subject Files, File NSC.

20 Paul Nitze, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, 86th Congress, 26–27 May, 1960, Part VI, Committee on Government Operations, US Senate.

21 Anna Kasten Nelson, “Turf Wars, The Evolution of the National Security Apparatus,” Unpublished Paper, Presented at the SHAFR Conference, Washington, 1997, 15.

22 Leffler, op. cit., p. 28.

23 Nelson, op. cit., pp. 14–16.

24 Until 1950, Truman only attended 21 percent of the first 57 NSC meetings. After the Korean War broke out, he attended 87 percent or 62 out of 71 meetings. In contrast to Truman, Eisenhower attended 278 of 307 or 90 percent of NSC meetings during his tenure. Moreover, when Truman did attend the meetings, approximately 120 actions were noted. In contrast during Eisenhower’s meetings 300 actions were completed. “Notes on Attendance at NSC Meetings,” DDEL, WHO, NS SP, 1948–1961, E Section S F, Box 11, File Jackson Committee.

25 Interview with General George C Marshall, NSC Study, 19 February1953, DDEL, WHO-OSANSA, Box 6, File NSC Official File, 2/1953 (5).

26 Paul Nitze to C.B. Marshall, Meeting in the Secretaries office on NSC Reorganization, 16 February 1951, RG 59, PPPS, 1947–1953, Lot 64D563, Box 11a, Subject Files, File NSC.

27 See Anna Nelson, “President Truman and the Evolution of the National Security Council,” Journal of American History, Spring 1971, vol. 72, no. 1; see also, Alfred Sander, “Truman and the National Security Council, 1945–1947,” Journal of American History, September 1985, 387. More recently, Sara Sale has challenged Nelson and Sander’s conclusions, arguing that the NSC played a “more dramatic role than has been previously recognized.” Sara L. Sale, Harry S. Truman and the Development and Operation of the National Security Council and the Origins of US Cold War policies,” PhD Dissertation, Oklahoma: Oklahoma State University, 1991.

28 During the first years, over 90 percent of the papers were written by the State Department. Edward Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board and Its Predecessors,” in Vincetoria L. Gaetano, ed., Studies in Modern History, New York: St John’s Press, 1968, p. 358.

29 Marshall, in Wilson Miscamble, George Kennan and the Making of Foreign Policy, New Jersey: Princeton University, 1992, 5n.

30 Anna Kasten Nelson, ed., The State Department and the Policy Planning Staff Papers, London: Garland Publishing, 1983, p. xvi.

31 However, while this was the case, dissenting views were to be included. This did not always occur. See George Kennan to Carleton Savage, 27 October 1947, NACP, RG 59, Policy Planning Staff papers, 1947–1953, Lot File 64D563, Subject File.

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32 The five original members included: Kennan, who was the director; Carleton Savage, who served as the Executive Secretary; George Butler, who functioned as the Deputy Director and a specialist on Latin American Affairs; and John Patton Davies, who was a specialist on the Far East. Robert Joyce joined in 1948; his specialty was South Eastern Affairs and “related activities,” a euphemism for covert operations. Dorothy Fosdick, the only woman on the staff, joined in 1949; she was a specialist in United Nations affairs. Herbert Feis joined in 1950, he was an economist, and he later became the official historian of the Cold War. Paul Nitze, a Wall Street businessman, Philip H. Watts, who specialized in economic and military matters, and Robert Hooker, a lawyer, who specialized in economics, rounded out the group.

33 Kennan Papers, Writings and Publications, File 1-D-18.

34 Nelson, The State Department’s Policy Planning Staff Papers, 3 vols, 1983.

35 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File # 091.12.

36 George Kennan, “Transcripts on Press Statements on Assessments of Foreign Policy, 23 June 1950, Kennan Papers, Writings and Publications, January–October 1950, File # 1-D-9.

37 Leffler, op. cit., p. 175.

38 One can chart the changing opinion in Washington by examining the reports written by the Central Intelligence Agency during this period. For example, it is interesting to note that, until the last months of 1948, the majority of CIA reports fail to mention East Europe at all. See CIA 4–48, “Review of the World Situation,” 8 April 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, File Meeting #10; Hillenkoetter to President, 20 May 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, Meeting discussion 1948, Box 220. However, beginning in October 1948, the CIA begins to document activities in Eastern Europe, detailing the fact that the Kremlin has still failed to consolidate its power in this theater. See CIA 10–48, 20 October 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, Box 204, File 25; CIA 11–48, 17 November 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC Box 204, File M27; see also Bedell Smith (American Ambassador in Moscow) to Secretary of State, 23 December 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, Box 204, File Memorandum 27.

39 Kennan in Walter Hixson, George Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast, New York: Columbia University, 1989, p. 38. This was a significant shift from only two months earlier, when “PPS 13: Resume of the World Situation,” drafted on November 6, 1947, stated that “one of the most dangerous moments to world stability will come when … Russian rule begins to crumble in the Eastern Europe area. The Kremlin may then feel itself threatened internally and may resort to desperate measures. “PPS 13: Resume of the World Situation,” drafted on 6 November 1947. NACP, RG 59, Policy Planning Staff Papers, 1947–1953, Lot File 64D563, Subject Files, Box 9.

40 Secretary of State to UN Representative, 20 January 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, Part 1, p. 312.

41 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, A Critical Appraisal of US National Security Policy, London: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 68.

42 Mill Paper #9, NACP, RG 273, Box Mill Papers, File Mill Paper #9.

43 Burnham went on to note that the objective of the United States should be to destroy communism in the Kremlin. He also noted that displaced persons and refugees should be used in the opposition movement. Burnham’s comments were greeted with enthusiasm. Savage to Morrison, “James Burnham Lecture to national War College,” RG 59/PPPS 1947–1953, Lot 64D563, Box 11a, Subject Files, File # National War College.

44 Charge in France (Bonbright) to Secretary of State, 25 February 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 4, p. 737.

45 Leffler, op. cit., p. 284.

46 See Record, Under-Secretaries Meeting, Department of State, 15 April 1949, vol. 1,

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284. See also, John Melby to Lacy, “On Policy Papers, 8 February 1951, RG 59, PPSP, 1947–1948, Lot File 64D563, Subject Files, Box 11a, File Planning.

47 Kennan to Lovett, 24 February 1948, FRUS, vol. 1, pt. 2, 509.

48 During the immediate postwar years, Forrestal played a critical role in the development of American foreign policy and the execution of early covert operations. According to Sidney Souers, he interpreted his role as Secretary of Defense as being the principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to national security. In other words, he believed he was “the Deputy President for National Security.” Darling Interview with Souers, NACP.

49 See Memorandum, “Request from the Director CIG for State Department Policy Statements,” from Eddy to Russell, 30 October 1946, FRUS/IE, 432–3; and Memo, Eddy to Vandenberg, 4 November 1946, FRUS/IE, p. 445.

50 “NSC 7: Position of the United States With Respect to Soviet Directed World Communists,” FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, 545–50.

51 Ibid., p. 549.

52 Ibid., p. 549.

53 This point was made by Kennan on his personal copy of NSC 7. See NSC 7, NACP, RG 59, PPSP, Subject File, Box 8, File Communism.

54 Despite Kennan’s point, we now know that unvouchered funds were made use of before the adoption of NSC 7. Specifically, they were integral to the operations of the SSU.

55 For JCS comments, see Forrestal to NSC, 17 April 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 1, 561–2.

56 Policy Planning Staff Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Subject File, Box 8; see also Butler to Lovett, 9 April 1948, FRUS, vol. 1, pt. 2, 560–1. See also, James Lay, Memo to the President, 18 December 1952, DDEL, WHO, NSC, 48–61, Box 17, File 5F #2.

57 See Minutes of the 170 the PPS Meeting, 3 May 1948, NACP, RG 59, PPS Meeting Minutes, Box, 31, File 47/48. James Forrestal, “Memorandum – The Position of the US With Respect to Soviet Directed World Communism,” 7 April 1948, NACP, RG 59, Subject File, Box 8, Communism, 1947–1948.

58 These operations were discussed in Chapter One. “Memorandum From the Intelligence Survey Group to Souers,” 13 May 1948, FRUS/IE, p. 682.

59 Forrestal to NSC, 10 July 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, 589, 591. See also, Lay to the President, 18 December 1952, DDEL, WHO, NSC 48–61, Box 17, File 5F #2.

60 Leffler, op, cit., p. 42.

61 Forrestal to the President, 10 July 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, 592–3.

62 The Policy Planning Staff wrote the first draft of the paper. It was completed on 18 August 1948, and was subsequently sent to the NSC, where it underwent four more drafts.

63 Kennan to Lovett, 5 August 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, 599.

64 See as examples, George Kennan to Chester Bowles, 17 September 1956, Kennan paper, Box 32, File 2-B, 1956 Outgoing Letters; George Kennan to Joseph Alsop, 26 February 1959, Kennan papers Supplementary Papers, Box 32, File 2-B, 1959 Outgoing letters; George Kennan, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, 86 Congress, 26–27 May 1960, Part VI, Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate.

65 Kennan, NSC 20/1, 18 August 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, NSC Memorandum Box 204.

66 See Annex, Forrestal to NSC, 10 July 1948, FRUS, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, 589, 600. See also, “Draft to the NSC: Measures Required to Achieve US Objectives With Respect to the USSR,” 30 March 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, 271–7.

67 NSC Staff Meeting Minutes, 11 October 1948, NACP, RG 273, Box 1, File Meeting Minutes.

68 Summaries of Staff Discussions, NSC Staff Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 273,

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Miscellaneous Documents, Box 1, Staff Minutes. NSC Staff Meeting Minutes, 1 December 1948, NACP, RG 273, Box 1, Meeting Minutes.

69 Memo, Kennan to James Webb, 14 April 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, 282. See also, Record of the Undersecretaries Meeting, 15 April 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, 283.

70 Lt. Col. Daley to General Wedemeyer, 29 October 1948, NACP, RG 273; and Record of the Under Secretaries Meeting, Department of State, 15 April 1949, FRUS, vol. 1, 284. See also, Webb, Memo of Conversation, 4 May 1949, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, 296.

71 “Policy Guidance to Assist in Achieving US Objectives With Respect to the USSR,” Appendix A, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1, 347.

72 Kennan to Rusk, “Objections to Draft entitled, ‘Report by the NSC Staff on the Suggestions for Policy Interpretation to Assist in Achieving US Objectives With Respect to Russia,’” 7 September 1949, NACP, RG 59, PPSP, Box 33, File CF-49. For similar complaints, see Kennan to Marshal and Lovett, 5 August 1949, NACP, RG 59, PPSP, CF, Box 38, File CF-48. See also, George Butler, “The Foreign Policy of the United States,” NACP, RG 59, Box 44, File Butler, G.

73 Memorandum for the President, 26 November 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, MD, Box 220, File MD, 48.

74 Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 29.

75 NSC Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 273, Miscellaneous Documents, Box 1, File Meetings.

76 “NSC 20/4: US Objectives With Respect to Russia,” 2 November 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC Meeting #17, Box 204.

77 “Notes on A Grand Strategy For Psychological Operations,” 1 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 28, File, 334. For the recent debates over the meaning of NSC 68, see Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, 355n; and Greg Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000.

78 The only significant difference between PPS 38, NSC 20/1, NSC 20/3 and NSC 20/4 was that, in PPS 38 and NSC 20/1, Kennan made an explicit point of singling out the Baltic States as the only countries which had the necessary criteria for the return of their independence. In an interesting side note to this discussion, thirty-two years later, in 1990 Kennan wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in which he argued that,

the three Baltic States deserve their independence and will eventually have it, seems beyond question. There are others that are demanding sovereign status, but in whom requisite experience and maturity of leadership, as well as other essential resources have yet to be demonstrated.

See Kennan, “Communism in Russian History,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1990, vol. 69, no. 4, 182.

79 George Kennan, “NSC 20/1: US Objectives With Respect to the Soviet Union,” HSTL, 18 August 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, NSC Memorandum, Box 204.

80 George Kennan, “Transcript on Press Statement on Assessments of Foreign Policy,” 23 June 1950, Kennan Papers, Writings and Publications, January to October 1950, File 1-D-9.

81 George Kennan Transcripts on Foreign Policy.

82 An examination of Kennan’s writings suggests he was greatly influenced by cultural modernism. In this context, his writings were often pragmatic. He privileged moral relativism over philosophical idealism, particularism over universalism and he rejected absolutes. Finally, Kennan’s writing contained a number of references that reflected his own cultural despair. For a good discussion of cultural modernism, see Norman and Mindy Cantor, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern

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Times, New York: Harper Perennial, 1998; on Kennan’s philosophy, see George Kennan to Senator Ralph Flanders, 30 November 1956, Mudd Library, Kennan Papers, Box 31, File 2B, 1956; Kennan to Richard Stephens, 6 February 1952, Box 29, File 2-A, 1952 (O-Z); Kennan to Arnold Toynbee, 7 April 1952, Box 29, File 2-A, 1952 (O-Z); Kennan to Ford Foundation Staff, 18 December 1951, Box 29, File 2-A, 1951; Kennan, Preliminary Notes, Lecture Course Politics, Box 27, File 1-E-24; and “Basic Problems in the Approach to American Foreign Policy,” 5 October 1953, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, Box 18, File 1-C-38, 1953.

83 “NSC 20/4: US Objectives With Respect to Russia,” 2 November 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC Meeting #17, Box 204.

84 Ibid.

85 George Kennan (emphasis in original), “NSC 20/1: US Objectives With Respect to the Soviet Union,” HSTL, 18 August 1948, HSTL, PSF, NSC, NSC Memorandum, Box 204.

86 Daily Agenda, 15 October 1948, CREST, NACP.

87 Interview with John Melby. Interview with Roy M. Melbourne by author.

88 NSC Summaries of Discussion, “Staff meeting minutes,” 10 January 1950, NACP, RG 273, Box 1, Staff Minutes.

89 Author deleted, “Notes on Grand Strategy for Psychological Operations,” 1 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 28, File 33. See also, Leffler, op. cit., p. 264.

90 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” HSTL, RG, PSB, Box 16, File 091.412.

91 OCB, Annex B, “A Review of NSC Policy Toward the Soviet Union Emphasizing US Policy on the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Series, Briefing Notes, Box 18, File # USSR, report on US Policy.

92 See Advanced Study Group’s Position on the NSC 20 Series, 12 October 1948, NACP, RG 319, Plans and Operations. 092.TS Section 7, 11–125, Case 118, VIII, 319, 154, 33. See also, Memo To Wedemeyer, 29 October 1948, NACP, RG 319, Plans and Operations.

93 The story of what happened to John Davies is a very interesting one, although there is not much written about it. The most extensive coverage can be found in David Halberstam’s, The Best and the Brightest and George Kennan, Memoirs 1950–1953, New York: Pantheon, 1977, pp. 201–15. See also, E.J. Kahn, The China Hands, New York: Penguin, 1975. For the story as it unfolded in the press, see Time magazine, 23 July 1952, vol. 58, 9; Time, 14 July 1952, vol. 60, 25; Time, 15 November 1954, vol. 64, 32; Time, 22 November 1954, vol. 64, 39; US News and World Report, 28 August 1953, 11 December 1953, 26–32; Newsweek, 23 July 1951, vol. 38, 20; Newsweek, 15 November 1954, vol. 44; and New York Times Magazine, 9 December 1953, (31 August 1969).

94 “The Long Trial of John Paton Davies,” the New York Times, 31 August 1969.

