Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Grose

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1
Nazis and Communists
As the nazi reich was crumbling all around him early in 1945, Joseph
Goebbels, creative propagandist for Hitler, shared his forebodings
with the German people in an editorial. The Russians were poised to
occupy all of eastern Europe, Goebbels declared in late February,
and "an iron curtain would at once descend."

Goebbels's warning, carried on shortwave radio, caught the
attention of a literary stylist on the other side of the war: Winston
Churchill, prime minister of Britain. Perhaps without remembering its
source, Churchill used the ominous image in his first message to
President Truman not three months later: "An iron curtain is drawn
down upon [the Soviet] front; we do not know what is going on
behind." Striving to impress the new president, with whom he yet had
no personal rapport, he then cabled on June 4: "I view with profound
misgivings . . . the descent of an iron curtain between us and
everything to the eastward." And nine months later, when Churchill,
by then out of office, spoke at a small college in Fulton, Missouri,
Truman's home state, the image finally caught on, to become the
singular metaphor for the gathering Cold War. Churchill declared:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an
Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie
all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe--
Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest, and Sofia; all
these famous cities and their populations around them lie in what I
might call the Soviet sphere, and all aresubject, in one form or
another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some
cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Few Americans who heard Churchill that day could have
confidently placed Stettin, Trieste, or any of the other named cities
on the map. If one drew a 600-mile-long line from Stettin in the
north to Trieste in the south, dividing the European continent at its
narrowest, all of the cities except Berlin would be east of the line.
Stettin, by then known as Polish Szczecin, was the capital of
Pomerania, on the western bank of the Oder, less than a hundred miles
northeast of Berlin. German settlers had built the town in the
twelfth century. In 1945 nearly four million Pomeranian Germans had
fled toward the West to escape the Red Army in its advance against
the disintegrating Third Reich. Cosmopolitan Trieste was the Adriatic
port that had given the old Austro-Hungarian Empire access to the
seas. By the end of World War II, it was effectively integrated into
Yugoslavia under the control of the communist partisans led by Josip
Broz Tito.
For the purposes of Churchill's rhetoric, the line was a
natural demarcation, but the realities on the ground in 1946 required
modest adjustments. Vienna, capital of Austria, was east of the
direct line, as Churchill said, yet American, British, and French
troops, as well as Russians, controlled the venerable (and
vulnerable) city under a four-power occupation authority. Prague and
the lands of the Czechs--Bohemia and Moravia--were actually a little
to the west of Churchill's line, but they were occupied by the Red
Army alone. Also to the west were the German länder around Berlin;
under Soviet occupation, they soon would become the German Democratic
Republic (East Germany).
With those adjustments, the line that Churchill drew that day
in Missouri endured intact for forty years, for all the overt and
covert efforts of the most anticommunist Americans to roll it back.
What had over time been called central Europe disappeared for half a
century, absorbed into a rigid delineation between East and West.
Just eight years before, Churchill's predecessor, Neville
Chamberlain, had dismissed a crisis in this central ground as "a
quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know
nothing."2 (Chamberlain's dismissive statement was uttered only 650
miles from Czechoslovakia; Americans were another 3,600 miles farther
away.) The disparate nations behind this curtain were not prominent
in United States foreign policy, save among ethnic and academic
specialists whose interests rarely intruded upon general public
perceptions. The diverse nations of eastern Europe faded into an
undifferentiated and hostile land mass under communism, monolithic
and, it was said, dangerous to America's global interests.
To be sure, Poland enjoyed an enduring hold on the American
imagination--tenacious, throbbing, and Roman Catholic, fabled for
Chopin and Paderewski and its nineteenth-century struggle for
nationhood against the vise grip of Russia and Germany. From the
waves of migration early in the twentieth century, Polish immigrants
had built a strong political presence in the United States, backed by
the Roman Catholic hierarchy, as Roosevelt and Democratic Party
strategists were ever mindful. The acts of the traditional predators
upon Poland drew Britain and France into the war against Hitler; once
the war was won some five years later, Stalin's designs moved the
Polish state bodily westward. Poland absorbed Pomerania and the
Baltic coast; in return, Polish lands in the east passed into the
Soviet Union. Polish nationalism was a culture resting on a shifting
territorial base.
Czechoslovakia, by contrast, was a relatively new cause. From
his years as a practicing historian, Woodrow Wilson had been
intrigued by the Slavs, predominant in central Europe before the
invasions of the German knights and merchants. At the Paris Peace
Conference of 1919, the uneasy merger of Czech and Slovak
nationalisms found voice in the remarkable political skills of Tomaš
Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, diplomatic charmers who knew how to flatter
the sensitivities of the western democracies to gain privileged
status for their artificial homeland. Yet by the time Hitler sought
to unite into his Reich the long-established and industrious German
population of the Sudetenland, ringing the Czech heartland, Britain
and the western democracies could not summon up sufficient sympathy
to bestir themselves for this "far-away" land.
Hungarians were Magyars, not Slavs, remembered by Americans
of idealistic inclination for the uprising of Lajos Kossuth in the
heady revolutions of 1848. The Magyars had allied themselves uneasily
with the triumphant Germanic culture of the Hapsburg Empire in the
mid nineteenth century, and they joined the Nazis at the start in
fighting the western allies and Russia. Hungary was occupied by Nazi
Germany in 1944. Though Hungary was well to the east of Churchill's
line, the western allies did not initially regard it as lost to a
Soviet sphere of influence.
Hugging the eastern shore of the Baltic, Lutheran Estonia and
Latvia, geographically and politically beholden to Soviet power,
clung to the vision of independent nationhood that they had enjoyed
between the two world wars. Like neighboring but Catholic Lithuania,
with its cultural and political ties to Poland, they hoped for
western support against Soviet Russia.
The South Slavs, joined together in the Yugoslav Federation,
were nonetheless fractured between Orthodox Serbs, who had resisted
Hitler, and Catholic Croatians, who had readily embraced Nazism in
its local manifestations. The Slavs farther east, Ukrainians and
Belorussians, lived on lands truly uncharted to most Americans--save
the active Ukrainian population in the United States (and Canada),
which struggled to make their national identity a cause of interest.
Given this perplexing diversity, American policymakers seemed
inclined, like Chamberlain, to dismiss the whole area. In 1943, Czech
president Beneš urged Americans to accept the eventual predominance
of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe. Later that year Roosevelt
breezily informed the troubled archbishop of New York, Cardinal
Spellman, that even if regions of particular Catholic interest--he
cited Austria, Hungary, and Croatia--fell under Soviet "protection"
after the war, twenty or thirty years of European influence would
make the Russians "less barbarous."
Early in 1945 some voices in the wilderness, such as those of
navy secretary Forrestal and Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg,
tried to turn official attention to the plight of eastern Europe.
Their motivations for concern were not altruistic: Forrestal,
formerly of Wall Street, was growing obsessed with the communist
threat to capitalism; Vandenberg had a large Michigan constituency of
immigrants from eastern Europe. A measure of their loneliness in
political life was Walter Lippmann's dismissive remark as late as the
start of 1946 that acceptance of a Soviet sphere of influence in
eastern Europe was only realistic. After all, he told his millions of
readers, this was only "one small specific area of the globe."
In this small specific area, these faraway countries of which
Americans knew so little, American political and strategic thought
found its focus in the first decade after World War II. Here was the
first battlefield of
the Cold War, the campaign to roll back the Iron Curtain. The
weaponry to be deployed would come from the new (to Americans)
arsenals of intelligence, subversion, and espionage.
*
Once the United States became established in the 1950s as a
superpower of the Cold War, the government could summon up sources
and methods for acquiring accurate, real-time, on-the-ground
