The strategy that shaped the cold war was the brainchild of George F. Kennan, second in command at the American embassy in Moscow during and after World War II. He had spent most of his adult life studying the calculations and the cruelties of Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union since 1924; the penetrating gaze of Kennan’s brilliantly blue eyes had been fixed on the enormity of the Soviet empire for nearly twenty years. He saw Stalin as “a man of incredible criminality, of a criminality effectively without limits; a man apparently foreign to the very experience of love, without pity or mercy … most dangerous of all to those who were his closest collaborators in crime, because he liked to be the sole custodian of his own secrets, and disliked to share his memories with others who, being still alive, had tongues and consciences.”
Stalin, like his true heir, Vladimir Putin, aimed not only to penetrate the American government with espionage and to get inside the minds of its leaders, but to seize control of nations within his reach, to defeat leaders he detested, to pick supplicants or useful idiots he could manipulate, and to make Russia a great global power, feared by allies and enemies alike, and to achieve all this in the wake of a devastating struggle. Alone among Americans in the months after the war ended, Kennan grasped all this, and he tried with increasing force to make American leaders understand it too. He had deep insight into what went on inside the Kremlin; he had nearly seven years’ experience inside Stalin’s Russia, and he knew it better than he knew America. “He was terribly absorbed—personally involved, somehow—in the terrible nature of the regime,” wrote the Russian-born Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, then serving at the British embassy in Moscow. The Russians were a nation of stage managers, Kennan wrote at the end of the war, and their deepest conviction was that things are not what they are, but only what they seemed to be.
Kennan saw that the sun would soon set on Russia’s wartime alliance with America and that the shadow of Soviet power would lengthen westward, falling on one hundred million souls in Europe and beyond. “No one in Moscow believes that the western world, once confronted with the life-size wolf of Soviet displeasure standing at the door and threatening to blow the house in, would be able to stand firm. And it is on this disbelief that Soviet global policy is based,” Kennan had written in a May 1945 cable from Moscow to Washington, a warning unread at the White House, newly occupied by President Harry Truman. But he believed that America could contain the hungry wolf. If it stood steadfast against the ambitions of the Kremlin and confronted them with confidence, “Moscow would have played its last real card.” Though no one heeded his words at the time, they would become the core principle of American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth century.
Harry Truman thought he could find a way to get along with the man he called Uncle Joe. They were set to meet for the first time at Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin, on the afternoon of July 16, 1945. But Stalin stood him up.
Truman was a pure product of America, born into the Missouri of the outlaw Jesse James to parents who traded in mules and horses and farmed the fertile earth. He was straightforward and plainspoken. He never went to college. A veteran of World War I, a failed haberdasher, a county judge by the grace of the Kansas City political machine, somewhat miraculously elected to the United States Senate in 1934, and ten years after that, a startling last-minute choice as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third vice president, Truman served for eighty-two days under FDR. The president was a ghostly figure to him, rarely seen, wraithlike in the flesh. When Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, Truman said, “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.”
Stalin was the dictator of 180 million people; his rule reached five thousand miles from Berlin to the Pacific Ocean, and from the cold Baltic Sea south to the balmy shores of the Adriatic. Born to an alcoholic shoemaker and a laundress, his face scarred by childhood smallpox, he had been expelled from a seminary and set out to be a revolutionary. He had edited the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda, run extortion rackets to raise money for the party, survived four years of exile to Siberia during World War I, and risen to power through ruthless cunning.
He was a master of conspiracy and a mass murderer. Truman was an innocent. He had no notion of foreign policy or statecraft. He was unprepared for power, and he knew it. For eight years, these two men would hold the fate of the earth in their hands.
When Stalin failed to show up at Potsdam that afternoon, Truman took a motorcade through what remained of Berlin, once the world’s fourth-biggest city, now a hellscape of death and destruction, stinking of rotting flesh. The rubble of the Reich was piled ten yards high along the boulevards. “I thought of Carthage, Baalbek, Jerusalem, Rome, Atlantis,” Truman wrote in his diary that night. “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up perhaps there’ll be no reason for any of it.” As Truman toured the ruined city, it was dawn in the high desert of New Mexico. At 5:29 a.m., the scientists and soldiers of the Manhattan Project witnessed a blinding light brighter than the sun and watched the rising mushroom cloud of the world’s first nuclear explosion. Truman got the news that night.