95 In March 1947, Kennan sent two copies of James Burnham’s, The Struggle for the World, to Charles Bohlen. He tells Bohlen that the book “contains as masterly an analysis of the world communist movement as I have ever seen.” He specifically asks Bohlen to make sure that Davies gets the second copy of the book and that he reads it. See George Kennan to Norris Chipman, 18 March 1947, George Kennan Papers, Box 2 Kennan Correspondences, 1939–1949, File # 1947. It is interesting to note that he would later deny reading Burnham’s work. See Chapter Seven.

96 Davies spent two years at the University of Wisconsin (1927–1929). He later transferred to Yenching University in China (1929–1930), where he spent one year before graduating from Columbia University, in 1931; here he received his B.S. degree. He joined the Foreign Service in the same year and his first appointment was to Canada. He was subsequently transferred to China in early 1933. “The Davies Record As Told By Patrick Hurley, Mr. Davies Himself, Walter Bedell Smith and Lyle Munson,” US News and World Report, Kennan Papers.

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97 See John Paton Davies Jr., Foreign And Other Affairs: A View From the Radical Center, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1964.

98 Halberstam, op. cit., pp. 339–40, 384–6.

99 Kennan, Box 3.

100 The “mandate of heaven,” was a Chinese philosophy which provided the rationale for the success or failure of a monarchy or government. It held that a given ruler had a moral right to preside over the country and that right was given by heaven. When a government fell, the Chinese believed that it had lost that right. On Davies and the “mandate of heaven,’” see DCI Historical Series, Volume 5, External Relations, Declassified Documents Reference System, CK31002952070; on the “mandate of heaven” itself, see John F. Melby, The Mandate of Heaven, Record of A Civil War, China 1945–1949, Toronto: Anchor Books, 1971.

101 In 1948, Davies won the Medal of Freedom when, along with journalist Eric Sevareid he and sixteen other passengers were forced to parachute out of their plane as it was about to crash in the midst of a jungle somewhere between China and India. After he left government service, he and his wife moved to Peru, where they set up a furniture design company. In 1962, he won the American Institute of Interior Designers International Design Award for a coffee table and leather chair. Adam Bernstein, “China Expert John P. Davies Dies: Pushed Out During McCarthy Era,” Washington Post, 24 December 1999, p. B6; and Kahn Jr., op. cit., pp. 29–30.

102 Wedemeyer, testimony to McCarren Committee, US News and World Report.

103 When Hurley left China, on 26 November 1945, he wrote a scathing letter to President Truman, in which he stated that his foreign service officers undermined all of his attempts to prevent the collapse of Communist China. Hurley later named Davies as one of five officers who compromised his policy. At a senate hearing, he also charged Davies as an “anti-imperialist,” which I am assuming, he meant was a bad thing. Patrick Hurley to Harry Truman, quoted in US News and World Report, pp. 27–8.

104 It is interesting to note that Davies did not officially become a member of the Policy Planning Staff until July of 1950. US News and World Report, ibid.

105 PPS39: To Review and Define US Policy Toward China, FRUS, 1948, vol. 8, 146–54.

106 “NSC 34: Draft Report to the NSC, US Policy Toward China,” 3 March 1949, Declassified Documents Reference System, CK 3100413822.

107 PPS39: To Review and Define US Policy Toward China, FRUS, 1948, vol. 8, 146–54.

108 Kahn, op. cit., pp. 137, 149n.

109 “NSC 34: Draft Report to the NSC, US Policy Toward China,” 3 March 1949, Declassified Documents Reference System, CK 3100413822.

110 George Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963, New York: Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 54; Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 80.

111 John F. Melby, “The Origins of the Cold War in China,” Pacific Affairs, 1968, vol. 41, no. 1, 19.

112 John Davies, “United States Policy Toward Communism,” NACP, PPS, SF, Box 8, File Communism.

113 This meeting was no doubt the result of James Forrrestal’s query at the 35th NSC meeting. He wondered if the United States had any way to get propaganda into China. See Summary of the 34th NSC Meeting, 4 March 1949, US Policy Regarding Trade With China, DDRS, CK310284719.

114 Policy Planning Staff Meeting Minutes, RG 59, Box 78, File Meeting Minutes.

115 James Webb to George Kennan, FRUS, 1949, vol. 1.

116 John Campbell Oral History Interview, HSTL, 157.

117 See also, “PPS 59: US Policy Toward the Satellite States in Eastern Europe,”

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reprinted in The State Department and the Policy Planning Staff Papers, op. cit., p. 124.

118 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 30.

119 “NSC 58, DOS Report to the NSC, US Policy Toward Soviet Satellite States in Europe,” 14 September 1949, CK3100455140. See “NSC 58: United States Policy toward the Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” FRUS, 1949, vol. 5; or Policy Planning Staff Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78.

120 The basic difference between the first two drafts of NSC 58 and the last draft is that NSC 58/2 stressed the difficulty and the problems that would occur if Eastern Europe should fall under US auspices. While NSC 58/1 says the US should always be prepared for this contingency, NSC 58/2 says this should be avoided. See “NSC 58/1 NSC Draft Statement on US Policy Toward the Satellites in Eastern Europe,” 6 December 1949, CK 3100455164 and “NSC 58 DOS Report to NSC, US Policy Toward Soviet Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” 14 September 1949, CK 3100455140.

121 PPS Staff Minutes. NACP, PPSP, RG 59, Box 78, File Meeting Minutes.

122 Lorraine Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat: The United States, Yugoslavia and the Cold War, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1997, p. 71.

123 “NSC 58: United States Policy toward the Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” FRUS, 1949, vol. 5; or Policy Planning Staff Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78.

124 See “NSC 58: United States Policy toward the Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” FRUS, 1949, vol. 5; or Policy Planning Staff Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78.

125 Kennan agreed with this strategy. See George Kennan to Wallace J. Gellman, 29 May 1951, Mudd Library, Kennan Papers, Box 29, File 2-A-1950.

126 NSC 58/2, 12 December 1949, “Report to the NSC, US Objectives With Respect to USSR, Problems to Eliminate Soviet Domination in Satellite States of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Rumania,” Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, Document # CK 3100354078. Davies and Joyce suggested that the US should accomplish this by: 1) bringing about withdrawal of Soviet troops; 2) attack weaknesses without satellite governments and mass organizations; 3) 3–4 lines deleted. They also suggested that these operations should be contingent on: 1) timing and tempo; 2) overall long range goals; 3) world position; 4) relations with USSR; and 5) vulnerability of the satellites.

127 Ibid.

128 John Campbell, Oral History Project, HSTL.

129 Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon, What Happened and Why, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, Florida: Harcourt, 1991; and Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, vol. 2, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

130 See for example, “US Policy Toward Albania,” in which an unnamed member of the State Department asks if the administration has made up its “mind as to whether our main aim is to detach the satellites from Russia or to settle in advance what their future of government should be.” “US Policy Toward, Albania,” undated, DDRS, Document # CK 3100323315.

131 Davies was in line for the position after Wisner, with Mathew Correa, Irving Brown, Norris Chipman, and Francis Stevens offered as alternate candidates. Kennan to Lovett, 30 June 1948, Box 11a, File # Political and Psychological Warfare.

132 Kennan letter to the New York Times, Kennan Papers, Box 3, Writings and Publications, 15 May 1953–31 March 1954.

133 The correct spelling of the term is pipit. However, the word was often frequently spelled “pippit.” A Tawny Pipit is a rare English bird similar to a lark that can wag its tail.

134 Of course Kennan had these operations put on hold during his bid to control OPC.

135 Halberstam, op. cit., p. 389.

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136 The central controversy, which was developed, was over who exactly Davies recommended to be part of this group, and whether or not they were communists or fellow travellers. The most recent work suggests that one of the people Davies advocated, Agnes Smedley, was a communist. See Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley, London: Oxford University Press, 2005; see also Ruth Price, “Agnes Smedley, an Example to Whose Cause,” The Chronicle Review: The Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 July 2005; Smedley was also outed on “Secrets, Spies and Atomic Spies,” NOVA, PSB, 2 February 2002. She was called one of “the most prolific female spies of the 20th century.” See also, Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of An American Radical, California: University of California, Berkeley, 1989.

137 A “cut out,” as defined by Walter Bedell Smith, is an American citizen of absolute loyalty and integrity who works for the government, but his employment is unknown to those he is dealing with. See Smith, US News and World Report, 115.

138 John Davies, “Report on Political Warfare,” 19 October 1949, NACP, RG 59, PPS, 1947–1953, Lot 64D563, Subject Files, Box 11a, File Planning.

139 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, p. 295.

140 It is unclear who called the meeting. See Kennan, Memoirs, 1950–1963, New York: Little Brown, 1967, p. 204.

141 US News and World Report, The Strange Case of John P Davies, 11 December 1953.

142 On 2 March 1948, Truman signed Executive Order 9835: Federal Employee Loyalty Program. Eventually 150 Loyalty Boards were set up between 1948 and 1958. If you were found guilty you could be fired. Three hundred and seventy eight people were eventually fired from the government.

143 Kennan draft letter to the New York Times, Kennan Papers, Box 3, Writings and Publications, 15 May 1953 to 31 March 1954, File 1-B-32, 17 December 1953.

144 Walter Bedell Smith, in “The Strange Case of John P Davies,” US News and World Report, 11 December 1953.

145 Kennan Papers, Box 3, File Writing and Publications.

146 Davies to Kennan, 2 December 1949; Kennan Papers, 2 Correspondence, 1950–1956, Box 29, 2-a, 1953, Correspondence with Other Persons in Alphabetical order.

147 John Davies, “Untitled,” 1 January 1950, NACP, RG 59, PPSP, Box 45, File Davies.

148 Ibid.

149 Today, one of the contentious debates within the new literature is whether or not Titoism had a significant impact on American policy. Historian Greg Mitrovich, argues that it did not. Conversely, historian Lorraine Lees, argues that it did. My reading of the documents suggests that, while a number of policy makers became quickly disenchanted with Titoism as a viable strategy, it was never abandoned and it continued to be an integral part of American policy. See James Webb, “NSC 58/2: US Policy toward the Soviet Satellite States in Eastern Europe,” HSTL, PSF, NSC, Box 212. For the debate over the significance of the paper, see Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin; and Lorraine Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1997.

150 I would like to thank Chester Pach for forcing me to clarify my position here.

151 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles as DCI, vol. 1, p. 29, DDEL.

152 John Davies, in Kahn, p. 262n.

153 Lilly, “Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 2, File 091.412.

154 Stephanson, op. cit., p. 177.

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5

A clinical experiment

1 The first three conditions are cited by Dougherty, however, he takes the last two points from the works of Mark Lowenthal and Anthony Codevilla. See William R. Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the Presidency, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2004, pp. 5, 19.

2 Richard Aldrich, ed., The Hidden Hand, Britain America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2001, p. 160.

3 Recently, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has acknowledged the British role in the Albanian campaign. In March of 2004 he announced that British intelligence “has recorded only two failures that will not be forgotten by history.” The first was the attempt to overthrow the Hoxha regime in the 1950s. See “Tony Blair: Our Failure With Enver Hoxha,” Korrieri (The Messenger Newspaper), 2 March 2004.

4 James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix), in Christopher Felix, A Short Course in The Secret War, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001, p. 281.

5 It is interesting to note that, while the US continues to deny that this operation took place, in August of 2002 a previously classified report on the Albanian operation was given to a group of Albanian archivists who visited the US. The report was subsequently published in an Albanian newspaper. See “The Consequences of the Attempts to Overthrow the Regime in Power in Albania,” Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette) 27 August 2002.

6 “Troublesome Albanians,” Evening Star, 26 March 1949, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 44, Clippings 1949 (3).

7 According to Saimir Lloja, the change was not really significant: Zogu was translated as “The Bird”; Zog was simply translated as “Bird.” Saimir Lloja to author, 15 November 2006.

8 Constantine F. Chekrezi, “The Strange History of Albanian Betrayal: A Communication,” 22 May 1949, Evening Star, DDEL, Lilly papers, Box 44, File 1949 (4).

9 “Troublesome Albanians,” Evening Star, 26 March 1949, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 44, Clippings 1949 (3).

10 See “The Secretary of State, George C. Marshall accuses Albania of Being Implicated in Local Greek Affairs,” Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette), 12 February 2003.

11 “Troublesome Albanians,” Evening Star, 26 March 1949, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 44, Clippings 1949 (3).

12 David Bruce to SOA, 29 June 1949, NACP, RG 59, Box 7113, Decimal File #875.00/62946.

13 Richard J. Aldrich, British Intelligence Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–1951, Routledge, London: 1992, p. 5; Beatrice Hueser, “Covert Action in British and American Concepts of Containment,” in Aldrich, British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 66–70; Nicholas Bethall, The Great Betrayal, The Untold Story of Kim Philby’s Biggest Coup, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1984, p. 37.

14 Richard Aldrich, “Secret Intelligence for a Post War World, 1944–1951,” in British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 21.

15 Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, op. cit., p. 161.

16 According to Aldrich, British Foreign Minister, Ernest Bevin, secretly opposed the Albanian operation. However, he was forced to go along because of pressure from the British Chiefs of Staff. Ibid., p. 164.

17 Ibid., p. 160.

18 Roderick Baile, “OSS-SOE Relations, Albania 1943–1944,” Intelligence and National Security, Summer 2000, vol. 1, no. 2, 5–19; see also, Aldrich, ibid., p. 81.

19 Frank Wisner, quoted in Michael Dravis, “Storming Fortress Albania,” Intelligence and National Security, 1992, vol. 7, no. 2, p. 432.

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20 Robins Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. p. 396.

21 Dravis, op. cit., pp. 430–1, Peter Grose, Operation Rollback, America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000, p. 156.

22 Kim Philby, My Silent War, London: Grove Press, 1968.

23 Felix, Christopher (James McCargar), A Short Course in The Secret War, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001, p. 48.

24 Beatrice Heuser, Western “Containment” Policies in the Cold War, The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 71.

25 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys; America’s Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, p. 224.

26 Susan L. Carruthers, “Between Two Camps: Eastern Bloc ‘Escapees’ and the Cold War Borderlands,” American Quarterly, 2005, vol. 57, no. 3, p. 915.

27 Wallace Carroll to Gordon Gray, 28 December 1951, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 58, File Planning 1951 (2).

28 The first policy paper on the refugees was: SANACC 395: Utilization of Refugees from the USSR in the United States National Interest. PPS 54: Policy Relating to Defection and Defectors from Soviet Power, which was drafted in 1948. See PPS 54: Policy Relating to Defection and Defectors from Soviet Power, NACP, RG 59, PPS Decimal File, Box 9, File Displaced Persons, 1948–1949. According to the Tirana Observer, however, during 1948 three-hundred-and-two Albanians were trained in an American camp in West Germany. The leader of this group went on to form the Free Albania Committee in 1949, Tirana Observer, 13 May 2006.

29 “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” 30 April 1950, NACP, RG 59, PPS 1947–1953, Lot File 64D563, Subject Files, Box 11a, File Policy and Psychological Warfare, 1947–1950.

30 Wayne Jackson, “Allen Dulles as DCI,” Chapter I, p. 52. DDEL.

31 Hersh, op. cit., p. 226.

32 Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effect on the Cold War, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, p. 100.

33 VOA report, 4 March 1950, HSTL, PSB, Box 3, File VOA 040. See also, Llewellyn E. Thompson to George Butler, 7 April 1948, RG 59, Box 11a, Political and psychological warfare, 1948–1950.

34 Apparently, Poole was Wisner’s third choice: George Marshal and Henry Stimpson declined the offer. See Lucas, Freedoms War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 67. On Poole see, Lorraine Lees, “DeWitt Clinton Poole, The Foreign Nationalities Branch and Political Intelligence,” Intelligence and National Security, Winter 2000, vol. 15, no. 4, 81–103.