information about lands and peoples hitherto unfamiliar. But in May
1945, America was on its way to unilateral disarmament in the realm
of strategic intelligence.
"Intelligence," so called, was a fractured pursuit, combining
visions of high purpose with low-life transactions in dark alleys,
with military officers and civilian professionals competing for the
attentions of policymakers and the services of agents in the field.
The military intelligence teams that had supported the Allied
invasion across France and into Germany found themselves after the
Nazi surrender with a fundamentally altered mission. Instead of
assembling the order of battle and tactical intelligence necessary
for an advancing fighting army, they were tasked with supporting an
army of occupation. Clinging for the first postwar months to the
image of Germans as enemies, the Army G-2 staff pursued suspected
remnants of the fallen Nazi regime across the ruined German
countryside.
Another military branch, the Counter-Intelligence Corps
(CIC), should have been better equipped for the local security
missions of an occupation administration. CIC detachments, after all,
were accustomed to the freewheeling ways and nonaccountable practices
endemic to the running of spies. But the CIC was, like the rest of
the armed forces, a corps of ordinary Americans, drafted into service
for the duration, with neither dedication nor ambition in the
tradecraft of intelligence. Weary from fighting a war, too many
officers and men of the CIC succumbed to the venal motives of an
occupying army. Discipline was lax, and anyone with casual access to
CIC insignia could pursue nefarious, self-enriching missions without
the nuisance of official orders. Stories of black-marketing and
looting of art works and other civilian treasures came to mar the
reputation of the CIC in occupied Europe.
Most complicating of all in 1945 was the upstart civilian
intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Later
generations of American intelligence professionals liked to trace
their lineage not from the military branches but from the broad-
ranging OSS. Created by Roosevelt to remedy the haphazard and
uncoordinated gathering of information that had allowed the surprise
attack on Pearl Harbor, the OSS became in just four years an
expansive, inclusive, and erratic intelligence apparatus, distinct
from the traditional and confined intelligence staffs of the
uniformed services, responsible to no one but a preoccupied
president. Businessmen, partisan fighters, professors, technicians
clever at devices for sabotage, all worked side by side in the OSS.
Exploits of
both derring-do and sophisticated analysis were subsequently and
appropriately heralded in the popular and professional literature.
But with the end of the war, the OSS seemed a strange hybrid in a
morass of conflicting purposes.
Its founding director, the dynamic William J. Donovan, was
ever difficult to place in a bureaucracy. A restive corporate lawyer
from Buffalo, New York, he was already fifty-eight when Roosevelt
called him to active duty in 1941. Twice he had run as a Republican
for public office, including the governorship of New York in 1932,
and twice he had lost. But he was a veteran of foreign wars, a
cavalry officer on the Mexican border in 1916 (where he picked up the
sobriquet "Wild Bill"), a Medal of Honor winner in World War I.
Innovative and hyperactive, he had shown a penchant for secret
missions during the Russian civil war in 1919, the Italian campaign
against Ethiopia, the Spanish civil war, and diverse military
missions to Czechoslovakia and the Balkans in the late 1930s, even as
he gained stature as a Wall Street lawyer and pulled in clients for
his firm, Donovan and Leisure. He had an undeniable gift for cutting
through petty obstructions, for energizing talents and getting things
done--not necessarily in an orderly way, but getting them done.
Energy, smoke, mirrors, and imagination had built an
unprecedented civilian intelligence service for the United States in
World War II. To his credit, Donovan recognized the demands that
would be made upon the broad profession of intelligence in the
postwar era. But his proposal in November 1944 to turn his agency
into a peacetime instrument of government backfired in a blaze of
tendentious publicity from the anti-Roosevelt press. Donovan always
pursued several purposes at the same time--a virtue for a master of
spies, self-defeating for a man of politics.
From early in the war, the OSS faced the dilemma of whether
or not to collect intelligence about the Soviet Union as well as
about the Nazi enemy. Roosevelt, determined to maintain Stalin's
alliance and trust, ordered Donovan to restrain his people--and
himself. For instance, even though a chance encounter gave the OSS
secret access to the private secretary of the Soviet ambassador in
Washington, Donovan broke off the contact. Early in 1943, he was
tempted by a proposition to develop sources on Soviet activities in
cooperation with the less inhibited British intelligence agencies.
But the State Department honored the presidential edict and declined
to get involved in undercover activity, refusing to provide
diplomatic cover for an OSS officer in the Moscow embassy. (Later
that year, however, a single OSS analyst, Thomas Whitney, quietly
joined the embassy staff, with the concurrence of Ambassador
Harriman. He became a trusted colleague of George Kennan's.)
Donovan was never a man to settle for a tightly circumscribed
mission. If he could not target the Soviet Union, he would take the
opposite tack in seeking to enhance his agency's effectiveness:
cooperation with the Soviet ally against the common enemy. On
Christmas Eve, 1943, Donovan flew to Moscow for professional
discussions with the Soviet external intelligence services. The
astonished Russians quizzed Donovan in detail "about the particular
methods of spying, American style." How did Americans introduce
agents into enemy territory? How were these secret agents trained?
What equipment did they carry? Donovan responded in his expansive
way. The Russians volunteered no information about spying, Soviet
style.
The Soviet government delayed a formal reply to the American
offer of cooperation, and during that six-week interim early in 1944
more sober minds prevailed in Washington. Even Roosevelt concurred in
the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover, who as director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation was responsible for internal security, that
cooperation with Moscow on matters of espionage and intelligence
risked becoming, at the least, counterproductive.
In 1944, swept up in the end-game enthusiasm of the invasion
of continental Europe and eager to serve the triumphant military,
Donovan turned his intelligence service in a less visible but
ultimately more fateful direction, to the urgent tasks of tactical
military intelligence rather than the strategic political
intelligence for which it had been assembled. His OSS parachuted men
behind the lines and built networks in France and the Low Countries
as the Allies pushed toward the Rhine. Inside Germany itself the OSS
tried to develop fifth columns and resistance to the disintegrating
power of the Nazis. This change of mission risked provoking the
existing rivalry between the civilian OSS and the military
intelligence staffs, of course. But Donovan knew what he was doing,
even if his rivals did not.
One of the most tightly guarded secrets of the war was a
special asset available to the OSS and not to the other intelligence
services. This was SIGINT, or signals intelligence: intercepts of
German army and police communications that the British had been
collecting and exploiting since early in the war. Churchill had
agreed in 1942 to share this invaluable real-time intelligence with
the United States but, to guard the secret to the fullest, with only
one select, specially classified agency. Created for the purpose was
a counterespionage branch of the OSS called X-2. Donovan's agency was
thus uniquely equipped to provide Eisenhower's advancing forces with
accurate and detailed intelligence of the names and locations of
resistance networks. The military intelligence staffs were not
apprised of the source of this sensitive data; the OSS relished the
power of its special, mysterious asset, which came at the
bureaucratic expense of its rivals.
The crucial military decision in the last weeks of the war
can be traced to information provided by Donovan. In diverting the
Anglo-American drive away from conquest of the accessible capitals--
Berlin and Prague--and turning his land armada toward southern
Germany, Eisenhower was acting on OSS intelligence. Donovan's agents
had assembled clues that the Nazis were building an underground army
of 35,000 to 40,000 guerrilla fighters, with a last-ditch military
redoubt in the Alps, to fight on even after the fall of the Nazi
capital. The Americans succeeded in cutting Bavaria off from the rest
of Germany, but found there no organized guerrilla units, no Alpine
redoubt.
The OSS "played a key role in the redoubt myth," wrote one
irreverent Donovan aide, William J. Casey, years later. "We were
unable to explode it and we should have, easily. We had a dozen teams
in the redoubt area and none of them reported anything justifying
belief that enough military strength could be generated in that
pastoral, undeveloped country to resist five million Allied troops
