Operation Rollback

by Grose, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780395516065
• ISBN10: 0395516064
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-01
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Summary

Fascinating . . . well-documented . . . thought-provoking and entertaining" (Publishers Weekly), Operation Rollback is a tale of intrigue and espionage that reveals how and why suspicions on both sides drove the world into the Cold War. In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union started secretly mobilizing forces against each other, building intricate intelligence networks of spies and digging in for the postwar era. America's secret action plan, known as Rollback, was an audacious strategy of espionage, subversion, and sabotage. Concealed for four decades by all involved, the dangerous episodes of the Rollback campaign have only now come to light.

Author Biography

Peter Grose, a longtime foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times and former executive editor of Foreign Affairs

Table of Contents

Overture: The Vexing ``Mr.X''	1	(10)
The two visions of George F. Kennan
I AN IRON CURTAIN OVER EUROPE
Nazis and Communits	11	(21)
``People of whom we know nothing'' ... unilateral disarmament of intelligence... the secret of ``Wild Bill'' ... Russians: allies or enemies? ... Germans: enemies or allies? ... the ``rat line''
Resistance	32	(21)
Crackly radio signals from the Baltics to the Balkans ... the Forest Brothers ... Romania's load of plenty ... Hungary's Scarlet Pimpernel ... ``bandits'' from Ukraine ... bothersome Russian emigres
II WASHINGTON AT PEACE
Liberals and Conservatives	53	(16)
Ideological ferment in a sleepy town ... an unwelcome visitor ... unwelcome testimony ... the FBI finds new bearings against communism ... the public perplexed
``Did I Do Right?''	69	(18)
The president perplexed ... a New Dealer visits Moscow ... clandestine operatives in action ... political operatives in action
III POLITICAL WARFARE
Kennan's Design	87	(13)
The Soviet Enemy Discovered... the Long Telegram... Truman reaches out... Kennan conceives a plan... NSC 10/2
The Secret Game	100	(21)
A special agency hidden within the government... an expansive Frank Wisner... money: ``the heart and soul of covert operations''... Congress looks the other way
IV GUERRILLAS, SABOTAGE, AND SUBVERSION
Starting with Intellectuals	121	(23)
``Organization X''... emigres in harness... fussing and feuding in exile... Mike Josselson and the Congress for Cultural Freedom
Into Battle	144	(20)
Is there a ``CIA type''? ... Frank Lindsay, the businessman... William Sloan Coffin, the divinity student... Michael Burke, the entrepreneur... failing the test case in Albania
Combat High and Low	164	(29)
Blowback from Romania... low-flying unmarked planes... parachute drops... arrests, accusations, denials... deception in Poland... mischief in Ukraine... the perils and travails of the NTS
V AFTERMATH
Anticommunism on the Hustings	193	(18)
``Liberating the Captive Nations'' ... the FBI turns against the White House... ethnic politics... the troublesome Congressman Kersten... John Foster Dulles takes power... Kennan is moved out
Legacy	211	(14)
Rollback frays at the edges... and at the core... restraint in Berlin... in Hungary... a devastating verdict on covert action... Glasnost and Rollback
Notes on Sources	225	(16)
Author's Note	241	(4)
Index	245

Excerpts

Overture: The Vexing "Mr. X" 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 build