35 Carruthers, op. cit., pp. 913–14.

36 Hersh, op. cit., p. 257.

37 Hersh, op. cit., p. 258.

38 Lucas, op. cit., p. 2.

39 Hersh, op. cit., p. 259.

40 Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000, p. 18.

41 The History of Psychological Warfare, Chapter Two, Initial War Time Planning and Operations, Edward Lilly Papers, DDEL, Box 47, File # 3.

42 Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2006, p. 31.

43 Alan L. Heil Jr., Voice of America: A History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

44 Edward Lilly, “A Short History of Psychological Warfare,” DDEL, WHO, NSC Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Secretariat, Box 6, File Lilly Report.

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45 Ibid., p. 49.

46 “Voice of America,” the New York Times, 7 May 1948, HSTL, WHCF, Box 166, File OF 20-E.

47 Robert Holt and Robert van de Velde, Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 206.

48 Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 38.

49 Ibid., p. 34.

50 Ibid., p. 51.

51 This same problem faced American psychological warriors during World War II. See Edward Lilly, “History of Psychological Warfare,” Chapters I and II, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 48, Folder #5.

52 Edward Lilly, “A Short History of Psychological Warfare,” DDEL, WHO, NSC Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Secretariat, Box 6, File Lilly Report.

53 Edward Lilly, “A Short History of Psychological Warfare,” DDEL, WHO, NSC Papers, 1948–1961, OCB Secretariat, Box 6, File Lilly Report.

54 “Policy Handbook for RFE,” 30 November 1951, DDRS, Document # CK 3100216219-CK 3100216222.

55 Wayne Jackson, “Allen Dulles as DCI,” Chapter III, p. 99, DDEL.

56 Sig Michelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story Behind Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, New York: Praeger, 1983, pp. 1–2.

57 Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000, p. 23.

58 See as an example, Karl Mautner, Director of the US High Commissioner in Germany, 1/2/53, “Eastern Germans said to be bored by Voice,” NACP, RG 59, Box 2456, File #511.624b/2–353.

59 Puddington, pp. xi, 2.

60 Ibid, p. 38.

61 Joseph Grew, in Emmett Washburn, Minutes of the Princeton Meeting. Washburn to Eisenhower, Minutes of the Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, DDEL, CD Jackson Papers, Box 83.

62 “Radio Free Europe Credited With Train’s Escape,” Washington Post, 14 September 1951; and Memo for the Record, “Exploitation of RFE by Czech Engineer, (CASEY JONES) Incident,” 18 September 1951, HSTL, PSB.

63 Wallace Dowling, Deputy High Commissioner, Vienna, Reaction to Hungarian Refugee Crisis, NACP, RG 59, Decimal File, 1950–1954, Box 2462, File 644/1/1–2952.

64 DDRS, Document #CK 3100140455.

65 By 30 November 1953, 7,316 refugees were resettled and 14,210 still needed help. Report on the Effectiveness of The Escapee Program. Prepared by the Office of Administration, White House, 23 December 1953, DDRS Document # CK 3100018473.

66 Ibid., Document # CK3100018470.

67 Charles Norberg, Memorandum visit to RFE, 28 January 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 3, File 040 RFE; see also, Michelson, pp. 36–7.

68 Michelson, op. cit., p. 40.

69 Cord Meyer, Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA, Washington: University Press of America, 1980, p. 112.

70 Grose, op. cit., 128.

71 Simpson, op. cit. p. 129.

72 “CIA and British MI6 in Albania,” Albanian-Canadian League Information Service, http://www.albc.com/aclis/modules.php?name+news&file=article&sid=436 (accessed 6 September 2005).

73 Albania, undated, NACP, RG 59, Decimal File, Albania, 1945–1950, Box 7113,

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File # 875.00/1249; Ernest Bevin, Albania, 14 September 1949, NACP, RG 59, Box 7113, File # 875.00/9–1449; David Bruce to SOS, 21 July 1949, NACP RG, Box 7113, File # 875/7–2149.

74 According to Saimir Lloja, the relationship between the British and Kupi was strained. After World War II had ended, British forces had abandoned a number of Albanians whom they had worked with during the war. They were left to their own devices when Hoxha seized power, and civil war quickly broke out. Saimir Lloja to Sarah-Jane Corke, 15 November 2006.

75 John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War Two, New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986, p. 46.

76 McCargar, op. cit., p. 113.

77 Dashnor Kaloci, “The Secret Account of an Albania Diplomat, The Embassy in Rome: How the Albanian Reaction is Organized,” Gazeta Shqiptare (the Albanian Gazette), 2 May 2005.

78 Hersh, op. cit., p. 265.

79 Bardha, pp. 67–71.

80 Prados, op. cit., p. 50.

81 Dashnor Koloci, Miftar Spahija, “From the Mountains of Kukes to a Professor in an American University,” Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette), 7 October 2004.

82 It is important to note that the Albanian government believed the Italians were working with the Americans on this operation, however, there is no other evidence available to support this assumption. According to the Albanian Internal Ministry, ten paramilitary groups sponsored by the US, Greece and Italy, conducted operations against the Hoxha regime. Each group was characterized by their leader or their location in Albania. They were listed as the groups of: Ethem Cako, Zenel Cane, Nikoll Mark Nikaj, Dibra, Kukës, Kruja, Vlora, Izet Vrazdo, Shefki Hysa, and Alush Lleshanaka. “Who Were the Ten Paramilitary Commandos,” Tirana Observer, 13 May 2006.

83 “Aid Memoir, Office of European Affairs,” NACP, RG 59, Box 7113, File #875.00/6–1647; and G.T.I. Cromie, Albanian Political Developments, Memorandum of Conversation with Mr. Economy-Gouras, Greek Minister, NACP, RG 59, Box 7113, File # 875.00/4–4829.

84 Although this document is undated, based on the information contained in it, it had to be written after October of 1952. It is also unclear which intelligence agency produced it – it was given to a group of Albanian archivists who visited the US in August of 2002. It was subsequently published in an Albanian newspaper under the title “The consequences of the attempts to overthrow the regime in power in Albania,” Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette), 27 August 2002.

85 Beatrice Heuser was the first scholar to report these operations. See also, Peter Grose, Operation Rollback, p. 153; and Aldrich, op. cit., p. xx.

86 The author of the report concludes that the United States should speak less of liberation and more about enabling the East Europeans to select their own form of government, (no name), US Policy Toward Albania, undated, DDDRS, Document # CK 3100323315-CK310032316.

87 Daily Digest, 30 March 1951, HSTL, RG NSC/CIA, Box 4, File OCI.

88 US Policy Toward Albania, Department of State, undated. The document refers to De Gasperi and Tripartite Defense Pact. Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group (hereafter DDRS), DDRS, CK3100323315-CK31003233316.

89 Ibid., DDRS, CK3100323313.

90 Albania, undated, NACP, RG 59, Decimal File, Albania, 1945–1950, Box 7113, File # 875.00/1249; Ernest Bevin, Albania, 14 September 1949, NACP, RG 59, Box 7113, File # 875.00/9–1449; David Bruce to SOS, 21 July 1949, NACP RG, Box 7113, File # 875/7–2149.

91 “CIA Report ORE 71–49: Current Situation in Albania, Strengths and Weaknesses

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of the Hoxha Regime,” 15 December 1949, CIA Memo #218, HSTL, CIA/NSC, Box 2, File CIA 218, Memo 1949.

92 Ibid.

93 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles as DCI, vol. I, p. 15, DDEL.

94 Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, p. 323.

95 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 41.

96 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles as DCI, vol. I, p. 15, DDEL.

97 According to Arthur Darling, Hillenkoetter had taken the preliminary steps to consolidate the Office of Special Operations and the Office of Policy Coordination in a new Operations Division, but he was unsuccessful. Arthur Darling, The Central Intelligence Agency as an Instrument of Government to 1950, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1990, p. 385.

98 John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars, CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War Two, New York: William Morrow, 1986, p. 34.

99 Karalekas, op. cit., p. 42. In the Lilly report, he makes a point, which was also subsequently crossed out, that given OPC’s early freedom of action, mechanisms were subsequently put in place to diminish this. See Lilly, HSTL, RG PSB, Box 15, File 091.412.

100 Grose, Operation Rollback, op. cit., p. 43.

101 McCargar, op. cit., p. 280.

102 Hersh, op. cit., pp. 43, 152, 245; and Thomas, op. cit., p. 34.

103 Hersh, op. cit., p. 255.

104 Hersh, op. cit., p. 154.

105 Barrett, op. cit., 73.

106 Grose, Gentleman Spy, op. cit., p. 355.

107 The year was 1950, Testimony of Paramilitary Agents, Mihal Prifti, Account of the Vice Minister of Foreign Relations of Albania, for the President of the Common Assembly of the United Nations, Padilla Nbrovo, Gazeta Shqiptare, 14 February 2005, Archive of MPJ, File 260, 1951.

108 Bardha, op. cit., p. 69.

109 Bardha, op. cit., p. 62. There is some debate among scholars about the number of men and boats used in this first operation. Some scholars argue that there was one boat carrying nine men, while others suggest there were two boats carrying twenty men. See Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars and the Secret War, 1939–1961, New Haven: Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 398. Most recently, historian Richard Aldrich has stated that there were twenty-six men who took part in this first operation. See Aldrich, op. cit., p. 163.

110 See also, Testimony of Muhamet Hoxha, Mihal Prifti, Account of the Vice Minister of Foreign Relations of Albania, for the President of the Common Assembly of the United Nations, Padilla Nbrovo, Archive of MPJ, File 260, 1951. Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albania Gazette), 14 February 2005. Ekrem Bardha, Far Yet Near Albania, Tirana: Onufri, 2003; and Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors, Covert Air Operations Against the USSR, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2005, p. 26.

111 The Way the American Officers Trained Us in Germany, Testimony of paramilitary agent Muhamet Hoxha, Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette), 14 February 2005.

112 Peebles, op. cit., p. 27.

113 Peebles, p. 28.

114 Aldrich, op. cit., pp. 11, 316.

115 Central Intelligence Agency, Albanian Refugee Organizations, February 15, 1952, DDRS Document #CK3100300396-CK310030097.

116 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 163.

117 Ekrem Bardha, Far Yet Near Albania, Tirana: Onufri, 2003, p. 113.

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118 Although Sami Bardha survived this operation, he entered Albania again in 1950 and was captured. He was shot three years later. Ekrem Bardha, Far Yet Near Albania, Tirana: Onufri, 2003. See also, Christopher Felix (James McCargar), A Short Course in the Secret War, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001, p. 142.

119 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 162.

120 Peebles, op. cit. 29.

121 Ibid., 33.

122 Hersh, op. cit., p. 266.

123 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Boston: Little Brown, 1984, p. 156.

124 Ibid., p. 155.

125 Ibid., p. 155.

126 Dashnor Kaloci, “The way the ones that fled to Greece were organized.” Gazeta Shqiptare (The Albanian Gazette), 7 October 2004.

127 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 164.

128 Prados, op. cit., pp. 50–1.

129 Winks, op. cit., p. 398.

130 Thomas Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1981.

131 Beatrice Heuser, Western “Containment” Policies in the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 71. S. Peters, 5 April 1951, “International Information and Educational Exchange Program: Country Paper For Albania,” NACP, RG 59, Cultural Affairs, Box 2471, File # 511.67/4B4/2–353.

132 Dravis, op. cit., p. 434.

133 S. Peters, 5 April 1951, “International Information and Educational Exchange Program, Country Paper for Albania,” NACP, RG 59, Cultural Affairs, Box 2471, File # 511.67/4–551; and VOA Listening in Albania, 11/12/1951, RG 59, Decimal File Box 2471, File # 511.674/11–1252.

134 Hersh, op. cit., p. 271.

135 Winks, op. cit., p. 398.

136 VOA Listening in Albania, 12 November 1952, NACP, RG 59, Decimal File, Box 2471, File # 511.674/11–1252.

137 Winks, p. 399.

6

A few martyrs

1 Although the traditional argument has always been that Truman asked for a reassessment of national security policy because of external factors, Bruce Cumings has argued that internal factors played the decisive role. See Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, The Roaring of the Cataract, vol. II, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992. See also, Benjamin Fordham, “Domestic Politics, International Pressure and Policy Change: The Case for NSC 68,” Journal of Conflict Studies, Spring 1977, vol. 17, no. 1, p. 128.

2 W.H. Godel, “Preliminary Estimate on the Effectiveness of U.S. Psychological Strategy,” PSB Staff Study, HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File #091.412.

3 During the early fifties, Godel handled defense liaison with the CIA. However, according to Wayne Jackson, Frank Wisner never trusted him. Between 1951 and 1957 Godel was not allowed into Wisner’s OPC’s buildings, and was later jailed for misappropriation of funds. Jackson states that Godel was always “preoccupied with conniving to advance his personal interests, which predisposed him against any give and take with his colleagues.” Wayne Jackson, “Allen Dulles As DCI,” Chapter III, p. 32.

4 “NSC 10/2: National Security Directive on Office of Special Projects,” in Michael Warner, ed., The CIA Under Harry Truman, CIA Cold War Records, CIA History Staff, Washington: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1994, p. 215.

Page 203

5 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412, p. 43.

6 Ibid., p. 45.

7 Lilly, op. cit., p. 46; see also, John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, p. 220.

8 Shane McCartney, Minutes of the SANNAC Subcommittee Meeting, RG 263, Box 23, File HS/HC 291.

9 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412.

10 Ibid.

11 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, DDRS, CK 31000148828.

12 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412, p. 70.

13 Ibid., p. 72.

14 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 58, File S/P Meeting Minutes.

15 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412, p. 72.

16 Ibid., p. 71.

17 “Summary of Psychological Warfare: Arrangements Within the US Government Since World War II,” undated, DDEL, WHO, OSANSA, 1952–1961, NSC, PPS, Series, Box 3, File NSC 127/1 Psychological Warfare Planning.

18 Edward Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board,” in Vincitoria L. Gaetano, ed., Studies in Modern History, New York: St. Johns Press, 1968, p. 362. One of the first programs contemplated by the NPSB was the use of weather balloons to deliver propaganda to the Soviet people. This came two years after Thomas Cassidy had first tried to get this program up and running, only to have his plan vetoed by George Kennan. It is interesting to note that the balloon project was still floundering almost a year later, as concerns over Soviet reactions continued to prevent its execution. PSB Staff Meeting Minutes, 14 April 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 27, File 337.

19 “NSC 74/1: The National Psychological Effort,” 10 July 1950, HSTL, PSF, Box 210, File M77 or NACP, RG 218, Box 204, File CCS 385, [12].

20 Raymond Allen, “Psychological and Political Strategy Re-examined,” 25 February 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 29, File 350.000.

21 Holt and Van de Velde, “Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy,” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, p. 207.

22 Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune, Toronto: Little Brown & Co., 1984, p. 159; see also Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 47.

23 “NSC 68: A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive,” FRUS, vol. 1, p. 241.

24 Wallace R. Deuel, “America’s New Policy Planner,” Washington Star, 15 January 1950.

25 Paul Nitze, “Hearings Before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery,” 86 Congress, 26 May 1960 to 27 May 1960, Part IV, Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate.

26 Samuel F. Wells, “Sounding the Tocsin: NSC 68 and the Soviet Threat,” International Security, 4/2, Fall 1979, 116.

27 Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 55–8.

28 Nitze, in Hersh, p. 285. In a letter to me, Nitze also claimed that Kennan was a much more ardent supporter of liberation than he ever was. Paul Nitze to Sarah-Jane Corke, 1 June 1995.

29 “NSC 68: A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive,” 7 April 1950; in Ernest May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC 68, New York: Bedford Books, 1993.