for more than a few weeks."
Casey, who became director of intelligence under President
Ronald Reagan in 1980, was one conservative who harbored enduring
suspicion about this seeming intelligence failure. Eisenhower's 1945
decision to chase the mythical Nazi guerrillas and their redoubt gave
the advancing Russians opportunity to capture cities and territory in
central Europe that otherwise could have fallen to the armies of the
West. Cold War anticommunists who saw conspiracies all around them
suspected that left leaning officers of the OSS might have
contaminated the evaluation of tactical intelligence over the winter
and spring of 1945, for the postwar benefit of the Soviet Union.
American intelligence lost its most powerful advantage with
the Nazi surrender in May 1945, when its access to secret German
communications became irrelevant. No information source remotely
comparable was available about the Red Army occupation forces in
eastern Europe or the Soviet Union itself. Having lost his special
asset, Donovan then lost his patron as well: Roosevelt may have
relished the skullduggery that Donovan promoted, but Truman had no
use for it nor for the overreaching Donovan himself. Acting on
impulse, in the style that characterized his early presidency, Truman
abruptly fired Donovan and abolished the OSS in September 1945.
*
The European continent was a pit of human and physical misery after
the six years of World War II. It was "the most violent and
frightening decade in European history," in the words of the British
historian Alan Bullock.6 Beyond the millions who had perished in war,
no less than 60 million persons had been uprooted from their homes,
nearly half removed to some other country to serve as slave labor for
the Nazi war machine or to escape marauding armies of victors and
vanquished alike. The occupiers of the fallen Reich found some 10
million homeless Germans, mostly uprooted city dwellers foraging the
countryside for food and shelter. A further 12 million who had fled
or been expelled from Germany's eastern territories poured into the
western occupation zones, mainly the American zone of Bavaria,
arriving, at one point in 1945, at the rate of 40,000 per week.
Another 7 million lingered in German prisoner-of-war camps, for which
the occupation regimes had to assume sudden responsibility.
Among these displaced persons were men, women, and children
from the Soviet Union, including ethnic Russians, Ukrainians,
Cossacks, citizens of the Baltic states, and Poles whose home
villages had been incorporated into Soviet territory. Some 5 million
Soviet nationals were found across western and central Europe,
including 2.8 million forced laborers and 1.15 million captured
Soviet troops who had survived in POW camps. Intermingled were a
million other Soviet citizens who had volunteered to fight under Nazi
command against their own communist government; these people
surrendered to the western armies rather than face a vindictive
welcome home from Stalin.
Even before V-E Day, the western allies had wondered about
these renegade Russians. Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE)
mounted a clandestine deception operation in 1944, dropping fake
documents and subversive equipment to pinpointed locations in France,
Belgium, Denmark, and Norway where the Russian units were known to be
deployed--hoping to make their German officers suspect an anti-Nazi
resistance movement among the Russian soldiers. In at least one case,
the SOE believed that their mischief mission had caused the Germ an
command in northern France to replace the Russians with SS fighting
units.
As victory approached, the western allies became concerned
about the fate of these Russian volunteer units. At first Soviet
spokesmen affected disinterest, claiming that too few men were
involved to be a matter for government concern. As British historian
Nikolai Tolstoy concluded, "the Soviet Union was reluctant to admit
publicly that any of its subjects were opposed to their Marxist
government." Yet when he met Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, Stalin
obtained their agreement to a seemingly routine "housekeeping"
measure committing the western allies to the repatriation of Soviet
citizens found in the various territories liberated from Nazi rule.
This commitment, signed at the working level by the American military
attaché in Moscow, Major General Deane, and a Red Army counterpart,
was not made public until a year or so later.
With the war's end, the enormous scope of the problem came
into view. The western allies demanded a routine order-of-battle
report from the captured Nazi high command, and two weeks after the
surrender General Alfred Jodl issued a pathetic accounting,
documenting the anarchy that had befallen the armies of the Third
Reich in its closing days. When he last heard from them, the Nazi
commander in captivity reported, Russian volunteer units (presumably
anticommunists all) were as follows: "a) 599th Russian Brigade, appr.
13,000 men, on march from Denmark southwards . . .; b) 600th Russian
Infantry Division, appr. 12,000 men, last reported in Bohemia-
Moravia; c) 650th Russian Infantry Division, appr. 18,000 men, last
reported on march from Muesingen to the Linz [Austria] area." On and
on went the meticulous but feckless accounting.
Western observers saw the problem in human terms. When the
novelist George Orwell visited a POW camp outside Munich as a British
war correspondent, he reported:
Prisoners were passing through it from day to day, but at a given
moment the number there was about 100,000. According to the American
officer in charge, the prisoners were on average 10 percent non-
German, mostly Russians and Hungarians. The Russians were being
sorted by asking the simple question, "Do you want to go back to
Russia or not?" A respectable proportion--of course, I have no exact
figures--answered "not," and these were regarded as Germans and kept
in the camp, while the others were released.
By the end of June 1945, 1.5 million Soviet nationals had
been returned to Red Army detachments in eastern Germany. Up to this
point, contemporary reports indicate, the repatriation proceeded
without incident or resistance. But as the months passed, news spread
through the camps of displaced persons about the fate befalling those
who had been returned to the Soviet Union: arrest as traitors,
sentences of hard labor, even execution on the spot immediately after
the western escorts had withdrawn from the sites of transfer.
Scarcely noted by the British and American public at the time, this
repatriation later became one of the most searing controversies of
the early Cold War. Honoring a commitment at Yalta undertaken before
they understood the nature of the problem, the western allies
eventually employed military force to dispatch hundreds of thousands
of Soviet nationals back to the mercy of the Red Army, to certain
punishment or death.
*
Churchill had slightly overstated the case when he complained to
Truman that "we do not know what is going on" in the lands conquered
by the Red Army. Ill coordinated and sporadic, British and American
intelligence teams had in fact made numerous feints into eastern
Europe before the war's end.
As early as March 1943, Donovan had sent a three-man mission
to Budapest to try breaking Hungary from its alliance with Hitler;
the men were promptly incarcerated. Late in 1944 a young OSS lawyer,
Frank G. Wisner, reported from Romania that the advancing Red Army
had deliberately let two Nazi divisions out of a trap, freeing them
to fight the British and Americans in the Ardennes campaign on the
western front.
The OSS and the British SOE fielded a joint mission behind
German lines in northwest Moravia (Czechoslovakia) in February 1945,
aimed at opening radio contact with London and preparing landing
fields for larger teams. The team ultimately made its way to Prague,
but not in time to set up a deterrence to the Soviet occupation of
the capital. The American Third Army under General George S. Patton
crossed into western Czechoslovakia in the first days of May, but
Eisenhower, acting in good faith about the understandings of Yalta,
ordered his general to halt the advance along a line drawn through
Karlsbad, Pilsen, and Budweis. The restraining order angered Patton,
but at least the names had a pleasant resonance among American troops
who knew good German beers.
British teams were ahead of Donovan's men in clandestine
missions to penetrate Nazi Germany and organize networks of agents
and informers for the occupation. One SOE agent named Fordwick
actually made his way into Germany in October 1944 from a clandestine
base in Denmark, contacting Danish workers in German industrial
centers to start spreading defeatist propaganda. Learning of the
mission, the British Foreign Office ordered it scuttled, fearful of
undermining the allied policy of unconditional surrender, and
reprimanded an SOE case officer serving under diplomatic cover in
Stockholm.
Once the Nazi Reich surrendered, and intelligence about the
Red Army finally became a priority for the western occupiers, front-
line officers confronted a stark reality that posed moral and
practical dilemmas for which they were not prepared. It became
evident in the first months after the war that Germans, Nazi or not,
possessed a great deal more intelligence and expertise about Soviet
Russia and the Red Army than any other source.
American conservatives, who, after the World War I armistice,