The Potsdam conference, intended to settle some of the most pressing problems of postwar Europe, foundered from the start. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who would be voted out of office the next week, was an exhausted volcano, his words great gusts of wind. Stalin was war-weary but wily, cautious but calculating. Churchill talked without coming to a point, Truman wrote; Stalin just grunted, but you knew what he meant. The one moment of great consequence came on July 24. The day’s talks at the Cecilienhof Palace, a mock Tudor mansion built during World War I, had been fruitless. After conferring with Churchill and their respective military chiefs, Truman decided to share his secret with Stalin that afternoon. He walked around the table as the late afternoon light slanted into the dark-beamed room and spoke quietly to the generalissimo and his interpreter. He said in a casual tone that he possessed a new weapon of great force with which to end the war against Japan. He came away thinking that Stalin didn’t understand what he saying. Stalin knew exactly what he meant.
Truman came home believing he could do business with Uncle Joe. Months passed before he knew he’d been naive. Through the summer and into the fall, the glow of victory began to fade and the chill of a darkening twilight descended on Washington. No one knew where to steer the American ship of state. Truman had no firm policy toward the Soviet Union and little basis on which to build one. What did Stalin want? How far west would he project his power? What should the United States do? In late January 1946, an urgent appeal for enlightenment on these questions arrived at Kennan’s desk at the American embassy in Moscow, in the depths of the Russian winter. His title was minister-counselor, but he was running the show. Ambassador Averell Harriman had left Moscow, and three months would pass before the arrival of his replacement, General Walter Bedell Smith, who had been chief of staff to the supreme allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and who went on to lead the CIA during the Korean War. Bedell Smith was desperate to understand Stalin’s thinking. So were the president and the secretary of state and the secretary of war. The State Department had turned to Kennan for wisdom after ignoring his cables for months. He was sick in bed, as he often was, suffering from the flu and a throbbing headache; his mood by turns highly strung and deeply melancholy. But he was roused by Washington’s plea for an understanding of the Kremlin. “They have asked for it,” he thought to himself. “Now, by God, they will have it.” He unleashed an eight-thousand-word dispatch, the “Long Telegram,” the longest in the history of American diplomacy and by far the most widely read. It circulated all over Washington and through American embassies and military outposts around the world. Every member of the newly emerging national-security establishment absorbed it, and Stalin, thanks to his spies, read it, too.
Kennan set out to address questions “so strange to our form of thought” that they required intricate answers. He wanted his superiors to understand that the truth in Russia was whatever Stalin said it was: “The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another.” The Russians conducted their affairs on two levels: the official realm of public policy and diplomacy, in which lip service would be paid to international relations with its allies, and the subterranean one, carried out by secret intelligence and security agencies, through espionage and subversion.
“There is good reason to suspect that this Government is actually a conspiracy within a conspiracy,” Kennan wrote. Stalin had dissolved the Communist International, or Comintern, in its aboveground role as a world congress in 1943, as a gesture to his wartime allies, the United States and Great Britain. But the international network under his direction and control was “a concealed Comintern … an underground operating directorate of world communism.” Although J. Edgar Hoover didn’t know it yet, Soviet spies in America had stolen the secrets of the atomic bomb, burrowing into the Manhattan Project from the first. They had a long start on the FBI and the CIA. They had more than two hundred agents and sources inside the United States government, the military-industrial complex, and the media. Soviet intelligence was “an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility,” Kennan wrote, “managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.”
The Kremlin was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief … that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted,” Kennan wrote, in a passage foreshadowing the political warfare waged by Putin against American democracy. The Kremlin would seek through covert means “to disrupt national self-confidence, to hamstring measures of national defense, to increase social and industrial unrest, to stimulate all forms of disunity.… Poor will be set against rich, black against white, young against old, newcomers against established residents”—all of which presaged the Russian attack that lay seventy years ahead.
Fighting back against this new enemy would constitute the greatest task that American diplomacy had ever faced, he warned. He proposed that the United States had to harness its strengths in a way that had little to do with armies and air forces but everything to do with the projection of political power. Stalin and the Soviet Union might be “impervious to the logic of reason,” Kennan concluded, but they were “highly sensitive to the logic of force”—not tanks and troops, but American political resistance designed to thwart the Kremlin’s dreams of glory. He was writing himself into history by imagining that America could fight Russia without weapons.
Three months later, Kennan went back to the United States, a nation he hardly knew, lecturing at universities and public forums and, starting in September 1946, teaching at the newly established National War College at Fort McNair in Washington. The college had been created to help weave together the disparate strands of thinking about the postwar world, bringing together officers and civilians from the Departments of War, Navy, and State. No other mechanism existed. The war and navy brass handled military strategy. State handled foreign policy. Nobody had a handle on intelligence. Only one man in America—the president of the United States—had the job of harnessing military power to political and diplomatic purposes. And that task was beyond the mind of Harry Truman.
At his first War College lecture, Kennan struck a theme that resonated throughout the government. The Soviets, like the Nazis, would pursue their goals without moral inhibitions and through all manner of skullduggery—intimidation, deceit, corruption, subversion, psychological and economic pressure, blackmail, and murder. The United States had to defend itself and counter the Kremlin by building alliances abroad and showing the Soviets that America possessed “a preponderance of strength.” Kennan was working out the rudiments of a strategy, sketching a new theory of American warfare. His adherents now included navy secretary James Forrestal, a volatile Wall Street magnate soon to be the first secretary of defense, and the newly appointed secretary of state, General George C. Marshall, who as army chief of staff under FDR had organized the biggest military expansion in history.
The cold war was coming into the forefront of the American mind by the start of 1947. Kennan was expanding on his work, polishing an article to be published in a forthcoming issue of the quarterly journal Foreign Affairs. The title was “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” and the byline was “X,” but his intended audience would know the words were Kennan’s. It made him America’s Kremlinologist, the man who understood how to confront the Soviets. He argued in it that “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 Russia’s imperial ambitions. And there it was, the word that would define a world. Containment became the compass of the cold war.
“Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce,” he wrote. “The Russians look forward to a duel of infinite duration, and they see that already they have scored great successes.” Stalin had seized nearly half of Europe, and he had his sights on Italy and Turkey and Greece and Iran. But the United States would win the duel in time—if it could “confront the Russians with unalterable counterforce at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interest of a peaceful and stable world.” American generals thought counterforce meant the deployment of an overwhelming military power. Kennan explained that the point was to prevent another all-out war. He wrote that the nation should not simply apply the logic of force but the force of logic: The United States had to show the Soviets and the world that it was “a country which knows what it wants, which is coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a world power.” That might prove to be the most valuable force of all.
Kennan’s concepts meant different things to different people, including Kennan. He was writing political poetry; he didn’t set his terms in concrete, and he would come to despair at how politicians and generals twisted his ideas. Some saw containment as stopping Stalin from spreading Soviet ideology deeper into the Western world. Some wanted to push him out of Europe, back to Russia’s borders. Some wanted to deter him or, if it came to that, destroy him by building an arsenal of nuclear weapons that could reduce Russia to a smoking, radiating ruin. The argument over the best means by which to achieve the end was ceaseless and schismatic. But the concept of containment at its core was the fundament of American foreign policy until the hammer and sickle went down over the Kremlin for the last time, the principle around which millions of soldiers and sailors and trillions of dollars in weaponry were organized, and the only strategic concept in the battle against the Kremlin that retained its value when the cold war was over.
Kennan did not say how an American counterforce could be created, or who would be in charge. But those ideas were coming to fruition in Washington in the spring of 1947. And many took shape at Sunday night suppers in the elegant Georgetown home of Frank and Polly Wisner, where Kennan and his wife, Annelise, had a seat at the table among the wealthy, powerful, influential men who created the American national security state and a political culture that lasted for twenty years until Vietnam tore it apart. Henry Kissinger is said to have once remarked that the hand that mixes the Georgetown martini guides the destiny of the Western world. This seemed almost true at the time, at least while Frank Wisner, who became commander of covert operations at the CIA, was stirring the drinks. Wisner was Mississippi gentry, a white-shoe New York lawyer in the 1930s, scalded by wartime experience inflicted by Stalin’s shock troops against the partisans he had worked with as an intelligence officer in Romania. He was genteel, witty, given to grandiloquence after the second or third drink. His favored guests included Charles Bohlen, who would in time replace Kennan as ambassador to Moscow, and Dean Acheson, who served as General Marshall’s second-in-command and would succeed him as the secretary of state. They gathered for cocktails in the garden under the tulip trees, conversed at the dinner table, and reconvened in the parlor for brandy and cigars thereafter, pondering the problems Kennan had defined and the strategies that might guide the United States through uncharted seas. In April, Acheson recruited Kennan to run the new policy planning staff at the State Department. The office was next to General Marshall’s, and the door was always open to Kennan. “The General,” Acheson wrote, wanted Kennan “to look ahead, not into the distant future, but beyond the vision of the operating officers caught in the smoke and crises of current battle; far enough ahead to see the emerging form of things to come and outline what should be done to meet or anticipate them.”
That spring and summer, a strategy for the cold war started taking shape in the crucible of Kennan’s mind. One brainchild grew into the Marshall Plan, which would deliver billions of dollars to rebuild the shattered cities of Western Europe and feed millions of people who faced hunger and starvation. Another gave rise to Radio Free Europe, which soon started beaming powerful signals in many languages and on many frequencies across the Iron Curtain to bolster American influence and subvert Soviet ideology. A third became the covert-operations directorate of the new and inchoate Central Intelligence Agency. On September 27, 1947, two months after the CIA was established under law as an intelligence-gathering organization, Kennan sent Secretary of Defense Forrestal a proposal that flowed from the conversations at Wisner’s table. The United States had to create a “guerrilla warfare corps” to counter the Soviets abroad—a force with which “to fight fire with fire.”
A few days later, one of Kennan’s first major policy planning papers went to the newly established National Security Council, where he served as Marshall’s representative, and it landed on President Truman’s desk in October. Surveying Soviet aims around the world, it drew particular attention to a growing political crisis in Italy, which had been the subject of the very first meeting of the NSC only two weeks earlier. Half a million Italians had died fighting fascism in World War II, a toll far greater than all American combat deaths. American forces stationed in Italy since the war were set to withdraw. National elections would take place in April 1948. The Kremlin would order Italian communists “to resort to virtual civil war” in order to seize power, Kennan predicted, and the Russians would try to keep their hand hidden by using spies rather than soldiers. “Our best answer to this is to strengthen in every way local forces of resistance,” he argued. “We should be free to call the play.” The call led to the first major covert operation in the history of the CIA.
On December 17, the NSC issued a sweeping directive in which Kennan had a firm hand. It ordered the CIA to conceive and execute “covert psychological operations” against Moscow. The intended end was clear, but the means to achieve it were not. The last major psychological operations the United States had run were the strategic deceptions that supported General Eisenhower’s D-Day invasion in 1944. This was a different field of battle. Nothing in the NSC’s command defined what these operations should look like. Nothing in the CIA’s charter empowered it to run them. No law authorized them. No legislation financed them. A mad scramble for money and manpower ensued at the CIA’s ramshackle Washington headquarters, at Forrestal’s Pentagon, and in Italy, where the communist Popular Front, whose members included battle-hardened veterans who had fought Mussolini’s Fascists, contested the conservative Vatican-backed Christian Democrats for political control of the nation. The Italian operation was carried out in an atmosphere of apocalyptic urgency. The CIA’s analysts painted it as a contest between Stalin and the Pope—a battle for Western civilization. President Truman ordered Forrestal to secretly ship arms and ammunition to Italian government security forces. High-ranking army intelligence officers made contingency plans to back a military coup if the communists won. At the palatial American embassy in Rome, the army attaché met with the ambassador and the CIA station chief, James Angleton, and reported that all agreed a communist victory could “start World War III.”
On March 8, 1948, the NSC weighed the likelihood that the Communists could win power by legal means and then transform Italy into a totalitarian state in thrall to Moscow. All of the first three major NSC reports dealt with Italy, and this one, the third, endorsed financial support for the Christian Democrats and other anti-communist parties and a “full-scale, vigorous and openly anti-Communist campaign” of political propaganda. It was in fact a formal approval of operations already underway. The Christian Democrats and their political allies received at least $10 million in support through the CIA; a 1948 dollar is a ten-dollar bill today. Every penny was off the books: the agency had to mount a major money-laundering scheme to finance the operation. This legerdemain was in great part the work of Forrestal and his good friend Allen Dulles, the future CIA director. In one part of the effort, they tapped a Treasury Department cache of funds earmarked for the reconstruction of postwar Europe. Great sums flowed from the Treasury to wealthy Americans, who signed personal checks to CIA-created fronts, then used a prearranged code to write the money off as a charitable deduction. More money came from wealthy friends of Forrestal and Dulles through Swiss banks. CIA officers in Rome handed over suitcases filled with cash to political candidates and politically savvy Catholic priests in four-star hotels. The money financed every essential element of the Christian Democrats’ campaign, including radio broadcasts, newsreels, posters, pamphlets, and propaganda to sway public opinion. It brought them the votes to win control of the Italian parliament on April 18, with a 48.48 percent plurality; the CIA kept backing the party for a quarter of a century.
The clandestine operation didn’t win the election on its own. But it was proof to America’s new national security chiefs at the CIA, the NSC, the State Department, and the Pentagon that covert action could change the course of human events.
On May 4, sixteen days after the Italian election, Kennan delivered a manifesto titled “The inauguration of organized political warfare.” Strikingly, crucial paragraphs of this document remain classified top secret today. It was deemed too explosive to serve as an official policy planning paper; only a handful of copies were printed. Kennan was shooting a flaming arrow into the air, and it struck home. He began by citing Clausewitz’s doctrine that war was a political instrument. Then he made a leap: if wars were politics, politics could be warfare. “Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace,” he wrote. “Political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”
Thus the Marshall Plan was political warfare. The creation of NATO as an American-led political and military alliance in Western Europe, precisely eleven months away, was political warfare. Espionage, sabotage, propaganda, and the “encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states” all were essential elements of political warfare. American leaders needed to understand that the British Empire had been built and maintained in part by four centuries of political warfare and that “the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history.”
Americans now had to join that battle. Their view of the world had been blinkered by their belief in “a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting contest outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations—the perpetual rhythm of struggle, in and out of war.” That rhythm was the cadence of the cold war.
The United States had to confront “the full might of the Kremlin’s political warfare,” as Stalin worked his will on nations like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, and threatened to push westward if unchallenged. “We cannot afford to leave unmobilized our resources for covert political warfare,” Kennan argued. “We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations”—like the Italian adventure. He proposed four new ways to fight.
First came “Liberation Committees”—overseen by Americans but filled with political refugees from the Soviet Union and its satellites, who would “provide an inspiration for continuing popular resistance” in Eastern Europe. The refugees would create “organized public support of resistance to tyranny.” And if the cold war turned hot, they could form “all-out liberation movements.” For now, their American sponsors would select leaders “to keep alive as public figures with access to printing presses and microphones.” From this seed grew the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA front organization led by Allen Dulles, ardently backed by General Eisenhower, and supported behind the scenes by Kennan. And from the committee came Radio Free Europe, which began beaming broadcasts behind the Iron Curtain in July 1950 and served as the most powerful American weapon of information warfare in the twentieth century.
Kennan called for carrying out covert operations in countries where Soviet political warfare threatened American national security, and wanted it done as “a matter of urgency,” because the communists were seeking to disrupt the delivery of Marshall Plan aid. And herein lay a crucial link. Congress still had given the CIA no money and no authority for covert operations. It had given the Marshall Plan billions to rebuild Europe. The Marshall Plan’s top administrators were, in Paris, Averell Harriman, Kennan’s old boss, and in Washington, Richard Bissell, very much a member of Kennan’s circle, and later the CIA baron responsible for the U-2 spy plane and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennan sent them a trusted emissary—Frank Wisner—who asked them to finance covert operations in Europe, and they readily agreed. Money was no object; they had far more at hand than they could spend. CIA officers in Europe and Asia thus had access to $685 million from the Marshall Plan’s coffers over the course of the next five years. This off-the-books financing was crucial to the development of the CIA as a clandestine service with missions around the world.
The first such operations were personally authorized by Kennan. The most immediate threat was that communist labor leaders, through strikes and intimidation, sought to block the distribution of Marshall Plan aid and military materiel being offloaded by American ships in Marseilles and Naples. The operation was mounted in a matter of weeks, delivering money to labor groups in France and Italy, and to the gangsters who served as their enforcers, via a trusted associate in the labor movement named Irving Brown, a conduit for the CIA’s political warfare in Europe for the next four decades. The military and economic aid got through.
Kennan now turned to paramilitary operations “to prevent vital installations, other material, or personnel from being sabotaged or liquidated or captured intact” by the Soviets. He was addressing ever-mounting demands from Forrestal and the Joint Chiefs, who were preparing for the prospect of World War III. They wanted foreign refugees to be recruited and trained to fight the Red Army; they needed plans to sabotage the oil wells and refineries of Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, in order to keep them from Russian hands in wartime; they sought ways to evacuate foreign leaders and allies who might be threatened in a political crisis. These demands would grow more urgent as the cold war deepened.
All of this was a preamble for Kennan’s boldest idea. “The time is now fully ripe for the creation of a covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government,” he wrote. “They must be under unified direction. One man must be boss.” And the man he chose was Frank Wisner, then the deputy assistant secretary of state overseeing operations in American-occupied Berlin. He created the job Wisner would hold for a decade—the chief of America’s covert operations.
Stalin’s soldiers and spies by now had seized Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltics; they had threatened Iran, Greece, and Turkey; they were seeking to subvert the politics and diplomacy of Western Europe in Paris, Rome, and London; they had blockaded Berlin. The United States should strive to “reduce the power and influence of Moscow to limits where they will no longer constitute a threat to the peace and stability of the world family of nations,” Kennan wrote on August 20. This concept went beyond containment to coercion, and it was the cornerstone of a secret order, titled NSC 20/4, which President Truman signed after narrowly winning reelection in November and then circulated to his cabinet on December 3. The United States, it said, would seek to take back the spoils of war from Stalin, to roll back the Soviet tide that had swept to the edge of Western Europe, to push back until it achieved “the gradual retraction of undue Russian power and influence … and the emergence of the satellite countries as entities independent of the USSR.” The goal was to liberate Eastern Europe through political warfare.
“As the international situation develops,” Kennan told Wisner on January 6, 1949, “every day makes more evident the importance of the role which will have to be played by covert operations if our national interests are to be adequately protected.” Wisner went forth and built an entirely new and utterly secret branch of American government, with the backing of the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the State Department: the clandestine service of the CIA. He proudly noted that “the original architects of the whole deal” included Marshall, Harriman, Forrestal, and Kennan.
By the end of Truman’s presidency four years later, Wisner had launched hundreds of major covert operations and spent close to $2 billion; and he and his superior had drawn up a budget for the coming year in excess of $700 million, or roughly 1 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. In the decade that Wisner ran America’s boldest political warfare operations, he gave his men the sense that they were America’s Knights Templar. They could make or break presidents and kings, prime ministers, and political parties around the world; they could buy or rent the loyalties of generals, dictators, spy chiefs, internal-security ministers, union bosses, and newspaper publishers; they were enmeshed in the political fortunes of France, Germany, Greece, Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea, and South Vietnam, among many other nations. And for five years, from the summer of 1949 onward, they were training and deploying exiles and émigrés and refugees and other foreign agents to serve as liberation armies behind enemy lines in Eastern Europe. Nearly every one of these paramilitary operations ended in death and disaster.
They were launched under the auspices of an overarching strategy put forth by Kennan on August 25, 1949, and approved by Truman in the form of a secret presidential directive shortly thereafter. It was the first concrete plan to drive the Soviets out of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania, and the rest of Eastern Europe—to free the captive nations through an all-encompassing campaign of political warfare. “Since V-E Day,” Kennan wrote, “we have checked the westward advance of Soviet power, at least for the time being,” and “made substantial strides in developing Western Europe as a counter-force to Communism. These are defensive accomplishments. The time is now ripe for us to place greater emphasis on the offensive” and to seek “the elimination or at least a reduction of predominant Soviet influence in the satellite states of Eastern Europe.” As an “essential prerequisite,” the United States had to push for “the withdrawal of Soviet troops from satellite countries,” he continued. A combination of intensive diplomatic pressure, economic power, and political attack would be required. So was the projection of power by American forces through the newly created realm of the NATO military alliance, and the dissemination of propaganda designed to promote heresies against Stalin. The most secret codicil to this strategy was covert action.
The CIA recruited exiles and émigrés made stateless by the war, trained them at American military bases in occupied Germany, and dropped wave after wave of the unfortunate foreign agents into desperately poor and isolated Albania, a Soviet satellite bordered by Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Adriatic Sea. Year after year, whether the guerrilla teams arrived by air, land, or sea, almost all of them were doomed. A second front was opened on September 5, 1949, when a charter member of the CIA, Steve Tanner, sent Ukrainian partisans—émigrés recruited in Munich—behind the Iron Curtain to a rendezvous near Lviv, a major city seized from Poland by the Red Army a decade earlier and incorporated into Ukraine. The CIA believed that the operation would spark a major underground resistance movement in Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union and its largest republic outside Russia. Wisner approved air drops of several dozen more armed members of the Supreme Council for the Liberation of Ukraine over the next four years. All were captured or killed; Soviet intelligence officers compelled those who survived to radio back encouragement to their CIA case officers, who organized and dispatched another set of partisans, and another. None survived. But the idea that the Iron Curtain could be pierced by American intelligence was electrifying. The CIA began to launch paramilitary operations into Russia, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic States. They were suicide missions, for the exile and émigré groups recruited for these exploits were shot through with Soviet informants, and their plans were relayed to Moscow by the British intelligence liaison in Washington, who worked hand in glove with the CIA. He was Kim Philby, Moscow’s foremost recruited foreign agent of the cold war.
Soviet espionage had made Stalin Truman’s equal on the world stage. The very day that Tanner’s team parachuted into the forests of Ukraine, the United States detected the atmospheric fallout from Moscow’s first atomic-bomb test. Stalin’s spies in America had sped the success of his scientists by at least three or four years. Truman responded to the Soviet test by authorizing the development of the hydrogen bomb. Stalin soon followed suit, but even he saw the bomb as a poisoned chalice; he rued the fact that “atomic weapons can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world.” Both men knew, at the same time, in the same way, that the most destructive weapons in history could not be used in war, lest they destroy humanity. “No one wants to use it,” Truman said. “But … we have got to have it, if only for bargaining purposes with the Russians.”
The American H-bomb test came on November 1, 1952—three days before Dwight Eisenhower won the presidency. The Soviet test came the following year, five months after Stalin’s death. Each blast was hundreds of times more powerful than the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not armaments for a war that had a strategy, but instruments of genocide or suicide, or both. They were political weapons. Their existence ensured, by virtue of their terrible force, that the cold war would be fought by political warfare. The Soviets would tighten their grip by force. The Americans would keep seeking, against all odds, to loosen it.