Page 204

30 Ibid., 41.

31 “NSC 68: A Report to the President,” 7 April 1950, FRUS, 1950, 1, 241.

32 Ibid.

33 Bruce Cumings, op. cit., p. 165.

34 Ibid., p. 166.

35 It appears as though, from about mid-1949 until mid-1950 Acheson even back-tracked from Kennan’s original concept of containment. Walter Lippmann, for example, saw his speech on 12 January 1950 as backsliding from Kennan’s policy of confronting the Russians with unalterable counterforce. See Walter Lippmann, “After Containment, What?” Washington Post, 1 January 1950.

36 Ibid.

37 Scott Lucas, “Campaigns of Truth: The Psychological Strategy Board,” International History Review, Summer 1997, vol. 18, no. 2, 10. Truman was aware of this shift toward a strategy of rollback. See Memorandum for the President, NSC Meeting, 2 November 1950, HSTL, PSF, Box 220, File Memorandum, 1950.

38 Even Cumings is ambiguous on this point. Although he attributes rollback to James Burnham, he concedes that he never used the term. See Cumings, op. cit., pp. 119, 121.

39 See especially, Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

40 Cumings, op. cit., p. 31.

41 See Charles Hulnick, Memo for the record, “Policy Guidance,” 19 April 1950, in Michael Warner, ed., The CIA under Harry Truman, CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1994, p. 323. See also, Gerald Miller, OPC History. FOIA request to author.

42 Miller (emphasis in original), p. 46.

43 Ibid., p. 47.

44 Frank Wisner to the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence Coordination, Re-PSB, 28 May 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 334 PSB Staff Coordination. See also, John Davies, 16 October 1950, Annex B, NSC 68, NACP, RG 59, Box 45, File Davies.

45 Miller, op. cit., p. 16.

46 “NSC 68: Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive,” FRUS, 1950, vol. 1, p. 241.

47 Murphy to SOS From Frankfurt, September 19, 1947, NACP, RG 59, Box 6569, File 3, 860E.00/9–1847.

48 Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence, Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 2002, p. 143; and Hersh, op. cit., p. 248.

49 Murphy to SOS From Frankfurt, 19 September 1947, NACP, RG 59, Box 6569, File 3, 860E.00/9–1847.

50 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pp. 199–249.

51 Ibid, pp. 248–9.

52 John Prados, The Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II, New York: William Morrow, 1986, p. 56.

53 Harry Rositzke, The CIA’s Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage and Covert Action, Boulder: Westview, 1977, op. cit., p. 169.

54 Prados, p. 35.

55 Rositzke, op. cit, p, 20.

56 Prados, op. cit., p. 55. Harry Rositzke argues that many of the demands made by the military during these years were imprudent. One Army colonel, for example, told OPC he wanted an agent with a radio on “every goddamn airfield between Berlin and the Urals.” An Air Force representative asked for a Soviet TU-4 strategic bomber, pilot included. Rositzke, p. 21.

Page 205

57 Rositzke, op. cit., p. 21.

58 Peebles, op. cit., p. 22.

59 Rositzke, p. 167.

60 There is some controversy over how long American covert operations in the Ukraine lasted. Beatrice Hueser says the operations took place from 1951–1954, Richard Aldrich says they continued to take place until 1957. Aldrich, “Hidden Hand,” 143: See Beatrice Heuser, Western “Containment” Policies and the Cold War: The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 76.

61 Peter Grose, Operation Rollback America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000, p. 181.

62 David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA versus KGB in the Cold War, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 105.

63 Grose, op. cit., p. 165.

64 Journalist Hanson Baldwin writing in The New York Times, blew these operations in July of 1948. David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story From Truman to Kennedy, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2005, p. 42.

65 Grose, p. 41.

66 According to Rositzke, most of these agents stayed in place until the mid-fifties. At this point, they were “released” from their duties. Rositzke, op. cit., p. 167.

67 According to John Prados, the Counter-Intelligence Corps of the US Army came into contact with a group of Ukrainian partisans in the fall of 1947. Prados, op. cit., pp. 13–14.

68 Grose, op. cit., p. 167.

69 Rositzke, op. cit., p. 169.

70 James McCargar (aka Christopher Felix), Christopher Felix, A Short Course in The Secret War, Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 2001, p. 59.

71 Burton Hersh, op. cit., p. 279.

72 Rositzke, op. cit., p. 170.

73 Grose, op. cit., pp. 176–9.

74 Ibid., p. 281.

75 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 166.

76 Grose, pp. 34–5.

77 Prados, p. 37.

78 Stewart Steven, Operation Splinter Factor: The Untold Story of America’s Most Secret Cold War Intelligence Operation, J.B. Lippincott Co.: New York, 1974.

79 Richard Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, 176–9.

80 C.B. Marshall to Paul Nitze, 29 July 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, Political and Psychological Warfare.

81 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.412, p. 50.

82 Hearings Before the Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, 86 Congress, 26–27 May 1960, Part VI, Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate.

83 James Burnham, The Coming Defeat of Communism, New York: The John Day Company, 1950, p. 9n. According to Burnham, The Coming Defeat of Communism was a “concrete extension” of the argument he made in The Struggle for the World, which was published in 1947.

84 Ibid., pp. 136–8.

85 Ibid., p. 27.

86 Burnham’s connection with OPC is interesting and it has only recently been taken seriously. Unfortunately, there is very little information on his work within OPC. Although, in his new biography of Burnham, historian Daniel Kelly offers some information, a more detailed discussion is needed, especially on the years prior to 1949 where he appeared to have someone “in the know” feeding him information on the failure to develop a coherent strategy for waging the Cold War. See Daniel

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Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle For the World, Wilmington: ISA books, 2002, pp. 27, 137–41, 147, 222.

87 He equates fomenting an armed revolt in Eastern Europe to the Warsaw Uprising. He argues that there is a moral principle here. Dulles, War or Peace, London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1950, p. 246.

88 On the rhetoric of liberation, see Chris Tudda, “Reenacting the Story of Tantalus: Eisenhower, Dulles and the Failed Rhetoric of Liberation,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, 2005, 3–35.

89 “Burnham versus Kennan,” Washington Post, 25 March 1950.

90 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 361.

91 Ibid., pp. 363–4.

92 Curtis Peebles, Twilight Warriors, Covert Air Operations Against the USSR, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2005, p. 77.

93 James Miller, A History of OPC, FOIA request to author, p. 17.

94 Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men, Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p. 51.

95 Aldrich, op. cit., pp. 280, 285.

96 Peebles, op. cit., p. 83.

97 Peebles, op. cit., p. 78.

98 According to Richard Aldrich, Frank Wisner had already developed a small operation designed to keep nationalist resistance alive before the Korean War broke out. Aldrich, op. cit., p. 294.

99 Peebles, op. cit., pp. 85–8.

100 Between October 1950 and December 1952, Donovan gave a series of speeches in which he advocated the use of covert operations to win the Cold War. For the most part, these speeches were covered by the New York Times. See for example, “William Donovan urges Better Coordination of war techniques,” the New York Times, 10 October 1950, p. 3, column 2; “Donovan Urges the United States to Adopt Subversive Techniques,” the New York Times, 3 March 1951, p. 15, column 2; “Donovan Says US Must Win Cold War,” the New York Times, 13 November 1951, p. 11, column 1; and “Donovan Proposes US Aid guerrilla forces in USSR Block,” The New York Times, 10 December 1952, p. 2, column 3.

101 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 298.

102 Ibid., p. 299.

103 Peebles, op. cit., pp. 89–91.

104 Peebles, op. cit., pp. 99–105.

105 NSC 68/1, 20 September 1950, NACP, RG 273, Box 9, File NSC 68/1.

106 Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, NACP, RG 263, Chapter 4, 3–4.

107 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, S/P, Box 78, File 78–64. See also Omar Bradley to George Marshall (Secretary of Defense), 15 January 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, 61–2; and JCS Study, “Review of Current World Situation and the Ability of the Forces Being Maintained to Meet United States Commitments, 15 January 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, 74–5. They argued to a lesser extent, so too were Hungary and Poland. See JCS Supplementary Study, “Review of Current World Situation,” 13 April 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, p. 75.

108 Immediately before assuming his new position, Smith had surgery for an ulcer. During the operation half of his stomach was removed and, according to Smith’s doctor, the “nutritional imbalance” which resulted, only fueled his short temper. John R. Tietjen, MD to Montague, “Health of General Walter Bedell Smith,” 6 April 1970, NACP, RG 263, Box 2, File HS/HC 400, Item 19. See also, Kenneth J. Campbell, “Bedell Smith’s Imprint on the CIA,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence, 45–61.

Page 207

109 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles as DCI, DDEL, p. 18.

110 Miller, op. cit., p. 41.

111 Ibid., p. 42.

112 Wayne Jackson, Allen Dulles as DCI, DDEL, p. 18.

113 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB Box 22, File 091.412.

114 Aldrich, op. cit., p. 87.

115 Hersh, op. cit., p. 289. According to Wayne Jackson, in November of 1950 Dulles had been designated a special consultant by Smith. The general consensus was that he would be appointed Director for Operations, however, the appointment never actually occurred – Jackson believes, because the “designation was too candid.” It was not until January of 1951 that he was officially appointed Deputy Director for Plans. During this period he worked full time for OPC but did so without any compensation. In August of 1951 he received his first paycheck, thereafter his secretary would have to remind him to cash it. Wayne Jackson, Allen Welsh Dulles (as Director of Central Intelligence), NACP, RG 263, Box Dulles History.

116 Leonard Mosley, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978, p. 273.

117 Ludwell L. Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October 1950–February 1953, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, p. 22.

118 Ibid., pp. 23, 208, 214n, 264.

119 Agenda Notes, 27 August 1951, CREST, NACP.

120 Smith, PSB Meeting Minutes, 5 May 1952, HSTL. RG PSB, Box 13, File 091.411Smith, PSB Meeting Minutes, ibid. See also, Montague, 209. Mitrovich tells us that part of Smith’s concern also revolved around the competing strategic visions of Titoism and rollback. Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 113.

121 Frank Wisner, “Briefing to the PSB on Some 10/5 Problems,” 7 May 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 13, File #091.411. See also, Montague, ibid., p. 203.

122 Wisner to the Assistant Director of the Office of Intelligence Coordination, PSB, “Re-PSB,” 2/28/51, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 334, PSB Staff Coordination.

123 Schwaub, “Background Comments of the Bureau of the Budget on NSC 68,” FRUS, 1950, vol. 1, 350.

124 NSC 10/5, in Michael Warner, op. cit., p. 438.

125 PSB Meeting Minutes, 8 May 1952, HSTL, PSB Box 13, File #091.411.

126 See NSC 10/5, in Warner, op. cit., p. 438.

127 Prados, op. cit., p. 81.

128 Allan Dulles, comments transcribed by Abbot Washburn, Abbot Washburn to Dwight Eisenhower, Minutes of the Princeton Meeting on Psychological Warfare: Development of an Integrated United States Psychological Warfare Campaign, DDEL, RG CD Jackson Papers, Box 83, File Princeton Meeting.

7

Ye strategic concept for ye cold warre

1 Ye Old Strategic Concept for Ye Cold Warre (Being a discussion on dyverse subjecks) [sic], no date, PSB. Box 23, File 334.

2 Edward Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950,” HSTL, PSB, Box 22, File 091.411.

3 J. Mohler, 1 July 1951, “Proposal for Government Wide Uniform Planning for Psychological Operations,” HSTL, PSB, Box 31, File 381.

4 In this chapter, my thinking has been influenced by the “bureaucratic politics” paradigm. However, I have not openly employed it, because of its tendency to simplify the debate by suggesting that competing bureaucracies played the most pivotal role in the evolution of strategy. The debates over American strategy often crossed bureaucratic lines. See J. Garry Glifford, “Bureaucratic Politics,” in Michael J.

Page 208

Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 142. See Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of A Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, New York: Longman, 1999. For a recent critique of the paradigm, see Amy Zegart, Flawed by Design, The Evolution of the CIA, JCS and NSC, California: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 19–21.

5 Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board, Studies in Modern History, p. 371.

6 Harry S. Truman, “The Psychological Strategy Board,” 4 April 1951, NACP, RG 59, PPS, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare, 1950–1953.

7 Harry S. Truman, “The Psychological Strategy Board,” 4 April 1951, NACP, RG 59, PPS, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare, 1950–1953.

8 Lilly, “American Psychological Operations, 1945–1950.” HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File 091.412. There was one influential group who lobbied hard against Gray’s appointment. In 1948, Gray had refused to comply with the President’s order abolishing segregation of the Army. Two years later, during his tenure at the University of North Carolina, he tried to block the admittance of African-American students. In response, the NAACP took an active stand against his nomination arguing, “democracy can be effectively sold at home and abroad only by one who believes in democracy without reservation.” HSTL, Official File, 1289–95, Box, File D Miscellaneous.

9 According to Gray, when Smith approached him for the President and asked him to take the job, Smith told him that Truman wanted him to become the next DCI. Oral History Interview with Gordon Gray, Washington, DC, 18 June 1973, HSTL, B-File, PSB.

10 To make matters worse, the PSB staff was housed in a number of different buildings. Gordon Gray’s office was in the CIA building and other members were housed in the State Department. See Memo For the Record, EPL Conversation with Charles Johnson, Administrative Office, PSB, 1 November 1951, DDEL, Lilly Papers, Box 51, File PSB Historical (1).

11 C.B. Marshall, Oral History Interview, Washington, June 1989, HSTL, B-File PSB.

12 C.B. Marshall to Nitze, “Minutes of a Meeting in the Secretaries Office on NSC Reorganization,” NACP, RG 59, Box 11, File NSC.

13 Ibid.

14 C.B. Marshall to Paul Nitze, 3 April 1952, NACP, RG 59, S/P Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare; “PSB: Selected Aspects of Its Concept,” Bureau of the Budget, HSTL, PSB, Box 31.

15 Interview with CB Marshall, HSTL, PSB, B-File.

16 John Sherman, 6 July 1951, “PSB: Functions, Jurisdictions and Authority,” HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File #334 and “Definition of Psychological Operations,” 24 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.412.

17 C.B. Marshall to Nitze, 29 May 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

18 (No name), “Definition of Psychological Activities,” View 1, 3 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.412.

19 John Magruder, “Concept of the Organization to Provide Dynamic Psychological Operations in the Cold War,” 10 May 1951. See also, Lilly, “One Year History of the PSB,” DDEL, RG PSB. 6.

20 Marshall to Nitze, 21 May 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a File Political and Psychological Warfare. See also, Marshall to Nitze, 21 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 334.

21 James Webb, 31 August 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

22 Paul Nitze to James Webb, 9 April 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

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23 Marshall to Nitze, 21 May 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare. See also, Marshall to Nitze, 21 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 334.

24 Marshall to Nitze, 29 July 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

25 John Ferguson to James Webb, 27 October 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, Political and Psychological Warfare.

26 The State Department later argued that Gray refused to resolve the situation because he knew it would be resolved in favor of the narrow view. See Marshall to Nitze, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

27 John Ferguson, “Functions of the PSB,” 26 March 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare; Anspacher, “Comments on Cox’s ‘Purpose of the PSB,’” 27 March 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 334.

28 James Webb, 31 August 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

29 Marshall to Nitze, 21 September 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 49, File Marshall.

30 This point was made in NSC 10/5. See also, “Definition of Psychological Operations,” 24 July 1951.

31 Gallantier, in Washburn, Minutes of the Princeton Meeting. Washburn to Eisenhower, “Minutes of the Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton,” DDEL, CD Jackson Papers, Box 83.