had collected reports by the defeated German General Staff about
Bolshevik atrocities, had long been impressed by the expertise of
Germans about Russia and eastern Europe. In the 1920s, financiers
such as Hjalmar Schacht, seeking American loans to rebuild German
industry, fed their interest. As early as 1920, the National City
Bank of New York circulated a report originating (anonymously) from
Schacht and his business associates arguing that America could
benefit from "the exact knowledge of Russian conditions possessed by
Germany, which the United States will be able to successfully avail
themselves of."
Developing their instincts for self-preservation as the Nazi
enterprise collapsed in 1945, German officers recognized that their
expertise about the East could be a vehicle for ingratiating
themselves with the conquering allies. Intelligence on the Soviet
Union soon became the coin of the realm, with any former Nazi of
gumption claiming special knowledge, even control of secret networks
of agents in eastern Europe who could be mobilized to serve the
western allies just as they had served the Nazis. The summer of 1945
opened the era of fabricators and paper mills in American
intelligence, with real and, more often, fictitious sources of
information dangled before the Americans in return for favorable
treatment from the war crimes courts.
Lacking other access to developments within the Soviet zones
of occupation, the Americans in Europe were tempted by these
information sources, for all the absence of quality control. Within a
month after the Nazi surrender, the X-2 branch of OSS, charged with
hunting down war criminals, received three separate offers from
former members of the Nazi intelligence services to turn over their
agent networks in Soviet-occupied territory. The officers involved
fell into the "automatic arrest" category, and X-2 flatly rejected
the offers.
Other American intelligence organizations were not so
scrupulous. At the POW camp of Wörgl, near Kitzbühel, a forty-three-
year-old German general struck American military interrogators as
more interesting than the rest of the unruly crowd of war prisoners.
Reinhard Gehlen had turned himself in to the American army on May 22.
Humility was not a common trait within the German General Staff, and
Gehlen did not hesitate to express his irritation at the lack of
respect shown to his person by the Americans. Gradually, successive
interrogators begin to appreciate that this prisoner, while probably
not as important as he said he was, deserved special attention for
the services he could provide. For Gehlen, who had been head of
Hitler's military intelligence on the eastern front, possessed a card-
file memory of agents and locations and a scholarly familiarity with
the Red Army and the Soviet system of warfare and government.
Transferred to more comfortable captivity than the routine
POW camps, Gehlen began to open up the project that he had been
devising for the past six months.12 Secretly, for any sign of
defeatism in the ranks would have brought immediate execution by the
SS, Gehlen had been spiriting away from his military headquarters
files and documents about Soviet affairs in eastern Europe, which he
buried in a mountain hideout in Bavaria near the Czech border.
Through June this wily Wehrmacht general dribbled out more and more
data and insights to American intelligence on what was becoming their
topic of greatest concern--on condition that he and his closest
associates in conspiracy not be treated with the contempt meted out
to all the rest who had worn the Nazi uniform.
By mid-July American interrogators were sufficiently
impressed with the prize that had fallen into their grasp: Gehlen's
name was discreetly removed from the circulated lists of German
officers subject to automatic arrest, and a special alert about his
potential value was passed up the line to General Edwin Sibert, chief
of army intelligence (G-2) in the U.S. occupation zone. Sibert was a
man sophisticated enough in the business of intelligence to have
understood the disadvantage his G-2 staff had been operating under
during the last year of the war, lacking the valuable asset of
SIGINT. He was determined not to let such a liability recur and to
grab for his own service any asset that seemed a promising source of
intelligence. Holding to none of the X-2 inhibitions about traffic
with the Nazi enemy, Sibert had already shown interest in German
intelligence professionals whom the rest of the army considered war
criminals. He did not bother to inform the OSS or any other
intelligence service of his catch.
Unlike lower-ranking intelligence officers, however, Sibert
understood the necessity of working within the chain of command, and
he arranged for Gehlen and a few of his closest associates to be
spirited out of Germany and flown in disguise to the army's
interrogation center at Fort Hunt, Virginia, for further
interrogation, cross-checking, and testing of credentials. For ten
months Gehlen was held under wraps in the United States. When he was
allowed back into Germany in June 1946, he returned with secret
status and authority within the intelligence apparatus of the
American military government.
By the summer of 1946, Washington's top military intelligence
officers had abandoned the fervor of de-Nazification and were
arranging for ex-Nazis with "special" qualifications, such as
expertise in rocket science and other high technology, to be excused
from the indignities of prisoner-of-war status and join the service
of the United States for the demands of the postwar era. Included
among these special qualifications was demonstrable expertise on the
USSR. As Major General Stephen J. Chamberlin, director of army
intelligence in Washington, informed Eisenhower, "valuable
intelligence on Russia and Russian dominated countries can be
developed more rapidly by this method than any other." In the less
formal language of an American staff officer in Frankfurt, speaking
to journalist John Gunther, "Are we dealing with our former enemies,
or our future allies? We have not yet decided whether we want to win
the last war or the next one."
Between World War III and a Fourth Reich, Americans in
Germany saw the former as the greater threat. If the United States
was to learn what was happening behind the Iron Curtain, they
believed, they must start with the expertise of the Nazis.
*
Weapons systems are difficult to dismantle even when they no longer
serve the purpose for which they were devised. The superpower
combatants found this out about their stockpiles of nuclear weapons
when the Cold War was over in the 1990s, and the United States found
it out concerning its weapons of intelligence at the end of World War
II. President Truman could abolish the OSS with a stroke of his pen;
more difficult was deciding what to do with the field agents and
communications channels established in a war that was over.
At its demise at the end of September 1945, the OSS had on
its duty rolls 10,390 persons, including nearly 6,000 abroad,
distributed among nine overseas missions. Those involved with
research and analysis (including the important wartime Foreign
Nationalities Branch) were transferred to the supervision of the
State Department. The actual "spies," agents in the field and the
case officers who ran them, were reassigned to the War Department in
a section specially set up to receive them, the Strategic Services
Unit. The SSU represented the remnant of an intelligence apparatus in
decay; by December 1 it numbered no more than 1,900 officers.
The SSU's mandate was to demobilize and disperse these
wartime assets. Yet from the start, the unit's intelligence
professionals were determined to keep a structure in readiness,
secretly, for a future "efficient peacetime clandestine intelligence
agency." They first signaled their intent on October 25, 1945, in a
memorandum to their chief, marked "for American eyes only," in which
they proposed to preserve capabilities for "support of underground
forces" and "clandestine subversion of enemy morale." None of them
yet envisaged a campaign to overthrow communist governments but they
believed there was no harm in stockpiling the weapons.
Encountering no resistance from "American eyes," the
surviving intelligence officers spelled out the details of their
undercover design in January 1946 for a tightly restricted audience
in Washington: The SSU would maintain up-to-date rosters
of "recoverable personnel" who had returned to private life but could
be called back on duty when needed; "local agents who have served
American secret intelligence purposes well have been 'sealed off,'
with arrangements made to resume contact in the future"; and a
central file was assembled on more than four hundred thousand
individuals, known agents of foreign intelligence services and other
secret organizations "whose activities are or may be inimical to
American interests."
All these preparations were for an undefined future. In the
field those first months after the war, the dwindling arsenal of
intelligence was a jumble of overlapping missions, competing
jurisdictions, and interagency rivalries. The SSU, Army G-2, and CIC
maintained separate reporting channels to Washington; seldom did they
communicate with each other, and never with the intelligence services
of the British and French in their own zones of occupation.
In Munich no less than ten American army and military
government units were pursuing distinct and uncoordinated activities;
