Behind the Curtain

During the early years of the Cold War, fervent anti-Communists urged the American government to abandon its policy of containment — a doctrine that gave tacit acceptance to Moscow’s domination of Eastern Europe — and replace it with an aggressive initiative to “roll back” the Kremlin’s zone of influence. Rollback eventually became a battle cry for those Republicans who believed the Truman administration was insufficiently zealous in countering world communism. During the 1952 presidential campaign, GOP notables from Joseph McCarthy to John Foster Dulles advocated a rollback offensive in Eastern Europe and denigrated Truman’s policies as weak and ineffective.

The attacks on Truman as “soft on communism” were, of course, ludicrous. Indeed, we now know that under President Truman — though he may not have known about it — the United States carried out its most ambitious attempt to detach the satellite nations from Soviet control. This campaign involved everything from propaganda balloons and radio broadcasts to the infiltration of guerrilla fighters into locales where Soviet control was still on shaky ground. Ironically, it was President Eisenhower, whose party had demanded that action be taken to stir things up in the Soviet Union’s backyard, who put a stop to the rollback initiative. Even more ironically, the architect of the campaign was no adventurer from the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency, but George F. Kennan, the father of containment and, later, a leading apostle of detente.

In Operation Rollback, a history of this unusually aggressive anti-Soviet campaign, Peter Grose has written one of the more intelligent accounts of America’s early Cold War policies. A former foreign correspondent and a biographer of Allen Dulles, Grose refrains from over-dramatizing an interesting, but certainly not pivotal, chapter in the East-West conflict. His fair-mindedness stands in sharp contrast to the demonization of America’s Cold War planners found in earlier Cold War studies.

At the heart of the story is America’s decision to make use of the millions of refugees and emigres from Eastern Europe who were languishing in displaced persons camps after World War II. The refugees were a diverse lot: They included the cream of Central European intellectual life, leaders of non-Communist political parties, and adherents of Ukrainian, Baltic, and Russian nationalist organizations. Some boasted solid democratic credentials; some had unsavory wartime pasts as Nazi collaborators.

While most American officials regarded the refugees as a nuisance, Kennan and a handful of others saw them as an untapped reserve force in the coming struggle against communism. Kennan had grandiose plans for a series of covert operations against the satellite regimes, not to mention the Soviet heartland itself. In a memorandum, he cited Clausewitz to the effect that a nation should use every means at hand short of war to achieve its objectives. He advocated “clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements,” “black psychological warfare,” and even “encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.”

While Kennan had a plan and, presumably, the troops to carry it out, he lacked a sponsoring agency within the government. His initial choice, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded with scorn: The military had had its fill of refugees and wanted no part of counterforce operations involving unstable emigre elements. Nor was the CIA, then run by military men with traditionalist views about the role of intelligence agencies, interested in taking on Kennan’s unpredictable venture.

The solution was found in the creation of a new entity, known as the Office of Policy Coordination. Ostensibly under State Department authority, the OPC for several years enjoyed carte blanche in planning and carrying out a secret war against East European communism. Its director was Frank Wisner, an enthusiast of psychological warfare who loathed communism and shared Kennan’s convictions about the potential usefulness of anti-Soviet emigres.

The OPC did have its successes, most notably Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the two stations that were established in the early 1950s and played a central role in American strategy throughout the Cold War. But the OPC is better remembered for its catastrophes, of which there were many.

The most tragic failures involved the attempt to help emigres infiltrate Eastern Europe to initiate guerrilla offensives. Here, Wisner was confounded by the Soviet espionage apparatus. In some cases, the Kremlin was tipped off by agents who had insinuated themselves into high-ranking positions within the anti-Communist emigre organizations that served as the OPC’s shock troops. In other cases, the Soviets discovered the identity of domestic oppositionists, who were then given the option of severe punishment of functioning as double agents. In still other cases, Moscow relied on information provided by spies within the Allied ranks. It was none other than British agent Kim Philby who informed Moscow about Wisner’s plans for guerrilla warfare in Albania and Latvia.

Much of this information is not new. The OPC’s more adventuresome projects have long provided fodder for revisionist historians who argued that it was American policies, and not Soviet expansionism, that triggered the Cold War. Grose, however, is no revisionist and his account as well as his judgments ring true.

Unfortunately, Grose is on less sure footing in his assessment of American domestic politics. He devotes considerable space to the rise of American anti-communism in the 1940s, a phenomenon he regards with extreme distaste. Grose uses “conservative” and “anti-Communist” interchangeably, and has no use for ardent Cold Warriors, whether they were respected intellectuals like Sidney Hook or Republican primitives like McCarthy, William Jenner, and John Bricker.

Grose implies that rollback policies were driven by the hysterical anti-communism of an American public obsessed with Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg case. Yet the evidence he presents suggests the opposite. Indeed, George Kennan was contemptuous of the very notion that foreign policy should be influenced by the changing mood of the voting public. In any event, Truman received no credit for his administration’s East European initiatives, the details of which were not made public for decades. Ultimately, the attempt to stimulate unrest within the Soviet empire was triggered by the impressive, even frightening, gains scored by Communists in the immediate postwar period: the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, Mao’s triumph in China, the Korean War, attempts by local Communists to undermine democratic governments in Italy and France.

There was also evidence of Communist weakness, especially in Eastern Europe. Intelligence indicated a great deal of discontent in the Baltics and the satellite nations. If American officials were skeptical of the utility of anti-Communist refugees, Stalin himself understood the threat they might pose to his regime’s stability, which is why he devoted such vast resources to infiltrating every kind of emigre organization around.

In the years since, Kennan has tried to minimize his role in the political warfare projects of the OPC, much as he has attempted to deny credit for containment. Kennan has no doubt concluded that the rollback ventures were simply another reflection of American arrogance and hubris. On this, as on containment, Kennan is surely wrong. The attempts to weaken Moscow’s hold over captive peoples may have been misguided, but not unjustified. Faced with a powerful totalitarian adversary, the United States responded by attacking the enemy at its weakest points, and when it became clear that the strategy was failing, the effort was abandoned. The rollback campaign may have failed to weaken Soviet power. But there is no reason to treat this chapter in the Cold War as a source of national shame.

Arch Puddington is vice president for research at Freedom House and author of Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.