32 Frank Wisner, to the Assistant Director’s Office of Intelligence Coordination. “Re-PSB,” 28 May 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334, Staff Coordination. See also, “Unofficial Suggestions for OPC Members Ad Hoc Committee, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File #334.

33 PSB Planning Sequence, 16 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 31, File 381. It was at this time that a discussion was initiated on whether NSC 10/2 should be changed to a less restrictive definition. CIA representative to PSB (deleted), “Possible Problem Areas for the PSB,” 23 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File #334.

34 Minutes of Panel “B,” Psychological Strategy Board, 28 August 1951, Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, 2006.

35 Draft #3, Terms of Reference for PSB Ad hoc Panel “B” outlined, 24 August 1951, Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, 2006, Document # CK 3100325637.

36 Schaetzal was later replaced by L. Horowitz, from the State Department, because the presidential charter governing the PSB forbid the board to deal with open economic activities. On the panel there were two others from the CIA, although their names have been deleted. See George Morgan to Edmond Taylor, Panel B, 21 November 1952; and Organization of Panel B, 12 September 1951.

37 “Psychological Strategy Board Work Assignments,” 30 August 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334, Panel B.

38 Meeting Minutes of Panel B, 28 August 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334, Panel B.

39 Minutes of Panel “B,” Psychological Strategy Board, 28 August 1951, Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, 2006.

40 Paul Davis, Acting Assistant Director, “Office of Plans of Policy,” Memoradum for the Director, 24 September 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

41 See Gordon Gray, “Terms and Reference for Ad Hoc Panel B,” HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

42 J.R. Schaetzel, Special Assistant to the Secretary for Economic Affairs, “Further Work on Panel B,” 11 September 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

43 “Robert Cutler Comments on Panel ‘B’ approach to analysis of NSC papers,” 4 October 1951, DDRS Document # CK3100329287.

44 Memorandum to Colonel Philby, Colonel Davis, Mr. Sherman, Mr. Philips, Comments on Sub-panel Three Approach to Analysis, 4 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

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45 Paul C. Davis, “Status Report on Panel B,” 24 September 1951, Declassified Documents Reference System, Gale Group, 2006, Document # CK31003111202; see also, Minutes of Phase B Panel Meeting, 14 March 1952, DDRS; and Psychological Strategy Board Panel B, US Policy Vis-à-vis Soviet Eastern European Satellites, 16 May 1952, DDRS.

46 See “Psychological Strategy Board Panel ‘B’ U.S. Policy Vis-à-vis Soviet Eastern Europe.” 16 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

47 Meeting Minutes of Panel B, 28 August 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334, Panel B.

48 PSB, Panel B, Group III, “Psychological Support for National Policy vis-à-vis the USSR,” 1 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 224, File 334.

49 As Wayne Jackson pointed out in his CIA in-house history of Allen Dulles, there remains some debate over where “this rather esoteric concept [the strategic concept] came from.” However, the idea seems to have originated from DCI Smith. As we discussed in the last chapter, Smith was one of the primary proponents of a more unified Cold War strategy. See Gordon Gray to Charles McCarthy, “Organization and Functions of the Director’s Office and Staff of the PSB: A Brief Presented to the Board by the Director at a Meeting at CIA,” 26 November 1951. See Also Wayne Jackson, “Allen Dulles as DCI,” covert operations, NACP, 18.

50 He later went on to become the Washington editor for the New York Times. Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 149.

51 Kennan had retired to Princeton, and Burnham was heavily involved in the Eisenhower election campaign. Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy For Subverting the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 120. Kennan was supposedly kept informed of the group’s discussions and was said to have agreed with their approach. PSB Meeting Minutes, HSTL, PSB, Box 27, File 337.

52 Leslie Stevens to Gordon Gray, “Problems for the PSB,” 21 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 218.

53 Admiral Leslie Stevens, “Method of Approach to Strategic Psychological Plan,” 31 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334; see also T.R. Philbin, Memorandum, 6 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

54 Admiral Stevens, “Method of Approach to the Strategic Psychological Plan,” 31 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

55 John Sherman, “National Policy and/or Strategy, Aims, Purposes, Objectives, Course of Action and Programs,” 31 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.412 drafts.

56 These ranged from Containment, to Titoism, Rollback and Liberation. See for example, Frederick Barghoorn, “Notes on a Strategic Concept,” HSTL, PSB, 23, File # 334; William Kennedy to Gordon Gray, “Suggestions for a Program for Psychological Strategy,” 5 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

57 Ye Old Strategic Concept for Ye Cold Warre (Being a discussion on dyverse subjecks) [sic], no date, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

58 Wallace Carroll, “Our Strategic Objectives,” 31 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box, 23, File 334.

59 Ibid.

60 Although there is no name on the report, a process of elimination suggests that Leslie Stevens was the author. “Notes on a Strategic Concept,” no author, 13 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File #334.

61 Ibid.

62 Three other strategic options, which still remain classified, were also outlined in the paper. “Notes on a Strategic Concept,” no author, 13 November 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File #334.

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63 William Kennedy, 6 September 1951, “Specific Objectives of Psychological Operations of US Detailed,” HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

64 The so-called Vaslov legend referred to the utilization of a group of men, under the command of Russian General Valsov, who had fought the communists during and after World War I.

65 William Kennedy, 6 September 1951, “Specific Objectives of Psychological Operations of US Detailed,” HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

66 Frederick Barghoorn, “Specific Objectives of Psychological Operations of the US Detailed,” 6 September 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 23, File 334.

67 Wallace Carroll to Gordon Gray, “Taking the Offensive,” 20 September 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411 Agenda.

68 Edward Lilly, “One Year History of the PSB,” DDEL, WH, NSC, 48–61, Box 23, File # PSB Background Material, p. 62.

69 Ibid.

70 Directors Group, “Strategy Paper,” 15 November 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

71 Ibid.

72 Lilly, “One Year History of the PSB,” DDEL, WHO, NSC, 48–61, Box 23, File # PSB Background Material, p. 62.

73 Philbin to Tracey Barnes, “Status and Timing of the Strategy Paper,” 19 March 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.411.

74 Joseph B. Phillips to Robert Cutler, 16 November 1951, “National Psychological Strategy,” HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411 drafts.

75 PSB, Panel B, Group III, “Psychological Support for National Policy vis-à-vis the USSR,” 1 October 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 224, File 334.

76 C.B. Marshall to Paul Nitze, 19 November 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

77 Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 71.

78 Philbin to PSB, “Status of the National Psychological Strategy Paper,” 19 March 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411.

79 Philbin to PSB, “Status of the National Psychological Strategy Paper,” 19 March 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411.

80 Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 101.

81 Marshall to Nitze, 19 November 1951, NACP, RG 59, S/P Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

82 “Problem: To Determine How the PSB Should Carry Out Its Responsibilities Under NSC 10/5,” 5 April 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 13, File #091.411.

83 Nitze, S/P Meeting Minutes, 15 November 1951, NACP, RG 59, S/P, Box 58, S/P Meeting Minutes.

84 “Memorandum of a Conference to Consider How Best to Approach the Formulation of A National Psychological Strategy,” 19 December 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411 drafts. See also, Nitze to Philbin, 8 January 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 11a, File Political and Psychological Warfare.

85 According to Gray, although he did eventually talk to the president about the situation, all Truman told him was “to do the best you can.” Gray, Oral History Interview. HSTL, PSB, B-File.

86 Edward Lilly, “The Psychological Strategy Board and Its Predecessors: Foreign Policy Coordination, in Vincitorio L. Gaetano, ed., Studies in Modern History, New York: St. John’s Press, 1968, pp. 370–1.

87 Barnes to (deleted), 11 January 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 1, File 1951–1952.

88 Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 102.

89 “CIA Means Paper: Approach to the Development of Psychological Strategy,” 15 April 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File # 091.412.

90 Ibid.

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91 “Preliminary Estimate of the Effectiveness of US Psychological Strategy,” 5 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File # 091.412.

92 Ibid.

93 In this paper, Browne argued that this shift in strategy would be easier under a new President, particularly, he pointed out, if Eisenhower was elected. Mallory Browne, “Overall Strategic Concept for Psychological Operations,” 7 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File 091.412.

94 Browne visited RFE and VOA missions in January 1952. PSB Staff Meeting Minutes, 7 February 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 27, File 337, File Staff Meeting Minutes.

95 M.B. Browne, “Overall Strategic Concept for Psychological Operations,” 7 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File # 091.412.

96 The one exception was, of course, Carroll who argued that the timing of the liberation of the satellites should be speeded up. See Wallace Carroll to Gordon Gray, “Taking the Offensive,” 20 September 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File # 091.412.

97 Sherman to Browne, 22 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File #091.412. Other comments, by Arthur Cox, William Korne and Charles Norberg, which essentially mirror Sherman’s, can also be found in this file.

98 Cox to Sherman, 16 May 1952, “Browne’s Strategic Concept and EAR Reports,” HSTL, PSB, Box 25, File 091.412.

99 “PSB Planning Objectives,” 8 May 1952, DDEL.

100 Charles Stelle, “A Strategic Concept for Cold War Operations Under NSC 10/5,” draft, 30 June 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File # 091.412 – agenda.

101 Ibid. By phasing, Stelle meant that operations had to show some sign of success within three years.

102 George Morgan, “Comments on the Strategy Paper,” undated, HSTL, Box 14, File # 091.412, drafts. See also, Palmer Putnam to George Morgan, “Critique of Strategy Paper,” 18 August 1952, PSB, Box 14, File # 091.411, drafts.

103 George Morgan, draft Memo to PSB, undated, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File 091.411.

104 As Mitrovich points out, PSBD-31 represented a significant change in the administration’s covert policy outlined in NSC 10/2 and NSC 10/5.

105 PSB “Strategic Concept Paper,” cited in “Report on US Policy for the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” 8 June 1954. DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Series, Briefing Notes, Sub-series, Box 18, File USSR Report on US Policy. I would like to thank Greg Mitrovich for sending me this document.

106 George Morgan to Browne et al., Meeting Minutes, 5 August 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.411.

107 Mitrovich, op. cit., pp. 111–12.

108 George Morgan to Browne, Meeting Minutes, 5 August 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.411.

109 George Morgan to Admiral Stevens, 30 July 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 14, File #091.412.

110 Lilly, “One Year History of the PSB,” no date, DDEL, WHO, NSC, 48–61, Box 23, File # PSB Background Material.

111 Edmund Taylor, “Psychological Strategy in Cold War Planning,” 30 December 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 15, File 091.412.

112 Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedelll Smith as the Director of Central Intelligence, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992, p. 134. This view was also held by Sydney Souers, the first DCI. Souers characterized the first two directors of the PSB as “bungling.” Darling, “Interview with Sydney Souers,” 4 November 1952, NACP, RG 263, Box 13.

113 Ibid., p. 212.

114 Edward Lilly, “Memo Fragment on the PSB,” DDEL, LP, Box 47, File PSB Historical (4).

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115 A new assistant director for Evaluation and Review was named, as was a new special assistant to the director. DDEL, LP, Box 59, File Psychological Warfare History, Chapter draft fragments (1).

116 Raymond Allen, “Memorandum for the Members of the PSB, Procedures for Handling 10/5 Matters,” undated, PSB, Box 13, File 091.411. I would like to thank Greg Mitrovich for sending me this document. On the 10/5 Panel see also, Smith to PSB, 13 October 1952, NACP, PSF, NSC, File NSC 10/2 and Smith, “Procedures for Handling 10/5 Matters in the PSB,” HSTL, PSB, Box 13, File 091.412.

117 Raymond Allen to Frank Wisner, 10 April 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 13, File 091.412.

118 Chairman of the 10/5 Panel, “Briefing to the PSB on Some 10/5 Problems,” 7 May 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 13, File 091.411.

119 Wisner, Draft Proposal: Program and Project Clearance Procedures,” 13 October 1952, HSTL, PSB, Box 13.

120 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, p. 318.

121 Montague, op. cit., p. 213.

122 See for example, Anthony Levario, the New York Times, December 1951.

8

The War of the Potomac

1 Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy, London: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 29.

2 See for example, John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life Magazine, reprinted in Thomas Paterson, ed., Containment and the Cold War: American Foreign Policy Since 1945, Addison-Wesley, 1973, pp. 52–6.

3 Although historians have yet to stress this subtle shift in policy it was recognized by a number of policy makers within the Truman Administration. See for example, Raymond Allen to David Bruce, 20 August 1952, HSTL, RG PSB, Box 14, File 091.411, drafts.

4 S/P Meeting Minutes, 19 September 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–133.

5 Annex B., A Review of NSC Policy Toward the Soviet Union Emphasizing US Policy Toward the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities, DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Briefing Papers, Box 18, File USSR Reports on Policy, 8–9 (I would like to thank Greg Mitrovich for sending me this document); Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power, California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 491.

6 “Kennan Urges Modesty,” the New York Times, 1 January 1951: “Kennan Urges Americans to Keep Modesty,” Chicago Sun, 31 January 1951; “Kennan Favors Letting Russian People Overthrow Soviet Rulers, Massachusetts Herald News, 21 March 1951; “Expert Says Revolt Could Topple Reds,” Long Island Press, 21 March 1951; “Expert Says Wait For Soviet Revolt,” Ohio Post, 21 March 1951.

7 Marshall Shulman to Dean Acheson, 15 May 1951, FRUS, 1951, 1, p. 922.

8 Stuart Symington to the President, “Current History of National Planning Policy – Diplomatic, Economic, and Military Reasons why it is essential that these three Segments of National Policy be Further Integrated.” FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, p. 28. It should be noted that the President disagreed with Symington’s analysis. Ibid., pp. 22, 33.

9 The most vigorous argument is made by historian Elizabeth Edwards Spalding in her book, The First Cold Warrior. Herein she argues that it was not Kennan who guided the American postwar policy, it was Truman. See Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006.

10 The best discussion of Truman’s attitude toward Israel can be found in Arnold A. Offner, Another Such Victory: President Truman and the Cold War, 1945–1953, California: Stanford University Press, 2002.

11 It is important to note that there were even divisions within the Policy Planning Staff over how to articulate American strategy. In January 1951, for example, John

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Ferguson, Walter Schwinn and Philip Watts, argued that NSC 68 should be published in whole or in part, in order to clarify American objectives. The decision was vetoed on 5 January 1951. NACP, RG 59, General Records of the Department of State, Records of Policy Guidance and Coordination Staff, Records Relating to NSC 47–54, Lot file, 62 D 367, Box 3.

12 In the report, vulnerability was defined as “an inherently operational concept” that depended on not only “the nature of the enemy’s society but equally upon American objectives and capabilities.” See Harvard MIT CENSUS Study, “The Vulnerability of the Soviet Union and its European Satellites To Political Warfare,” October 1952, vol. 2, 3; S/P Meeting Minutes, 6 March 1952, 78–350. The MIT Group consisted of Max Milkan, Ames, Hughes and Walt Rostow.

13 In order to facilitate discussion along these lines, the group added an annex on a “Statement of United States Interests and Objectives in Russia and Eastern Europe,” Harvard MIT CENSUS Study, “The Vulnerability of the Soviet Union and its European Satellites To Political Warfare,” October 1952, vol. 1, 3. NACP, RG 59.

14 MIT CENSUS Study, ibid., 7.

15 See John Prados, The President’s Secret Wars, CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II, New York: William Morrow, 1986, pp. 50–60.

16 Chris Tudda, The Truth is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006, p. 99.

17 S/P Meeting Minutes, 4 January 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–322.

18 Greg Mitrovich argues that it was the shift in the nuclear balance of power that had the most profound affect on operations. See Greg Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 16.