in one case, three of them conducted separate reliability
investigations of the same potential informer. In Berlin the SSU
retained a former Gestapo officer named Karl Krull, who strolled the
streets to pick out former Nazi comrades who were either looking for
a job (most of them) or, more ominously, had already signed on with
the Soviets to spy on the western occupation--for the Russians also
were engaged in building new intelligence networks. When fingered by
Krull, former Nazi officers would be "turned" by the Americans to
serve as double agents in the new war of espionage.
Sometimes the demands of intelligence clashed with official
policy imperatives. When the American military government ordered a
former Nazi evicted from his comfortable apartment to provide housing
for a family of displaced persons, the American occupation officers
had no way of knowing that the officer, one Heinz Schmalsläger, was
already employed by SSU and was providing reams of documents on
Soviet intelligence methods and networks in eastern Europe.
Schmalsläger was allowed to keep his flat; the DPs had to wait for
other quarters.
*
Scattered down the chains of command of American military
intelligence were officers who were unwilling to depend solely on the
remnants of Nazi networks. Though they had to start from zero,
various CIC units in occupied Germany and Austria set out to build
their own access to information.
The destitute refugees and POWs were a humanitarian problem
for the occupation authorities, but these displaced persons also
represented potential sources of information about the Red Army and
the Soviet infrastructure. The CIC established elaborate
interrogation procedures to systematically assemble data about
industrial and military facilities from POWs, forced laborers, and
Red Army defectors who could provide firsthand descriptions of what
they had seen and experienced. Countless stories of humanity in
upheaval show through the interrogation files: the thirty-five-year-
old teacher of science and mathematics in Odessa who defected from
his artillery regiment at the Hungarian border; his parents had
perished in the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, and he had no other
family; the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant in the Red Army signal
corps, veteran of the battles for Budapest and Vienna, who, after
being ordered back to Moscow, decided that surrender to the Americans
might bring him the chance of a better life; the Pole from Belorussia
liberated from a German POW camp in Czechoslovakia who had witnessed
the Red Army massacres of Polish officers at Katyn Forest in 1940 and
had resolved never to return to the Soviet Union.
Immediately upon the German surrender, the American army
commandeered a former Luftwaffe camp at Oberursel, outside Frankfurt,
where Nazi intelligence officers had grilled captured British and
American fliers. Some forty American interrogators, fluent in German,
Russian, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Spanish, and
Dutch (even one who could handle Japanese, mainly when cursing),
settled in at Oberursel.16 A similar center was established across
the Austrian border in Salzburg.
At first the interrogators sought evidence of lingering Nazi
guerrilla activity. As this line of questioning dried up, the
Americans turned their attention to what could be learned about the
Soviet Union. The first problem they faced was determining the bona
fides of each individual. "The interrogators . . . were always on the
lookout for [Soviet intelligence] agents in disguise," explained one
veteran of the operations, "men who would present themselves in the
West as refugees from communism and would learn every detail they
could of American intelligence proceedings, the identities of
American officers, the places they used for their business."17 The
Kremlin never tired in its curiosity about spying "American-style."
After many months of interrogating the destitute homeless,
the American officers confronted the problem of what was not so
politely called their "disposal." The Americans had learned enough by
early 1947 about the fate of displaced Soviet nationals repatriated
to the Red Army. Though most of their interrogation subjects were
willing to take their chances in returning to their former homes,
others did not want to go back.
At a level far below the vision of the statesmen, the human
treasure of postwar Europe had been taken in hand by particular
interests. All sides--British, American, Russian--were seeking
technicians of Nazi enterprises to contribute scientific expertise
for new national ventures in high technology. The builders of a
future Jewish homeland, Zionists, combed the DP camps starting as
early as the summer of 1945 for fighters and intellectuals ready to
be smuggled out of Europe to populate and develop Palestine.
The 430th CIC detachment in Austria devised a novel method of
disposing of defectors and informants from Soviet-occupied lands.
These officers were accustomed to operating on their own, without
documentation or reference to the higher occupation authorities. The
commander, Colonel James Milano, son of Italian immigrants in West
Virginia, resolved in the summer of 1947 to set up a route for
smuggling truly displaced persons to South America, where they would
establish new identities, secure from the hit men of Soviet
intelligence.
Latter-day United States government investigators described
the mechanism, apparently unknown to higher authorities, as "a sort
of underground railroad, dubbed a 'rat line,' and it ran from Austria
to Italy, where it relied on a Croatian priest, Father Krunoslav
Dragonovic, who was attached to a seminary in Rome where Croatian
youths studied for the priesthood." After an official investigation
in the 1980s, Milano came forward to tell his long-secret story
without the euphemisms of government officials.
Father Dragonovic was "completely corrupt," Milano's chief of
operations told him, "runs a visa racket on the side . . . will sell
them for fifteen hundred cash no questions asked." But what caught
the alert officers' eyes was an American citizen associated with the
Catholic father in his lucrative pursuits. This American's daytime
job was in the eligibility office of the politically respected
International Refugee Organization in Rome; he clearly knew all the
devices for getting visas for foreign countries for persons of shady
provenance.
If the CIC men in Austria could have compared notes with the
remnants of the old OSS and consulted those card files assembled by
the SSU, they might have learned a good deal about this particular
American. His name was Robert Bishop, and he was a veteran of
undercover exploits in wartime Romania. Presumably to protect the
secrets of American Cold War intelligence, his name was deleted from
the official investigation of the "rat line." Bishop would later
figure prominently in the effort to roll back the Iron Curtain, but
for Milano and the men of the CIC in 1947 he was a disappointment.
He "suddenly lost his mental stability," as the evaluations put it,
became an alcoholic, and had to be confined to the psychiatric unit
of an American military hospital.
The 430th CIC detachment in Salzburg nonetheless decided to
pay Dragonovic the then-extravagant fee of $1,500 from their
unvouchered funds to "dispose" of each defector from Soviet justice,
once their use as intelligence sources was exhausted; the Americans
called each one a "visitor" or a "VIP." All records of previous
identities were erased as the men disappeared into new lives,
families, and livelihoods in Bolivia, Argentina, and other South
American countries. Nothing was put in writing about a minor American
army intelligence operation--or almost nothing. One contemporary
report survives, a rambling assessment by CIC operations officer
Captain Paul Lyon:
[Dragonovic] is known and recorded as a fascist, war criminal, etc.,
and his contacts with South American diplomats of a similar class are
not generally approved by US State Department officials, plus the
fact that in the light of security, it is better that we may be able
to state, if forced, that the turning over of a DP to a welfare
organization falls in line with our democratic way of thinking and
that we are not engaged in illegal disposition of war criminals,
defectees and the like.
The refugees of the rat line surely numbered only in the
dozens--many more, at $1,500 a head, would have raised questions even
in the unvouchered funds of the CIC. But the demonstrated efficacy of
this novel escape route proved tempting beyond measure for a
different sort of "disposal."
Sent along to Dragonovic and then to safety in South America
was one particular intelligence asset for the United States in the
gathering Cold War, a Nazi war criminal named Klaus Barbie. He was
indeed a defector, but not from communism. Both the French and
American systems of justice were on his trail, but he had also
provided much useful data to American intelligence. Rather than face
the consequences of legal and public disclosure of the connection,
the CIC decided to "dispose" of him. Barbie, called the "butcher of
Lyons" for his role in Nazi atrocities in France, lived for the next
thirty-three years as a free man in Bolivia. Only in 1983 was he
discovered under his new identity and deported; tried for crimes
against humanity in 1987 and sentenced to life imprisonment, he died
in a French prison in 1991.

