Behind the Curtain

...It was none other than British agent Kim Philby who informed Moscow about Wisner's plans for guerrilla warfare in Albania and Latvia...

...In any event, Truman received no credit for his administration's East European initiatives, the details of which were not made public for decades...

...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 émigré elements...

...The attacks on Truman as "soft on communism" were, of course, ludicrous...

...While most American officials regarded the refugees as a nuisance, Ken-nan and a handful of others saw them as an untapped reserve force in the coming struggle against communism...

...In some cases, the Kremlin was tipped off by agents who had insinuated themselves into high-ranking positions within the anti-Communist émigré organizations that served as the OPC's shock troops...

...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 solution was found in the creation of a new entity, known as the Office of Policy Coordination...

...Some boasted solid democratic credentials...

...Kennan has no doubt concluded that the rollback ventures were simply another reflection of American arrogance and hubris...

...Much of this information is not new...

...There was also evidence of Communist weakness, especially in Eastern Europe...

...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...

...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 détente...

...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...

...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...

...The most tragic failures involved the attempt to help émigrés infiltrate Eastern Europe to initiate guerrilla offensives...

...Grose, however, is no revisionist and his account as well as his judgments ring true...

...The rollback campaign may have failed to weaken Soviet power...

...At the heart of the story is America's decision to make use of the millions of refugees and émigrés from Eastern Europe who were languishing in displaced persons camps after World War II...

...His fair-mindedness stands in sharp contrast to the demonization of America's Cold War planners found in earlier Cold War studies...

...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...

...The attempts to weaken Moscow's hold over captive peoples may have been misguided, but not unjustified...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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 émigré organization around...

...some had unsavory wartime pasts as Nazi collaborators...

...Yet the evidence he presents suggests the opposite...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Here, Wisner was confounded by the Soviet espionage apparatus...

...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 émigrés...

...But the OPC is better remembered for its catastrophes, of which there were many...

...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...

...Kennan had grandiose plans for a series of covert operations against the satellite regimes, not to mention the Soviet heartland itself...

...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...

...In still other cases, Moscow relied on information provided by spies within the Allied ranks...

...Unfortunately, Grose is on less sure footing in his assessment of American domestic politics...

...Grose implies that rollback policies were driven by the hysterical anti-communism of an American public obsessed with Alger Hiss and the Rosenberg case...

...Even more ironically, the architect of the 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...

...On this, as on containment, Kennan is surely wrong...

...BY ARCH PUDDINGTON 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...

...He devotes considerable space to the rise of American anti-communism in the 1940s, a phenomenon he regards with extreme distaste...

...Rollback eventually became a battle cry for those Republicans who believed the Truman administration was insufficiently zealous in countering world communism...

...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...

...Indeed, George Kennan was contemptuous of the very notion that foreign policy should be influenced by the changing mood of the voting public...

...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...

...But there is no reason to treat this chapter in the Cold War as a source of national shame...

...Intelligence indicated a great deal of discontent in the Baltics and the satellite nations...

...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...

...In other cases, the Soviets discovered the identity of domestic oppositionists, who were then given the option of severe punishment or functioning as double agents...