19 Historian Greg Mitrovich, was one of the first historians to deal with this. Mitrovich, ibid., p. 151. See also, Bowie and Immerman, op. cit., pp. 28–30; and Michael Hogan, The Iron Cross: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 317.

20 Bohlen to Acheson, 9 October 1951, FRUS, 1951, 1, 180.

21 “NSC 114: Status and Timing of Current Programs for National Security,” 21 July 1951, NACP, RG 273, Box #, File NSC 114.

22 Ironically, Bohlen’s analysis represented the first time the Soviet intentions were challenged since Kennan had first chronicled them in the Long Telegram. Bohlen to Acheson, 25 September 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, p. 177.

23 Bohlen to Nitze, Memorandum, 28 July 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, pp. 106–7.

24 Bohlen, Annex, 22 August 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, p. 181.

25 Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 169.

26 Bohlen, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

27 S/P Meeting Minutes, 31 October 1951, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–178.

28 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–404.

29 “NSC 114/2: United States Program for National Security,” 12 October 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, pp. 189–91.

30 George Morgan, Memo For the Record, NSC Senior Staff Meeting, 10 July 1951, HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334. See also, Report to the President, Brief #6, The National Psychological Program, HSTL, PSB, Box 218, File Memorandum 122.

31 S/P Meeting Minutes, 10 March 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File # 78–355.

32 NSC 114/2, United States programs for National Security, 12 October 1951, FRUS, 1951, vol. 1, pp. 189–91.

33 Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman Administration and the Cold War. California: Stanford University Press, 1992, p. 448. Greg Mitrovich tells us that the discussions over NSC 114 were so heated that, at one point, Robert Cutler and Leon Keyserling, the President’s economic advisor,

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argued with such intensity that Keyserling left the room and refused to return. See Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 165; Bowie and Immerman, op. cit., p. 29.

34 Bohlen, Annex, 22 August 1951. FRUS, vol. 1, p. 181.

35 S/P Meeting Minutes, 26 March 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–363.

36 Ibid.

37 Schwartz to Bohlen, 12 May 1952, FRUS, 1952, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 14; see also, S/P Meeting Minutes, 18 June 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–407.

38 S/P Meeting Minutes, 20 February 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–348.

39 Congressional Record, Memorandum on Kersten, HSTL, PSB, Box 2, File 032.1.

40 James Jay Carafano, “Mobilizing Europe’s Stateless: America’s Plan for a Cold War Army,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Spring 1999, vol. 2, 61–85.

41 Charles Byler, “Trouble for Joe Stalin in His Own Backyard: The Kersten Amendment and the Debate Over American Policy in Eastern Europe,” Unpublished Paper, SHAFR 1995.

42 S/P Meeting Minutes, 10 March 1952, File 78–355.

43 S/P Meeting Minutes, 21 January 1952 and 25 January 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–328, 78–330.

44 “Containment Plus,” The Economist, 2 April 1952.

45 “Containment Plus: Editorial,” The Economist, 26 April 1952, pp. 203–4.

46 Sherman to Cox, Meeting With Congressmen Kersten, August 1952 to January 1953, HSTL, PSB, Box 33, File 383.7.

47 O.K. Armstrong, “Significant study of Psychological Strategy in the Cold War,” Extension of Remarks by Charles Kersten, The House of Representatives, 1 January 1953, Congressional Record.

48 Richard Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy, Wilmington: SR Books, 1999, p. 30. See also, Robert A. Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” the Journal of American History, pp. 100–1.

49 Hogan, op. cit., p. 332.

50 Ibid., pp. 327–8.

51 Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War, The Roaring of the Cataract, vol. II, Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 29–32, 100.

52 See R. Hirsh to Allen and Taylor, 26 February 1952, Report on Psychological Strategy Conference, HSTL, PSB, File 337.

53 At the conference were: an employee of the PSB; five or more from CIA; and eleven or more from the military. Hirsh to Allen and Taylor, 26 February 1952, Report on the Psychological Strategy Conference, HSTL, PSB, File 337.

54 Those attending the Conference were some of the top decision-makers in Washington. The list included: Frank Altschul, Adolf Berle Jr., Charles Bohlen, Tom Braden, Frederick Dolbeare, Allen Dulles, Joseph Grew, John Huges, William Jackson, C.D. Jackson, Robert Joyce, George Morgan, DeWitt Poole, and Walt Rostow.

55 Ironically, Allen Dulles reiterated this point at the conference. He argued that “we have got to get going even if we do not know fully where we are going.” George Morgan, 12 May 1952, Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, HSTL, PSB, Box 1, File 000.1 Rand Corporation.

56 See Minutes of the Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, Abbot Washburn to Eisenhower, “Development of an Integrated Psychological Program,” DDEL, C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 83.

57 Washburn to Eisenhower, Minutes of the Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, DDEL, C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 83.

58 George Morgan, 12 May 1952, Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, HSTL, PSB, Box 1, File 000.1 Rand Corporation.

59 Ibid.

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60 Bohlen, in Morgan, Meeting on Political Warfare, 12 May 1952, Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, HSTL, PSB, Box 1, File 000.1 Rand Corporation.

61 Ibid.

62 Lang, in Washburn, Minutes of the Princeton Meeting. Washburn to Eisenhower, Minutes of the Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, DDEL, C.D. Jackson Papers, Box 83.

63 George Morgan, “Meeting on Political Warfare,” 12 May 1952, Meeting on Political Warfare at Princeton, HSTL, PSB, Box 1, File 000.1 Rand Corporation.

64 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–404.

65 Ibid.

66 Also included were the initials SP, however, I have been unable to identify this person.

67 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–404.

68 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–388, 78–404; see also, Nitze to Marshall, 16 June 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 49, File Marshall, C.B.

69 S/P Meeting Minutes, 18 June 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–407.

70 S/P Meeting Minutes, 30 June 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–410.

71 C.D. Jackson, Triennial Banquet, 24 June 1952, DDEL, Jackson Papers, Box 100, File 1952 (4).

72 Paul B. Sheatshley, Memorandum, 19 January 1952, “The Paradox of Popular Support for Individual US Foreign Polices Along With the Distrust of the Foreign Policy of the United States,” HSTL, PSB, Box 24, File 334.

73 However, historian Jim Marchio cautions us to avoid over-interpreting this data, observing that, of the 28 percent of people who knew the Republicans challenged the Truman Administration’s foreign policy, only 3 percent of them knew that this included containment. Thus, he concludes that the containment/liberation debate was not important in terms of the election. James Marchio, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe,” Ph.D. Dissertation (American University, 1990), pp. 85–6.

74 Hogan, op. cit., p. 212.

75 Cumings, op. cit., p. 25.

76 James Burhnam, Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry Into the Aims of US Foreign Policy, New York: John Day Company, 1952, p. 43.

77 John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: Critical Appraisals of Post-War National Security Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

78 Immerman, op. cit., p. 31.

79 S/P Meeting Minutes, 13 February 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–340.

80 John Foster Dulles, War or Peace, London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1950.

81 Immerman, op. cit., p. 39.

82 Dulles’ call for liberation was reinforced by other Republicans. See for example, Senator Alexander Wiley, “My Plan for a GOP Foreign Policy,” Look, HSTL, PSB, Box 2, File 032.3; see also, Immerman, pp. 5, 18, 31.

83 Thomas Paterson, “Containment Debated,” in Thomas Paterson, Containment and the Cold War: American Foreign Policy Since 1945, Reading, Addison-Wesley, 1973, pp. 37–8; see also, James Marchio, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953–1959,” Ph.D. Dissertation (American University, 1990, p. 69.

84 John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” Life Magazine, in Paterson, ibid., pp. 54–5.

85 Letters from Allen to Foster are available at the Mudd Library. On 11 April 1952 Allen wrote a letter to his brother which argued that some “highly competent work” was being done to promote liberation in the satellites.” However, he added that these operations did not lend themselves to public exposition. In response to his brother’s letter, on 1 May 1952, Foster wrote back saying that, in order for liberation to be successful, it had to be a public policy. He concluded:

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liberation from the yoke of Moscow will not occur for a very long time and courage in neighboring lands will not be sustained unless the United States makes it publicly known that it wants and expects change to occur. If that happened, it would change, in an electrifying way, the mood of the captive peoples, put heavy burdens on the jailers and create new opportunities for liberation.

Both of these points ultimately found their way into Foster’s article, “A Policy of Boldness.” See Allen Dulles to John Foster Dulles, Mudd Library, Princeton University, Allen Dulles Papers, Box 52, File JFD and John Foster Dulles to Allen Dulles, 1 May 1952, ibid. See for example, Leonard Mosely, Dulles: A Biography of Eleanor, Allen and John Foster Dulles and Their Family Network, New York: Dell Publishing, 1978, p. 288; Burton Hersh Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the Cold War, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986, p. 328; Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy, The Life of Allen Dulles, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

86 Gordon Gray, Oral History Interview, HSTL.

87 Paul Nitze, S/P Meeting Minutes, 28 August 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–424.

88 Ibid.

89 Nitze, S/P Meeting Minutes, 22 September 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–434.

90 S/P Meeting Minutes, 3 September 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–428.

91 Dwight Eisenhower to Harry Truman, DDEL, Ann Whitman File, Box 33, File HST. Truman’s response to Eisenhower was as follows: “I am sorry if I caused you embarrassment … I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us. You have made a bad mistake and I am hoping that it won’t injure this great republic.” Harry S. Truman to Dwight Eisenhower, Ibid.

92 Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, pp. 14–16.

93 Marchio, op. cit., p. 47.

94 S/P Memorandum, 21 September 1951, FRUS, 1951, 1.

95 Mitrovich, op. cit., p. 160.

96 Bohlen to Nitze, 28 July 1951, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 1, 106; and Bohlen to Nitze, 22 August 1951, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 1, p. 165.

97 Mitrovich argues that Nitze’s did not clarify his position in the summer of 1952, but rather that his argument at this time reflected a transition in his thinking from June of 1950. See Mitrovich, op. cit., pp. 175–6.

98 S/P Basic Issues Raised by Draft, NSC “Re-appraisal of US Objectives and Strategy for National Security,” FRUS, undated, 1952–1954, vol. 2, no. 1, 64–5.

99 S/P Basic Issues Raised by the NSC Reappraisal of US objectives, 72.

100 S/P Meeting Minutes, 27 May 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–395.

101 (emphasis added) Annex B. A Review of NSC Policy Toward the Soviet Union Emphasizing US Policy Toward the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities, DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Briefing Papers, Box 18, File USSR Reports on Policy. 8–9.

102 A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive,” 7 April 1950, FRUS. 1950, vol. 1, p. 241.

103 Nitze to Mathews, 14 July 1952, FRUS. 1952–1954, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 58.

104 Ibid.

105 As Bowie and Immerman have argued, although NSC 135/3 included much of the same language as NSC 68, “its analysis, objectives and policies were in fact radically modified or abandoned.” After its release, “aggressive rollback” was abandoned. Bowie and Immerman, op. cit., pp. 30–1.

106 (Emphasis Added) Reappraisal of US Objectives and Strategy for National Security, 30 July 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954.

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107 NSC 68 in Ernest May, American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting, NSC/68, New York: Bedford Books, p. 73.

108 “NSC 135: Reappraisals of US Objectives and Strategy for National Security,” 30 July 1952, FRUS, 1952–1954, vol. 1, no. 2, p. 71. This theme is reiterated in NSC 135/3: Current Policies of the Government of the United States related to National Security, 25 September 1952, HSTL, PSF, SF, NSC, Box 194, File SF NSC.

109 Beatrice Heuser first recognized a “note of caution in document.” Heuser, Western Containment Policies and the Cold War; The Yugoslav Case, 1948–1953, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 79. Neither Leffler nor Hogan address this issue. Rather, both argue that US objectives were consistent from NSC 20/4 on. Leffler, op. cit., p. 491; Hogan, op. cit., p. 384.

110 As the Small Committee concluded in 1954, although the general approach to the Soviet Union was “apparently basically the same in objectives as had been the case in NSC 68/2, (NSC 135) appeared more cautious and less optimistic in terms of US capabilities…” Annex B, A Review of NSC Policy Toward the Soviet Union Emphasizing United States Policy on the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Briefing Notes, Box 18, File USSR Report on United States Policy, 13.

111 S/P Meeting Minutes, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–417.

112 The Small Committee was an Operations Coordination Board, sub-group set up to study Soviet Vulnerabilities. Small Committee report, Annex B, p. 15.

113 NSC 141, taken from Small Committee, Annex B, p. 17.

114 NSC 135/3, Annex 6: The National Psychological Program, HSTL, PSF, NSC ME, Box 218, File M 122, 4/4.

115 NSC 68/3, Annex 5: The Foreign Information Program, NACP, RG 273, Box, File # Annex to NSC 68/3.

116 Small Committee, Annex B.

117 S/P Meeting Minutes, 27 May 1952, NACP, RG 59, Box 78, File 78–395. All of this was much to Wisner’s dismay, who eventually asked the State department to intervene on his behalf. 28 May 1952, pp. 78–396.

118 Franklin Lindsay, “A Program for the Development of New Cold War Instruments,” October 1952, HSTL, Gordon Gray Papers, Box 1, File PSB 1951–1952.

119 The author located a copy of the paper that Frank Wisner sent to Gordon Gray in 1952. Lindsay, “A Program for the Development of New Cold War Instruments,” October 1952, HSTL, Gordon Gray Papers, Box 1, File PSB 1951–1952.

120 Lindsay’s conclusions were re-affirmed one year later, when Max Milkan submitted a classified report to the Eisenhower Administration that argued there was very little the United States could do to weaken the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe. Rather, the Americans should be concentrating on creating problems for the bureaucracy. Jacob Beam to Stoessel, Milkan Paper, NACP, RG 59, Bo 83, Chronological File 54.

121 Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992, p. 319.

122 Grose, op. cit. 592, n38.

123 Hersh, op. cit., pp. 319–20.

Conclusion

1 The four organizations that Jackson was referring to were: the State Department, the CIA, the Army and the Air Force,” C.D. Jackson to Eisenhower, 17 December 1952, Jackson Papers, Box 50, File, Correspondence, 1950.

2 James Marchio, “Rhetoric and Reality: The Eisenhower Administration and Unrest in Eastern Europe, 1953–1959,” Ph.D. American University, 1990, p. 115. See also, Klaus Larres, “Eisenhower and the First Forty Days After Stalin’s Death: The Incompatibility of Détente and Political Warfare,” Diplomacy and Stagecraft, July 1995,

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vol. 6, 431–69; and John Yurenchko, “The Day Stalin Died: American Plans for Exploiting the Soviet Succession Crisis of 1953,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, May 1980, vol. 3.

3 Emmet Hughes, in Klaus Larres, op. cit., p. 441.

4 Larres, ibid., p. 444.

5 Drew Pearson, “Crucial Period for Non-Russians,” Washington Post, 10 March 1953.

6 The administration’s first policy paper, NSC 153/1, released on 9 June 1953, did not “appear to revise the more pessimistic appraisals” of US capabilities implicit in NSC 135/3. However, given that American objectives were outlined as to “eventually bring about the reduction and retraction of Soviet power,” many questions remained. Small Committee, “Report on US Policy for the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” 8 June 1954, DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Series, Briefing Notes, Sub-Series, Box 18, File USSR – Report on US Policy.

7 Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy For Subverting the Soviet Bloc, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 123.

8 “The President’s Committee on Information Activities: Final Report,” NACP, RG 273, Box 1, File # 28.89.

9 Jackson Committee Report, DDEL, RG, C.D. Jackson Papers, File Jackson Committee, Chapter 3, 2–3.

10 James C. Hagerty, “Press Statement on the Jackson Report,” NACP, RG 273, Box 1.

11 Wallace R. Deuel, “Kennan Against Fostering Strife Behind the Iron Curtain,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 17 January 1953.