Copyright © 2000 by Peter Grose. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

The timing was awkward but, as it turned out, auspicious. At the turn of 1946, just as the new American president, Harry Truman, was growing skeptical about continuing the uneasy wartime cooperation with Soviet Russia, the United States embassy in Moscow was in the temporary care of a moody and troublesome journeyman, a midcareer diplomat hitherto unnoticed by the powers in Washington.

His ambassador, W. Averell Harriman, millionaire disburser of Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union for the common cause against Hitler, had worn out his welcome in Moscow - and had exhausted his own patience in trying to sustain cordial relations with Stalin while putting up with daily life under communism. Late in January 1946, Harriman turned over the embassy to his deputy. Old money and high politics tend to patronize careerists: "You're in charge now," Harriman told the earnest caretaker. "Now you can send all the telegrams you want."

Just a few days short of his forty-second birthday, George F. Kennan had waited a long time for his main chance. He had served powerful ambassadors across Europe through the 1920s and 1930s with unsung competence, working his way uncomfortably through the social obligations that constituted the diplomacy of the era, chafing at the bureaucratic concerns of those he considered intellectual inferiors. He had a way of trying people's patience with his propensity for obtuse musing. "Almost everyone got annoyed with Kennan after they first got to know him," said Loy Henderson, a senior diplomat whom Kennan actually admired. "He was so engrossed in his own ideas that he never learned how to go along or get along."

