Secrets of State

...Although World War II brought about a three-and-a-half-year alliance, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was better disposed toward the USSR than Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in the last week of his life FDR began to be pessimistic about future relations with the Kremlin...

...The first was the nature of the force we attempted to turn against Moscow and its satellites...

...Over the years, it consumed tens of millions of dollars...

...The particular policy favored by the CIA—support for advanced art, since it was prohibited in the Soviet bloc—was even more controversial: Many agreed with Representative George Dondero, a Missouri Republican, who said "All modern art is Communistic...

...She suggests that certain people might have been financed beyond their deserts because of their willingness to hew to the CIA's line, but doesn't name any...

...States have been subsidizing writers and artists for thousands of years...

...On the contrary, as Schlesinger rightly claimed, it was by far the "most worthwhile and successful" of all the CIA's endeavors...

...Eventually, he went to work as a buyer in Paris for Gimbel's and Saks, his launching pad for emigrating to the United States in 1936 and obtaining citizenship...

...When this financing came to light in the 1960s and '70s, those responsible claimed it had merely made it possible for people to do what they wanted to do anyway...

...Although patronage of art is a traditional function of the state, the United States had never had an arts policy, and the whole idea was controversial...

...The paramilitary operations described by Grose were not the only ones set in motion by NSC Directive 10/2...

...Besides holding conferences and avant-garde art festivals, it financed a couple of dozen magazines in far-flung places, including Australia, Austria, France, Germany, India, Italy, Spain, and Latin America...

...More dangerously, he also recommended "subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements...

...Schlesinger, who does not hesitate to admit he was involved in what was going on, made two sound arguments defending the CIA's financing of the Congress...

...Harriman's deputy, George F. Kennan, was a professional diplomat "more conversant with the culture and politics of Russia than of his native land," as Peter Grose observes in his fascinating and important Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pp., $25.00...

...Other elements came from the Forest Brothers of the Baltic countries and a similar guerrilla movement in the western Ukraine, two groups that had alternately fought and collaborated with the Germans in wartime and actively resisted Soviet rule from 1945 to 1947...

...Meanwhile, W. Averell Harnman, the U.S...

...SUMMER BOOKS Secrets of State By Roger Draper American relations with the Soviet Union were bad from the first: The United States participated in the Western force that attempted to intervene in the Russian Civil War in 191819, and then declined to recognize the Communist state until 1933...

...As for the secrecy, suggested Schlesinger, it was necessary "because if Joe McCarthy knew that the U.S...

...The level of penetration made this ragtag army useless, and it was too morally compromised to attract significant support on the ground...

...In the cultural sphere, the OPC (and thus the CIA) acted through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, set up in 1950 by an agent named Michael Josselson...

...The OPC's first director, appointed in 1948, was Frank G. Wisner, a "dynamic and aggressive" lawyer from Mississippi who had served with distinction in World War II as a spy in Romania...

...economic warfare, extending to market manipulation...

...Her sole specific case of CIA suppression is Dwight Macdonald's bitter critique, "America, America," eventually published in Dissent...

...Since he was completely fluent in German, Russian, French, and English, he could hardly have been more useful...

...In August 1949 a number of prominent former Communists, including Ruth Fischer and Franz Borkenau—as well as Melvin I. Lasky, an ex-radical graduate of New York's City College—met in Frankfurt am Main to discuss the creation of a group to counter Communist efforts at influencing intellectuals, artists and Left-wingers...

...Ultimately, Communism undermined itself...

...This set forth a plan for containing the expansion of a Soviet empire that now included much of Central and all of Eastern Europe, together, it seemed at the time, with Mao Zedong's China and Kim II Sung's North Korea...

...The author isn't sympathetic to Communism...

...Tilings were back where they had started...

...James Burnham accused liberals of believing history would take care of the Soviet Union, yet that is exactly what happened...

...Others sought to influence public—and particularly intellectual, artistic, labor, and moderate Socialist—opinion in Western Europe, Asia and Latin America...

...Armed opposition in the Baltics and the Ukraine had been put down by 1947, before the OPC was conceived...

...I can't defend this, but free political institutions soon took care of McCarthy, without any help from Encounter...

...In early 1948, as head of the State Department's policy planning staff, Kennan developed a plan to wage political warfare against Communism...

...Although it was clear from the beginning that the organization would focus primarily on the non-Communist Left, the plan was soon approved...