12 “Little Difference Seen in Two US Policies,” The Scranton Tribute, 17 January 1953; Joseph Hearst, “Dulles Edict Seen as Periling Kennan’s Post,” Washington Times Herald, 23 January 1953.

13 Joseph C. Harsh, “That Pattern of Diplomacy: Kennan Posts Warning to Dulles,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 January 1953; Red Kuhn, “Dulles Policy Dangerous,” Washington Post 17 January 1953; John M. Hightower, “Kennan Criticizes Dulles’ Plan for Pressure on Red Satellites, Washington Star, 17 January 1953.

14 John Hightower, “Dulles to Talk With Kennan About Opposition to Policy,” Washington Star, 22 January 1953; “Kennan is Forgiven, Dulles Will Give Him a New Assignment,” Washington Star, 24 January 1953; Ferdinand Kuhn, “No Penalty: Dulles Terms Kennan Talk Closed Issue,” Washington Post, 24 January 1953; Kennan Dulles Policy Row, Closed Episode After Talk,” Washington Times-Herald, 24 January 1953.

15 “Kennan Awaits New Post: Says He Has Had No Word on Any Position; But is Remaining Available,” The New York Times, 1 March 1953; “Dulles Expected to Retire Kennan, The New York Times 13 March 1953; “Kennan Retirement Linked to Differences With Dulles,” Washington Star, 9 April 1953; “Kennan’s Insight Will be Missed,” Washington Post, 12 April 1953; “A Regrettable Retirement,” Chicago Daily Sun-Times, 15 April 1953. All of the articles cited above can be located at the George Kennan’s Papers at the Mudd Library, ML, Kennan Papers, Box 34, 1953 Scrap Books, 1953–1956.

16 Mitrovich, op., cit., pp. 137, 140.

17 Small Committee, “Report on US Policy For the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” 8 June 1954, DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Sub-series, Box 18, USSR Report on US Policy.

18 See Christian Ostermann, “Implementing Rollback: NSC 158,” SHAFR Newsletter (September, 1996).

19 Ostermann, 3–4. It is important to point out that both Marchio and Ostermann see American actions in East Germany as aggressive. However, their studies are limited to American policy in the Eisenhower Administration. It is only when one compares the policies and operations of both governments that the strategic retrenchment becomes evident.

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20 Christian Ostermann, “The United States, The East German Uprising of 1953 and the Limits of Rollback,” Working Paper, #11, Cold War International History Project, Washington, December 1994, p. 43.

21 Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade Against the Soviet Union, New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 184.

22 C.D. Jackson to Louis Banks, 11/1/54, DDEL, Jackson Papers, Box 49, File B.

23 Many of the conclusions which appeared in NSC 174, were similar to those which appeared in NSC 162/2. Taken together, these two documents signify a significant shift from those which were outlined in NSC 20/4 and NSC 68/2. See OCB Meeting on NSC 5501, DDEL OSANSA, NSC, Box 15, File # NSC 5501 (1). The final draft of NSC 174 was signed on 11 December 1953. See NSC 174: United States Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe, NACP, RG 273.

24 Summary Statement of Existing National Security Policy, based on NSC 162/2, DDEL, WHO, OSANSA, NSC, PP, Series B.

25 See “NSC 174: United States Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe,” NACP, RG 273, Box 26, File NSC 174.

26 Progress Report on US Policy Toward the Satellites in Eastern Europe,” OCB 16 July 1954, NACP, RG 273, Box 26, File NSC 174.

27 Memorandum for Mr. Elmer B. Staats, 2 June 1954, Comments on NSC 174, DDEL, WHO, Box 67, File 091.4 Eastern Europe (9).

28 Jim Marchio, “Resistance Potential and Rollback: US Intelligence and the Eisenhower Administration’s Policies Toward Eastern Europe, 1953–1956,” Intelligence and National Security, April, 1995, vol. 10, no. 2, 229.

29 Small Committee, “Report on US Policy For the Exploitation of Soviet Vulnerabilities,” 8 June 1954, DDEL, OSANSA, NSC Series, Briefing Notes Subseries, Box 18, USSR Report on US Policy.

30 Chris Tudda, The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1006, pp. 1, 75.

31 Woodward claims that Bush’s strategy was solely one of denial. Bob Woodward, “State of Denial: Bush at War Part III,” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006, p. 491.

32 The National Strategy of the United States of America, the New York Times, 18 September 2002.

33 Here I disagree substantially with John Lewis Gaddis’ 2004 analysis of the Bush National Security Strategy. Gaddis believes that the strategy was not only more forceful than a number of previous administrations, but “more carefully crafted … and more multilateral,” than that of the Clinton Administration. See John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security and the American Experience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, p. 84.

34 C.B. Marshal to Paul Nitze, “Policy Planning Staff Concept of Policy,” 11 February 1953, NACP, RG 59, Policy Planning Staff Papers, Lot File 64D563, Subject Files, Box 11a, File # NSC.

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Lilly, Edward P., “The Psychological Strategy Board and Its Predecessors: Foreign Policy Coordination, 1938–1953,” in Vincitorio L. Gaetano, ed., Studies in Modern History, New York: St. John’s Press, 1968.

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Lucas, Scott. “Campaigns of Truth,” International History Review, May, 1996, vol. 18, no. 2.

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MacPherson, Nelson, “CIA Origins as Viewed From Within,” Intelligence and National Security, April 1995, vol. 10, no. 2.

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Page 233

Index

Acheson, Dean 32–3, 52, 66, 101, 103, 106, 120

Advanced Study Group (ASG) 69, 74

Albania:

Albanian Committee for National Liberation 94;

Albanian National Committee 91, 95;

Albanian operations/Operation Valuable 2–4, 18, 55, 77, 82–4, 91–100, 107, 109, 140, 154;

broadcasts into 90;

feasibility for US covert operations 131;

Free Albania Committee 91, 96;

government in exile 91;

Italian occupation 83;

Legality, the 92–3, 98;

possible target of operations 112;

resistance to Soviet control 115;

restoration of the monarchy 92

Aldrich, Richard 26, 84, 97, 111, 114

Allen, George 34, 56

Allen, Raymond 131, 135

Allende, Salvador 22

Ambrose, Stephen 151

Angleton, James Jesus 50

anti-communist organizations 56

Armstrong, Hamilton Fish 39

Armstrong, O.K. 145

assassination operations 102

Atlee, Clement 84

Azerbaijan 34

Baghoorn, Prof. Frederick 125–7

Balkan countries 15, 25, 55, 68

Balli Kombetar (BK)/Ballist 91–3, 98–9

Bandera, Stephen 108

Barnes, Tracey 131, 135

Barnes, Trevor 25, 173n127

Barnett, David 96

Barrett, Edward 121

Basholi, Ali 98

Bay of Pigs, invasion of (1961) 1

Berger, Samuel 123

Berle, Adolph 14, 86

Berlin blockade 53, 61

Bethal, Nicholas:

The Great Betrayal 2

Bevin, Ernest 84

Bissell, Richard 155

Black, Prof. 77

Blair, Tony:

Our Failure With Enver Hoxha 2, 163n9

BLOODSTONE 85–6

Blum, Robert 61

Bogotá riots 53

Bohlen, Charles 31–2, 56, 68, 129, 140, 141, 143, 146, 151, 153

Bosnia 161

Braden, Tom 63

Bross, John 22

Browne, Mallory 132–3

Bruce, David 18, 148

Bulgaria:

broadcasts into 90;

feasibility of US covert operations 131;

lobby for covert operations 129;

relations with 31

Bulgaria

Bulgaria Bureau of the Budget 104, 117

Burgess, Guy 3

Burke, Michael 13, 18, 60, 98

Burma 114

Burnham, James 148, 150;

Containment or Liberation 112, 148;

The Coming Defeat of Communism 111–12;

The Struggle for the World 68, 190n43

Bush, President George W. 161

Butler, George 71

Buza e Bredhit 93

Byrnes, James 16, 28, 31, 35, 45, 67

Cako, Ethem 93

Cambridge Comintern 3

Campbell, John 31, 78, 93

Carroll, Wallace 125–6, 128, 135

Page 234

Carruthers, Susan 86

Cassidy, Thomas 22, 51–2, 56, 60, 69–70

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA):

Chief/Director of Plans 60, 62;

on containment 142;

on control of psychological warfare 104;

creation of 24, 45, 65;

estimate on Albania 97;

expansion into Asia 114;

gap between intelligence and operations 94;

General Council of 2;

International Organization (IO) Division 89;

interpretation of directives 115;

need for guidance 44, 121–3, 135, 148;

Operations Directorate 95;

pursuit of American objectives 152;

purview/mandate 47–8, 58, 116–17;

record 3;

Soviet Operating Division 22;

tension between OSO and OPC 94–5, 110;

Truman critique 1–2;

see also Office of Policy Coordination

Central Intelligence Group (CIG) 6, 23–4, 26, 28, 46, 69

Chambers, Whittaker 52

Chennault, Major General Claire 114

Chiang Kai-shek 75–6, 114–15

Chief of Plans see Central Intelligence Agency

China 161;

Nationalist government 75–6;

US policy 76;

US propaganda 78–9

Chinese Peoples Republic 133

Churchill, Winston S. 12, 24, 30, 33

Civil Air Transport Incorporated (CAT) 114–15

clandestine operations see covert operations

Clifford, Clarke 34

Clifford Report 34–5

Clinton, President William 161

Cohen, Benjamin 77

Columbia 53

Cominform 76, 83

communism:

Chinese movement 75;

containment of 97;

expansion of influence 31;

in Greece and Turkey 37;

influence in Eastern Europe 38;

liberation of China 114;

threat of 30, 35, 37, 76, 79;

in US 96;

weakening/destruction of 102, 112, 141

Company 4000 98

Coordinator of Information (COI) 12–14, 19

Correa, Mathias F. 57

Costigliola, Frank 32

Council of Foreign Ministers Conference 31

counter-espionage 14, 20

Counter-Intelligence (X-2) see Strategic Services Unit

covert operations:

behind the Iron Curtain 85;

bureaucracy 5;

capability 19, 119;

command of 102, 104;

components for success 4;

definition in NSC 10/2 59;

extension/increase of 45, 139, 142;

failure to reconcile policy and operations 4, 81;

funding 50;

policy guidance 117;

reasons for strategy failure 4–6;

in Russia 74;

see also psychological warfare

Cox, Arthur 133

Cumings, Bruce 8, 76, 106–7, 145, 148

Cutler, Robert 128–9, 157

Czechoslovakia:

broadcasts into 90;

coup 68;

lobby for covert operations 129;

operations 55;

planned uprising 127;

resistance to Soviet control 115;

Soviet influence 38;

Soviet invasion 53

Darling, Arthur 53

Daugherty, William 82

Davies, John Paton 51, 53, 62, 68, 75, 76, 77–81, 93, 111, 140

de Gasperi, Prime Minister Alcide 47–8, 51

Declaration on Liberated Europe 30

Deuel, Wallace R. 105

Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) 1–2, 23, 47, 49, 52, 57, 61–2

Director of Plans (D/P) 49, 55

Director of Special Studies 49, 55

Director’s Group 126, 129

Displaced Person (DP) camps 95–6

Divijka Beach 91, 97

Division of Economic Affairs 123

Donovan Tradition 10, 16, 25, 52, 64

Donovan, William 6, 10–19, 24, 99, 114, 145

Donovan’s legacy 46, 63

Downy, John 115

Dulles, Allen W. 1–2, 18–19, 38, 57–8, 60, 85, 86, 116, 118, 149–50, 155

Dulles, John Foster 6, 18, 45, 138, 149, 150, 152, 158;

A Policy of Boldness 149–50;

War or Peace 111–12, 149

Dulles Report 61

Dunn, James C. 48

Dwyer, Peter 84

East Germany 111;

feasibility of US covert

operations 131;

liberation of 126, 128;

lobby for covert operations 129;

riots 159

Page 235

Economic Cooperative Administration (ECA) 50

Economic Stabilization Fund 50

economic warfare 14, 60

Eisenhower Administration 156, 161

Eisenhower, Dwight D. 6, 69, 74, 138, 145, 149, 150–1, 157, 158, 161

Elsey, George 34, 37, 139

Ermenji, Prof. Abaz 96, 99

Estonia, broadcasts into 90

European Recovery Act 50

European Recovery Program see Marshall Plan

Fecteau, Richard G. 115

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 17, 24, 80

Ferguson, John 142, 148

Fir’s Edge 93

Foreign Affairs Magazine 38

Forrestal, James 26, 28, 45, 47, 55, 60, 68, 69, 70–2, 81, 140

Fort Bin Mema 96

Fortier, Brigadier General Louis 23–4

Fortier Committee 21, 23, 25–6

Fosdick, Dorothy 142

France:

communist party 25–6;

operations in 26–7

Frasheri, Mithat 91–2

Free Albania Committee see Albania

Free Europe Committee 86

Freedom Committees 85

Freedom and Independence Movement see Wolnose I Niepodlenose (WIN)

G-2 24

Gaddis, John Lewis 7, 32, 40–1;

Strategies of Containment 40

Galloway, Col. Donald 22, 24, 25, 51–2, 60, 69–70

Gates Commission on Openness 7

Gleason, Everett 123

Godel, William H. 101

Goldwater, Barry 24

Grand Alliance 30

Gray, Gordon 120, 122–5, 128, 131, 150

Greece:

Albanian interests 83, 93;

civil war 37

Grew, Joseph 86, 90

Gromback, Col. John V. 27

Grose, Peter 27, 41, 95–6, 109, 155

guerrilla warfare/activity 14, 19, 25, 55, 56, 79, 102, 118, 130, 155

Hagerty, James 158

Harriman, Averell 32–3, 45, 113

Hayter, William 84

Helms, Richard 19, 22, 109, 110

Hersh, Burton 22, 23, 85, 95, 155

Heuser, Beatrice 41, 84

Hillenkoetter, Admiral Roscoe 47, 49, 51–3, 56–62

passim, 80, 86, 95, 116

Hiss, Alger 79, 145

Hitler, Adolph 12

Hixson, Walter 38, 41, 68, 88

Holt, Robert T. 87, 105

Hoover, J. Edgar 17

Hopkins, Harry 31

House Resolution#89 143

Houston, Cloyce C. 31–2

Houston, Lawrence 47

Howe, Fisher 123–4

Hoxha, Enver/Hoxha regime 2, 77, 82–4, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99

Hughes, Emmett John 149, 156

Hulnik, Charles V. 107

Hungary:

broadcasts into 90;

destabilization of government 111;

operations in 26–7, 29, 36, 55;

relations with 31;

resistance movement 36–7, 38;

revolution (1956) 37;

Soviet influence 38;

US objectives 68

Hunter, Edward H. 79

Hurley, Patrick 75

Immerman, Richard 149

Independent Block 93

intelligence:

foreign 16, 20;

postwar 21, 23

Interdepartmental Coordinating Staff (ICS) 49–50, 69, 102, 103

Interdepartmental Foreign Information Organization (IFIO) 88–9, 103

Interdepartmental Foreign Information Staff (IFIS) 103

International Organization (IO) Division see Central Intelligence Agency

Iran:

Iranian crisis (1946) 25;

as strategic asset 33–4

Iraq 161

Iron Curtain 4–6, 22, 55, 57, 68, 69, 85, 87, 89, 127, 133, 152, 155, 159

Iron Guard 109

Italy:

Communist party 47;

crisis in 47;

Letters to Italy campaign 50;