Kennan had graduated from Princeton in 1925 and had lived abroad almost continually after 1926; that was an era when the diplomatic career was a rarefied preserve cut off from American life. His postings included Geneva, Berlin, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the American diplomatic missions closest to the still-unrecognized Soviet Union. Tapped at the beginning of his professional career for special training in Soviet affairs (an uncle, for whom he was named, had been a recognized scholar of Tsarist Russia at the turn of the century), the pensive youth from Milwaukee had grown more conversant with the culture and politics of Russia than of his native land.

He had become a minor and idiosyncratic member of an exclusive cadre of Soviet specialists in the State Department, unknown to the general public or indeed to anyone outside his own circle. Almost to a man (no women had diplomatic careers at that time, of course), these tightly focused experts were contemptuous of Bolshevik manners and pretensions, contemptuous even more of American liberals of that era who looked upon Soviet Russia as a laboratory of social reform.

In the New Deal years of the 1930s, intellectuals sympathetic to the Soviet experiment had gained an upper hand in Washington, from President Franklin D. Roosevelt on down. Dispatches from the likes of this Kennan, about purges and the murderous rampages of collectivization and communization, threatened the prevailing wisdom. Kennan would have had no interest in getting along or going along with such left-wing contemporaries in the State Department as Noel Field or Alger Hiss, for instance.

Kennan began serving in Moscow under Harriman in 1944 and, along with disenchanted colleagues like the chief of the military liaison mission, General John Russell Deane, bombarded the lower levels of Washington bureaucracy with analyses of communist evil - reports that went unread by the senior officials pursuing Roosevelt's vision of alliance with the Soviet Union. As victory over Hitler became assured, however, the simmerings of anti-Soviet thought began surfacing in Washington again. Even Roosevelt, the week before he died, began to doubt that he could go on doing business with Stalin in building a secure peace.

President Truman came into office uninhibited by the reforming zeal of the old New Deal. Once the victories in Europe and the Pacific were confirmed in the course of 1945, his fledgling administration opened new eyes upon the Soviet Union: an ally for six years, was it now to be an adversary?

In February 1946, just after Ambassador Harriman had withdrawn, the State Department and the Treasury sent two modest inquiries to the Moscow embassy left in Kennan's care. Washington needed an "interpretive analysis" of recent Soviet statements about international financial institutions, for the purpose of fashioning American policy. Such inquiries were routine, the normal format for discussion between a capital and its diplomatic outposts. What was unusual was that this time the officer responsible for replying was George Kennan.

After a few days of thought, the chargé d'affaires ad interim decided to seize the opening that had eluded him through all his years of bureaucratic servitude. "Now, suddenly, my opinion was being asked," he wrote, looking back on the moment. "It was no good trying to brush the question off with a couple of routine sentences describing Soviet views on such things as world banks and international monetary funds. It would not do to give them just a fragment of the truth. Here was a case where nothing but the whole truth would do. They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it."

At nine p.m. on February 22, Kennan sent a telegram to Washington - 8,000 words in length but broken into five parts, as its author described it, "like an eighteenth-century Protestant sermon." (More to the immediate point, he split up the text so as not to burden the primitive communications channels of the day and so that it "would not look so outrageously long.") Here was Kennan on his own - analysis both elegant and prolix, lucid in language but not always clear on the practical points he was trying to make. It was the sort of thoughtful essay that over the years had stirred the respect, and the irritation, of busy superiors and men of politics.

Your inquiry, Kennan began, "involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, . . . that I cannot compress answers into single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of over-simplification." Readers thus warned, the flow of words poured forth: Soviet behavior patterns scrutinized for both academic and operational import; the Kremlin's "neurotic view of world affairs"; the "traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity"; the implications for American policy arising from the neuroses of the Russian soul. Kennan released all the intellectual emotions of his diplomatic colleagues steeped in Soviet affairs, pent up as they had been under the disinterest of the Roosevelt years. As it turned out, his musings that February evening in 1946 rang down the final curtain on the alliance of wartime convenience between Soviet communism and western democracy.

In the later annals of the Cold War, Kennan's dispatch no. 511 became known simply as the Long Telegram - "probably the most important, and influential, message ever sent to Washington by an American diplomat," in the words of Clark Clifford, then a modest Truman aide in the White House. In the State Department, a wary staff assistant warned the secretary of state that "this telegram from George Kennan in Moscow is not subject to condensation." The hard-driving secretary of the navy, James V. Forrestal, clipped a copy of the diplomatic dispatch to his personal journal and, ignoring its Secret classification, passed it around the government.

From his later stature as an elder statesman, Kennan remarked, "If none of my previous literary efforts had seemed to evoke even the faintest tinkle from the bell at which they were aimed, this one, to my astonishment, struck it squarely and set it vibrating." For the Long Telegram told Washington what it was finally ready to hear: the Soviet Union, an ally in war, was becoming an adversary in peace.

Kennan was due for home leave after his overseas service during World War II, and upon the arrival of a new ambassador that spring he returned to the unfamiliar terrain of Washington. There he found that quite a few important people wanted to meet the author of the Long Telegram. Assigned to a sabbatical at the National War College, Kennan made the rounds of policymakers and commentators known to him previously only from newspapers and shortwave radio broadcasts.