...In World War II Josselson served in the Army's Psychological Warfare Division in Germany...

...And Kennan did...

...But the author has to concede that from the beginning the Congress was widely regarded as a front for American intelligence...

...The money to carry out NSC Directive 10/2 was hidden in the machinery of the Marshall Plan...

...Nevertheless, they were recruited for Rollback...

...Why this isn't a legitimate sphere of governmental activity is never explained...

...She doesn't identify these "natural procedures...

...Grose found evidence of only one successful undertaking...

...Finally, our unwillingness to respond to the Hungarian uprising in 1956 shows that had Rollback somehow managed to crack the Iron Curtain, we would never have exploited the breakthrough, because we refused to make a real military commitment...

...and British intelligence, Philby knew more about this misguided crusade, particularly in Albania, than did almost all CIA officers...

...Some of their members subsequently managed to make their way westward, along with Communist agents planted in their midst—"the chronic trap of undercover work that wouldplague Rollback operations to the end...

...Seeing containment as a reactive strategy, the Republicans attacked it...

...Initially, it was independent of both State and the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with which it merged four years later...

...The agents who participated in the rest were captured and executed, or became double agents...

...The campaign, which "probably numbered in the many dozens rather than the many hundreds" of missions, ended in 1953 and was an unqualified disaster...

...government was funding non-Communist Left magazines, and Socialist and Catholic trade unions, that would have caused great trouble...

...His design, set forth in NSC (National Security Council) Directive 10/2, called for the United States to help émigrés from the Soviet bloc and anti-Communists in countries such as France and Italy, where the Communists might be voted into power...

...Is it wrong for a government to engage in covert activities...

...On February 22, he transmitted to Washington an 8,000-word document known as the "long telegram...

...Stonor Saunders is hostile to that argument, yet cannot show a single case where it wasn't true...

...If the United States was going to follow a strategy like Rollback, of course it had to be secret, as all military undertakings are...

...Wisner decided to proceed in four directions: psychological warfare, such as the spreading of rumors...

...Unlike the counterforce mischief described by Grose, or the War in Vietnam, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was not attempting to pump money into futile ventures...

...Perhaps the most important diplomatic message in our history, it attacked the Soviet Union as a power "committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S...

...Still, it is true that some people claim to have been duped by the Congress and in particular by Michael Josselson...

...And in this particular respect, the moral equivalency argument has merit: Both sides did indeed subsidize magazines...

...In the 20th century all governments—and not just, as the author seems to think, the Communist ones and the United States—attempted to influence people in other countries: During both World Wars, the British, for example, spent huge amounts of money to sway opinion here...

...Stonor Saunders insists that it was, because "the natural procedures of intellectual inquiry had been interfered with...

...Its first editorial team consisted of Stephen Spender, the English writer and poet, who oversaw the cultural side of its coverage, and Irving Kristol, the future neoconservative...

...The Germans had mobilized auxiliaries from every land they occupied, and many in their ranks deservedly emerged from the War as marked men...

...The OPC, sometimes with British participation, proceeded to launch a three-year effort to penetrate the Western borders of the Communist world...

...Ambassador to Moscow, was calling for a much harder line, and FDR's successor, Harry S. Truman, tended to this view as well...

...Kennan disliked the Communists and bombarded his boss with memos denouncing them...

...But he had in mind something different from the futile adventures carried out by the organizers of counterforce...

...To implement the campaign a new unit of government was created: the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC...

...There was also a second reason for secrecy...

...Kennan, however, had actually written that it would involve the "adroit and vigilant operation of counterforce"— meaning covert military operations...

...The OPC was a substantial agency, with a 1952 budget of $200 million, half of it devoted to counterforce in Eastern Europe, the main subject of Grose's book...

...In July 1947, after returning to Washington, he published an article in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X...

...Kennan later called his counterforce proposal the greatest mistake of his life...

...As the Washington-based liaison between U.S...

...Operation Rollback—a name conferred on the scheme retroactively when it came to light in the 1990s—failed for several reasons...

...To me, that isn't the true question...

...there can be no permanent modus vivendi...

...must be credited to the heroic efforts of Michael Josselson...

...The second reason Wisner's four-pronged project failed was the penetration of the highest levels of Western intelligence by two Soviet agents: Donald Maclean and Kim Philby...

...In one respect, though, the CIA did have an unfortunate influence: It made McCarthyism essentially off-limits for its own magazines...

...Was it wrong in principle for the United States to influence the politics of other countries, and to do so secretly...

...I see nothing unbelievable about the idea that this one was rejected on its merits...

...The problem was, rather, that Rollback was based on mistaken premises and people...

...First, as he noted, "Organizations of the Right in most countries get financial support from the local business communities and oligarchies...

...When Harriman departed his post at the end of January 1946, leaving his deputy temporarily in charge, he said, "Now you can send all the telegrams you want...

...But even if Philby had never existed it is hard to believe that Rollback could have threatened the Communists: Stalin's rule was too brutally complete to permit success on this level...

...Her tale is not new: The facts have been coming out since the New York Times broke the story in 1966...

...It became apparent in the 1990s that this had been much more than a mere throwaway line...

...It wasn't much of an article, to judge by such selections as, "Even the Soviet Russians, for all their ruthlessness, barely covered by the fig of ideology, seem to speak a more common language with other peoples than we do...

...But if secrecy per se isn't the real issue, it is related to a legitimate concern: The policy was not only hidden from public view, it was directly contrary to our announced containment strategy under Truman...

...Following demobilization, he stayed in Berlin, working for the military authorities and later the State Department...

...Yet the author speaks of his "heart of darkness...

...The Congress was a major undertaking with a substantial budget: $200,000 (in 1952 money) for the salaries of its paid direct employees, not counting those of the entities it controlled...

...British philosopher Stuart Hampshire said of Mike Josselson, "He was the big fixer, the man who could get anything done...

...organizations of the anti-democratic Left get it from the Russians or Chinese...

...according to her, he was given to brooding and anger, though none of the people she quotes about him says anything like this...

...In the fall of 1948 Josselson became one of the first OPC employees in Germany, serving as chief of covert action at the Berlin Station...

...Those who ran the OPC, and later the CIA, knew that this current of opinion had the greatest real knowledge of Communism...

...policies had nothing to do with its destruction...

...The most important, Encounter, was published in English from 1953 to 1990, in London...

...she is a latterday neutralist who quotes with approval a letter Spender's wife, Natasha, sent to Michael Josselson: "What was really wrong about the silence imposed on you by the CIA" about its role in financing the Congress, she wrote, is that it "was forcing you to adopt the same ethics as the Communists and therefore making the methods of the West somehow on a par with those of the East in that respect...

...Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...and "preventive direct action": assistance to guerrilla forces, sabotage, countersabotage, and demolition...

...But the real charge against the USSR is not that it covertly paid the salaries of sympathetic editors and writers—surely at most a trivial sin on its part and ours...

...Spender, the most prominent among those who say they were deceived, definitely knew about the rumors...

...Even Josselson's wife, Diana, admitted that "the real damage to people's reputations anguished him terribly...

...said Josselson "could play any instrument in the orchestra" to make things happen...

...Even she admits, "That the Congress for Cultural Freedom survived and even thrived...

...The need to conduct foreign policy with "secrecy and dispatch" is asserted by every country...

...but organizations of the democratic Left have no obvious and reliable sources of support...

...Truman approved the directive...

...Anything...

...Stonor Saunders herself argues that in funding the Congress, the United States government put itself into a position very similar to that of its Soviet counterpart...

...the British Treasury paid Spender's salary without his knowledge...

...Encounter was secretly financed through real and dummy foundations...

...Having won the Cold War, we have forgotten why it was important to do so...

...In the early '20s he fled to Berlin, where he attended the university (but did not take a degree) and spent several years living in avant-garde circles...

...This story too is the subject of a new book: The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders (The New Press, 509 pp., $29.95...

...This is the only part of the antisecrecy argument that has any merit for me...

...Lasky succeeded Kristol in 1958...

...Josselson may or may not have been there, but the idea submitted to Wisner in January 1950 was called the Josselson proposal...

...After Dwight D. Eisenhower became President in 1953, real and announced policies continued to be diametrically opposed, in the opposite way: The government claimed to be aiming to roll back the borders of Communism while having no real intention of doing so...

...Josselson, born in Estonia in 1908, lost most of his family in the Russian Revolution...

...As Kristol (whose conservatism I do not share) rightly observes, turning down articles is part of a magazine editor's job...

...political support for resistance movements in Iron Curtain countries and for anti-Communist elements in Western ones...