NSC statement of objectives 48;

operation in Albania 93;

Peoples Bloc 48

Page 236

Jackson, C.D. 145, 146, 147, 148, 156, 157, 160

Jackson Committee 157–8

Jackson, Wayne 18, 89, 94–5, 116, 136, 157

Jackson, William Harding 57, 116, 157

Japan, operation in 113, 115, 149

Jebb, Gladwyn 84

Jellicoe, Earl 84

Johnson, Louis 61, 101, 103, 121

Johnson, President Lyndon B. 161

Joint Advisory Commission-Korea (JACK) 113

Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) 14–15, 25, 47, 55–6, 64, 69, 70, 89, 102, 104, 108, 109, 115

Joint Intelligence Committee 84

Joint Strategic Plans Group (JSPG) 89

Joyce, Robert 22, 62, 77–8, 84, 91, 107, 136, 147

Karalekas, Anne 28, 54

Katyn Forest Massacre, 24

Kennan, George 7, 29, 39, 41–6

passim, 51–63

passim, 66–72

passim, 75, 78, 80, 81, 86, 112, 139, 149, 159, 181n8

Kennan, George:

Long Telegram 32–3

Kennedy, President John F. 1, 161

Kent, Sherman 60

Kersten Amendment 143

Kersten, Congressman 143, 144, 145

Killian, James 8

Kintner, Col. 123

Kirchwey, Freda 38

Kirk, Admiral 135, 136

Kirpatrick, Ivone 84

Korean War 6, 66, 97, 105, 112–13, 115, 118, 141, 142, 145

Kosovo 91

Krock, Arthur 35, 42

Kroner, Brigadier General Haynes 27

Kupi, Abas 92, 96

Lang, Robert 147

Larson, Deborah Welch 36

Latvia, broadcasts into 90

Lawton, James 104

Lay, James 58, 67, 68, 121

Lebanon 161

Leffler, Melvyn 65, 70, 113, 142

Legality, the see Albania

Leverio, Anthony 6

Liberation Committees 54–5

Life magazine 149–50

Lilly, Edward 13–14, 45, 62, 74, 89, 102, 104, 111, 119, 120, 131

Lindley, Ernest 42

Lindsey, Franklin 84–5, 89, 107, 154, 155

Lippmann, Walter 42–4

Lithuania, broadcasts into 90

Lloyd, David 139

Long, Breckinridge 14, 35

Lovestone, Jay 77

Lovett, Robert 26, 47, 56, 58, 60, 81, 85, 113, 120, 140

Low, Robert 95, 98

Lucas, Scott 41, 86, 160

Luce, Henry 86, 145

McArthur, General Douglas 113, 115

McCargar, James 4, 27, 36, 51, 82, 84, 92, 95, 109, 110

McCarthy, Col. Charles 21

McCarthy, Joseph 79, 81, 96, 145, 150

McCloy, John J. 17

McDowell, Col. Robert 110

McKee, Samuel 123

Maclean, Donald 3

McNarney, Joseph 62–3

Magnitude Paper 116

Magruder, Brigadier General John 17, 19–21, 62, 121–2, 130, 136

Manchuria 115

Mangelly, Thomas 98

Mao Tse Tung 114

Marcio, James 156, 161

Mark, Eduard 25

Marshall, Charles Burton “Bert” 120, 122, 129, 131, 140, 148, 161

Marshall, George 28, 48–9, 52, 53, 66–7, 72, 76, 103, 113, 121

Marshall Plan 26, 28, 38, 41, 50, 76, 87

Melby, John 68, 81

Menzies, Stewart 84

Messer, Robert 32

Meyer, Cord 91

MI6 3, 84

Mickelson, Sig 89

Milkan, Max 140

Miller, Gerald 107

MIT Center for International Studies 88

MIT Soviet Vulnerability Study 140

Mitjani, Hamit 99

Mitrovich, Greg 41, 131, 159

Modin, Yuri 3

Montague, Ludwell Lee 115, 116, 136

Morgan, George 134, 142, 146, 147

Moscow, American Embassy 75

Page 237

Mosely, Leonard 116

Mosely, Prof. Philip 77

Mugosha, Dushan 83

Mundt, Karl 87

Munson, Lyle 79

“Murder Board” 136, 154

Murphy, Charles 106, 139

Murphy, Raymond 52

Mutual Security Agency (MSA) 26, 123, 153

National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) 86–7, 89, 91–3, 146

National Front see Balli Kombetar

National Intelligence Authority (NIA) 22

National Labor Alliance 108

National Military Establishment (NME) 65

National Security Act (1947) 5, 45, 46, 65

National Security Council (NSC) 4–5, 47, 58, 65–6, 88, 103–4, 117, 119, 153, 157, 160;

MSC 59 103–4;

NSC 1/1: The Position of the United States With Respect to Italy 48;

NSC 4: The Coordination of Foreign Information Measures 48, 103;

NSC 4/a: Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on Psychological Operations 25, 46, 48–9, 51, 53–6, 60;

NSC 7: The Position of the United States With Respect to Soviet Dominated World Communism 52, 69–70;

NSC 10: Office of Special Operations 58–9;

NSC 10/1 59;

NSC 10/2: Office of Special Projects 43, 53, 54, 59, 60–1, 70, 89, 102, 104, 109, 116;

NSC 10/3 104;

NSC 10/5: Scope and Pace of Covert Operations 117, 123, 124–5, 134;

NSC 20/1 70–3, 80, 127;

NSC 20/4: US Objectives Toward the Soviet Union 43, 55, 72, 74, 78, 80, 82, 107, 132, 138, 147, 154, 160, 192n78;

NSC 34: US Policy Toward China 76;

NSC 35: Measures Required to Achieve United States Objectives 71, 129;

NSC 48 106;

NSC 58/2: US Policy Toward the Soviet Satellite States in Eastern Europe 77, 78, 82, 88;

NSC 68/1 115;

NSC 68/2 138, 160;

NSC 68/3 Annex 51, 54;

NSC 686 72, 75, 101, 105–7, 111, 117, 130, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154;

NSC 114: The Status and Timing of Current Programs of National Security 141, 142, 150;

NSC 114/2 142, 143;

NSC 135/2 153;

NSC 135/3 Annex 6 154;

NSC 135/3 153–4;

NSC 135 137, 143, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157;

NSC 141 153, 155;

NSC 158 159–60;

NSC 162/2: Review of Basic National Security Policy 160–1;

NSC 174: United States Policy Toward the Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe 160–1

National Week 42

Natsionalno Trudovio Soyuz 108

Nazi 15, 83, 86, 92

New York Herald Tribune 42

New York Times 3, 6, 38, 140

Newsweek 42

Nitze, Paul 66, 105–6, 111, 122, 129–31, 134–5, 142, 151, 159

Nixon, President Richard M. 52, 115, 161

Noyes, Charles 123

Oeschner, Frederick 49

Office of Intelligence Research 123

Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs 28

Office of National Estimates 76

Office of Occupied Territories 29

Office of Plans and Policy see Psychological Strategy Board

Office of Policy Coordination (OPC):

advocacy of liberation/rollback 155, 159;

on Albania 92, 98;

blueprint for command and operations 46;

budget 118;

campaigns 2, 4;

competition with other organizations 156;

control by DCI 116;

covert operations in Russia 74;

creation 60;

curtailment of 144;

differences with State Department 94;

expansion of operations 107–10, 115;

guidance, need for/lack of 78, 81, 89, 95, 136, 140, 148;

guidance to NCFE 86–7;

incorporation of Donovan tradition 6, 10;

as independent body 62–3, 64;

interpretation of objectives 117;

misinterpretation of strategy 130;

operational planning in Korea 113;

organization of liberation committees 55;

removal from CIA command and

control 75;

review of projects for satellites 136;

support of resistance

movements 114

Office of Reports and Estimates 60, 61

Office of Review see Psychological Strategy Board

Office of Special Operations (OSO) 10, 22, 24–6, 46, 51, 94, 108, 113

Page 238

Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 6, 10, 14–17, 19, 84;

Morale Operations Division 19;

Special Operations Branch 19

Office of War Information 14, 45

Offie, Carmel 95–6, 107–8

Operation Safehaven 27

Operation Splinter Factor 111

Operation Valuable see Albania

Operational Auxiliaries Branch see Strategic Services Unit

Operations Coordination Board (OCB) 158

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) 108

Ostermann, Christian 159

Ottoman Empire 82

Overload and Delay, operations 127

Paper (operation) 114

paramilitary capability/operations 20, 25, 55, 56, 99, 102, 118, 139, 152, 154, 155

Patch, Lt. General Alexander M. 21

Patterson, Robert 26, 28, 34

Pearson, Drew 50, 157

Peebles, Curtis 98, 113, 114

Philby, Harold “Kim” 3, 84

Phillips, Joseph 123, 129

Poland:

broadcasts into 90;

lobby for covert operations 129;

operations 55, 140;

planned uprising 127;

resistance networks 110;

Soviet influence 18

Policy Planning Staff (S/P) 29, 45, 53, 66–72

passim, 75–6, 81, 84, 93, 103, 105, 120, 129, 131, 139, 142, 144, 150, 151, 153

Polish Peace Council 110

Polish Underground 110

political warfare 54, 58, 158

POND, the 27, 95

Poole, DeWitt Clinton 86–7

Pope, Generoso 50

Popovic, Miladin 83

Poster, Mark 41

Potomac, War of the 6–7

Prados, John 95

Princeton Manifesto 147, 148

Project BGFIEND 98, 100

Project Troy 88

Project Ultimate 51–2

Project Umpire 51

propaganda, use of 14, 15, 19, 20, 50–2, 56, 60, 87–9, 99–100, 102, 140, 147

Psychological Strategy Board (PSB) 5–6, 59, 104–5, 111, 119–20, 122, 130, 134–6, 138, 148, 150, 156–9;

Director’s Office 120;

Office of Coordination 120;

Office of Plans and Policy 120, 122;

Office of Review 120, 132;

PSD D-45: An Interim United States Psychological Plan for the Exploitation of Soviet Unrest in Satellite Europe 159;

strategic concept paper 143

Psychological warfare/operations 10, 11, 13, 14–17, 19, 23, 25, 87, 89, 99, 101, 103–5, 121, 140, 145;

capability/mandate in CIA 45, 46, 47;

covert (black) 48;

definition 122;

in France 26;

in Italy 48;

in national aims 28;

overt (white) 48, 107;

responsibility of CIA 48;

in Romania 27;

status of US 123;

used by USSR 123;

in USSR 79, 85

Psychological warriors 5–6, 10, 46, 74, 88, 145, 147, 153, 154, 157, 161

Putnam, Palmer 125–6, 128

Quemoy 114

Quinn, General William 21–2, 24

Quvam, Prime Minister Ahmed 34

Radio Free Europe (RFE) 87, 89–91, 99, 100, 146, 157

Radio Liberty 89–91

Ranelagh, John 64

Readers Digest 112

Reagan, Ronald W. 6, 161

Red Army 15

Republican Party 143, 145, 151

resistance movements/operations 69, 102, 118, 122, 130, 143

Reston, James 37

Ring Plan 88

Roberts, Frank 33

Robinson, Gerald T. 32

Romania:

broadcasts into 90;

operations in 25, 27, 55, 109;

relations with 31;

US objectives 68

Romanian National Peasant Party 25

Roosevelt, Jimmy 12

Roosevelt, President Franklin D. 10, 11–13, 15, 16, 30–1, 64

Roosevelt, President Theodore 11

Rositzke, Harry 4, 15, 22, 108, 110

Royall, Kenneth 49, 59

Ruggles, Melvyn 123

Rusk, Dean 71

Russia see Soviet Union

Russia Committee 83

Page 239

sabotage operations 14, 19, 20, 25, 55, 56, 99, 102

Savage, Carleton 140, 142, 148

Schaetzel, Robert 123

Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. 16

Schwartz, Norman 115

Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) 3, 84

Secret Intelligence (SI) see Strategic Services Unit

Selvage, Doug 46

Services Branch see Strategic Services Unit

Sherman, John 125–6, 133

Sherwood, Robert 14

Sigurimi 97–8

Simpson, Christopher 85

Small Committee 153–4, 161

Smiley, David 84

Smith, Harold 17

Smith, Howard 87

Smith, Walter Bedell 26, 33, 62, 68, 80, 95, 113, 114, 117, 120, 121, 122, 135, 136, 139, 154

Smith–Mundt Act 87

Snoddy, Robert 115

Solarium Exercise 158–60

Souers, Rear Admiral Sydney William 1, 23, 45, 48–9, 58–9, 61, 62, 104

Soviet Union/USSR:

assistance to captive peoples 143;

atomic capabilities 143;

breakup of Soviet bloc 160;

conflict with 102;

counter-intelligence 110;

danger of war with 105, 106;

defections to 3;

destabilization of 118;

Eastern Europe, actions/objectives 27, 32–3, 43–4, 68–9;

hegemony in Eastern Europe 155;

intelligence on 15, 21, 22;

liberation/separation of satellites 77–8, 132, 136, 139, 143, 152, 156, 160;

negotiated settlements 160;

overthrow of government 73, 141, 143;

policy of destruction by force 128;

power and influence 2, 5, 14, 68–9, 73–4, 77, 85, 142, 151, 153, 157, 159, 161;

promotion of internal disintegration 158;

resistance to expansion 159;

Soviet propaganda 87, 90;

threat to security 34, 41, 51, 61, 74, 84, 106, 134;

US policy/objectives towards 68–9, 70, 106–7, 125;

US propaganda 51, 88–9;

US relations with 15, 16, 25, 31–2, 34, 36, 47;

world domination 141

Special Operations Executive (SOE) 84

Special Political Action Group 84

Special Procedures Group (SPG) 51–2, 55–8, 60

Special Projects Division for the Soviet Union (SPD/S) 22

Special Studies and Evaluation Committee (SSEC) 28–9, 46–8, 57, 60, 101, 102–3

Stalin, Joseph 24, 30, 42, 110–11, 152, 156–7

State Department:

conflict with NSC 66;

conflict with OSS/SSU 15–16, 20–1, 24;

conflict with PSB 120, 122, 135;

control of ECA 50;

determination of policy 67, 103–4;

impact of Davies case 81;

incorporation of OWI 45;

influence of COI 14;

involvement in SSE, Stevens, C. 28;

lack of guidance for NCFE 87;

lack of policy/objectives/strategy 31–2, 68, 70–1, 119, 134, 140, 142;

operation BLOODSTONE 86;

opposition to support for communist governments 78;

reaction to Director’s Group report 129;

reining in OPC 144;

skepticism for

backing of Chinese Nationalists 114;

strategic planning for Titoism 111

State–Army–Navy–Air Force Coordinating Committee (SANACC) 28, 45, 47, 65, 101, 103

State–War–Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) 27, 28–9, 85

Stelle, Charles 130, 131, 132, 134

Stephanson, Anders 72

Stephenson, Adlai E. 7

Steven, Stewart 110–11

Stevens, Admiral Leslie 120, 121, 125–7, 129–30, 136

Stillwell, General Joseph 75

Stone, Donald 17

Strategic Services Unit (SSU) 6, 10, 16, 19–24, 108, 109, 122;

Counter Intelligence (X-2) 17, 19–20;

demise/transfer to OSO 24, 28;

Foreign Branch M 22;

Operational Auxiliaries Branch 19, 20;

Secret Intelligence (SI) 17, 19–20;

Services Branch 19, 20

Strong, General Kenneth 21

subversive operations 19, 20, 55, 60

Symington, Stuart W. 59

Taiwan, emergence as operational base 113

Task Force A 158–9

Task Force B 159

Task Force C 159, 160

Tawny Pipit 79