Forrestal asked him for a further memo clarifying what the thoughts of the Long Telegram meant for America's long-term strategy. Sitting in a northwest corner room at Washington's Fort McNair, hacking away at a typewriter (as he later pictured himself), Kennan churned out a new essay, which, with Forrestal's permission, he submitted to the prestigious New York journal Foreign Affairs. Unexpectedly, however, he was recalled onto active State Department duty; he tried to withdraw the article, then in press, for fear that it would be taken as an official policy statement. He reluctantly agreed to permit publication under the pseudonym "X."

The "X article" of July 1947 addressed a general public confused about the Soviet Union; it had all the impact in intellectual circles that the Long Telegram had registered within the government a year earlier. As the author's identity quickly became known, the State Department tried to dismiss the article, unconvincingly, as merely the views of a scholar on leave.

"The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies," Kennan as "X" argued. "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points."

The elucidation was nuanced and elegant, but the argument rode roughshod over all those in Washington who still clung to the hope that the wartime alliance could be sustained in the postwar era. It proposed nothing less than a fundamental realignment of all the assumptions held by the American people about the nation's foreign policy. Understandably, and to the discomfort of its author, the "X article" provoked an enduring storm of criticism from both left and right.

From the prevailing liberal perspective, the first onslaught came from the era's most influential commentator on public affairs, Walter Lippmann, who lambasted "Mr. X" in fourteen successive columns published in newspapers across the nation that autumn. (The columnist, an intimate in Washington political circles, knew full well the identity of the author he was criticizing and, indeed, regarded him as a personal friend.) Lippmann challenged the facts, the logic, and the implications of the article. Containment, Lippmann argued, was a "strategic monstrosity" that would require unending military pressure, straining America's political and economic resources to the breaking point. The policy was doomed to fail.

Painful though this assault was to Kennan, a private person unaccustomed to public criticism, an even more strident response came from the conservative opinion centers of Washington, New York, and the midwestern heartland, where generations of emigrants from eastern Europe had made their new lives. Containment reeked of appeasement, they complained, and amounted to the abandonment of eastern Europe to communism.

As eloquent on this side as Lippmann on his was James Burnham, a then-prominent polemicist holding forth from the philosophy faculty of New York University. Containment, he declared, was merely "bureaucratic verbalization of a policy of drift - its inner law is: Let history do it." Burnham and his cohorts on the right were not content with drift when it came to confronting communism; they wanted action! "Containment is a variant of the defensive," Burnham argued, "and a defensive policy . . . can never win."

The rhetoric soared as the controversy raged over the coming years. Burnham belittled containment as a "teacup edition" of what ordinary Americans wanted from their foreign policy; the doctrine, as he understood it, drew a magic line behind which "every communist, like a Brunhilde behind a wall of fire that even Siegfried has sworn to respect, can sleep secure." Alexander Wiley, the powerful Republican senator from Wisconsin, denounced Kennan and his State Department colleagues for pursuing what he made bold to call "panty-waist diplomacy."

Kennan did not reply to these critics (though years later he commented sadly that his friend Lippmann had argued upon a "misunderstanding almost tragic in its dimensions"). Kennan's was not the style of the radio discussion programs that were starting to make an impact among Americans far from the intellectual centers. Moreover, he was once again a serving United States diplomat, restricted by protocol from speaking out on his own.

Only four decades later did another reason for Kennan's reticence come to light. Commentators and even powerful senators were not privy to some most unusual policy discussions proceeding in deep secrecy within the top echelons of the Truman administration. Even as containment was being scorned as appeasement and timidity in the first months of 1948, a high-level staff within the State Department was devising a remarkable initiative to confront communism aggressively through clandestine action. The secret program would start with innocuous propaganda and persuasion, then proceed directly into sabotage, subversion, and paramilitary engagement.

While critics were lambasting what they considered the defensive doctrine of containment, its author was at work designing a massive offensive. When the diplomatic archives were finally unsealed, they revealed the architect and champion of American covert action against east European communism to be "Mr. X" himself, George F. Kennan.

Among Kennan's many idiosyncrasies was a fascination, rare for a conventional diplomat, with the practice and product of intelligence as it was then understood - the clandestine collection of secret information. As early as September 1945, while serving as the ambassador's deputy in the Moscow embassy, Kennan had been impressed with the work of the American intelligence officer serving in the Soviet Union under diplomatic cover. Since "the normal channels and facilities now available to us" were not turning up the most important and sensitive information, he informed the State Department, using the euphemisms of polite diplomats, "large scale special efforts on various lines . . . are therefore justified."

His sabbatical abruptly terminated at the end of 1947, Kennan became head of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff. Kennan turned to one theme of Mr. X's exposition that his militant critics tended to overlook: containment, to be effective, required "adroit and vigilant application of counterforce." Lippmann was one who did spot this point, and warned that it would require "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets." Lippmann may have been appalled by that prospect, but it seemed just fine to Kennan. Seeking useful tasks to perform, he set his planning staff to the design of the counterforce. In the process, he expanded the practice of traditional intelligence into a new realm of political cold warfare.

An early Policy Planning product, a memo of February 5, 1948, called policymakers' attention to hundreds of thousands of refugees from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union languishing as war-displaced persons in western Europe. Kennan's staff urged that they be mobilized "to fill the gaps in our current official intelligence, in public information, and in our politico-psychological operations." That was a modest beginning.

By April, Kennan was ready with a more ambitious comprehensive program for "organized political warfare." He shared the draft of his bold initiative with a few trusted colleagues among the department's Soviet specialists, including his old mentor Loy Henderson and a promising contemporary, Charles E. Bohlen. Kennan's proposal was submitted to the National Security Council (NSC), the top policymaking body of the Truman administration, even as the "teacup" image of Mr. X's containment was gaining public currency.

On June 18, 1948, Truman and his NSC formally committed the United States government to an unprecedented program of counterforce against communism, moving beyond propaganda and economic warfare to authorize "preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures" and then even "subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups." And all of these activities were to be carried out under such ruses and deceptions, the Truman administration directed, that the U.S. government could "plausibly disclaim any responsibility."

Thus was drawn the first battle line of the Cold War, without the knowledge of the public and, indeed, contrary to what the public believed its government's foreign policy to be. Kennan's secret operational plan for the counterforce quickly took on a life of its own across the government, caroming wildly out of its author's control. By the 1950s right-wing ideologists, little knowing what the defeated Democratic administration had already attempted, pounded the hustings with the battle cry of rolling back the Iron Curtain.

Years later, looking back in dismay on the whole sorry episode, Kennan portrayed himself as "one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster."