It was an emotional, rhetorically overwrought performance, which sat uneasily with Kennan’s later, much-vaunted reputation as a Cold War “re-alist”; but, for an audience grasping for ways to make sense of the bewil-deringly complex postwar world, it hit home. Recalled from Moscow in April 1946, Kennan toured the United States, giving as many as thirty lectures on the Soviet challenge before taking up residence at the National War College in Washington, where he developed his notion of strategic “containment” into an article published the following year in the influential journal Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “Mr. X.”
Meanwhile, events seemed to be conspiring to confirm Kennan’s analysis of Soviet behavior. In March 1946, while speaking in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill used the phrase “Iron Curtain” to describe Moscow’s growing control over communist-dominated governments in eastern Europe. A year later, with the Soviet Union sending probes into areas of the Mediterranean and Middle East previously controlled by the British, President Truman appeared before Congress to request huge appropriations to aid the threatened governments of Greece and Turkey. A few months after the “Truman Doctrine” committed the United States to a global policy of saving “free peoples” from communist aggression, Secretary of State George C. Marshall used a June 1947 commencement address at Harvard to outline a massive program of financial assistance to the war-devastated economies of Europe. Predictably, the Soviets refused to take part in the Marshall Plan and, in October, at a conference of eastern European com-
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munist party officials in Warsaw, revived the Comintern (which Stalin, in a wartime gesture of goodwill, had abolished in 1943) in the shape of the Communist Information Bureau, or Cominform. Soon the Cominform was launching Münzenberg-style front operations all over the west, ped-dling a seductive image of the Soviet Union as a champion of world peace and the war-mongering United States as its principal enemy. The briefly fluid international situation of the immediate postwar period had frozen into a bipolar world order in which two ideologically opposed enemies used every means available to them, short of direct military confrontation, to frustrate the ambitions of the other.
It was against this background of deepening international tension that the Central Intelligence Agency was conjured into being. The first step toward the establishment of a peacetime foreign secret service had been taken in January 1946 when, in a mock ceremony in the Oval Office perhaps intended to mask his profound anxiety about the dangers of creating an American gestapo, Harry Truman appointed his trusted friend Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers the first head of the interim Central Intelligence Group (CIG), conferring on him a black cloak and wooden dagger and pronouncing him “director of centralized snooping.”38 The CIG was to function as a White House “news desk,” furnishing the president with digests of information gathered by the intelligence divisions in the State Department and armed services.39 With the arrival in February of the Long Telegram, however, and the alarming deterioration in American-Soviet relations that followed, support grew for a more powerful centralized body with its own research and analysis capability. Following a series of congressional debates—the U.S. secret service was the first in history to originate in parliamentary legislation—a national security bill was en-acted on July 26, 1947, creating both a Central Intelligence Agency and a National Security Council (NSC) to advise the president. Mention of the Soviet Union was conspicuously absent from the National Security Act and the debates leading up to it. Nonetheless, an important clause of the Act, which authorized the CIA to perform unspecified “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security,” would later be invoked as legal justification for anti-Soviet covert operations.40
That was still in the future, however. In the first years of its existence, the CIA, reflecting the temperament of its director, the amiable but inef-fectual Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, steered clear of political war-
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fare, preferring to stick with the more gentlemanly business of intelligence gathering. Not surprisingly, this squeamishness exasperated the “Park Avenue cowboys,” the rambunctious corporate lawyers who had run the OSS
and, since that organization’s demise, had been lobbying for a revival of special operations to counter the new totalitarian threat. Joining the Park Avenue cowboys in their calls for stronger anti-Soviet measures were the
“Dumbarton Avenue skeptics,” a cadre of anticommunist Sovietologists who, during the war years, had gathered in the Georgetown home of future ambassador to France Charles “Chip” Bohlen to express their dissent from the foreign policy of the Roosevelt administration.41 At the head of this coalition of “determined interventionists” was George Kennan, an ardent advocate of covert operations and psychological warfare, who in May 1947 was effectively handed control of U.S. Cold War strategy when he was chosen by George Marshall to head the powerful new State Department body, the Policy Planning Staff (PPS).42 Thanks to his authorship of the Long Telegram and the “X” article, Kennan has long been recognized as the chief architect of the American foreign policy of “containment.” It is only recently, with the release of newly declassified government documents, that historians have come to appreciate the extent to which his definition of containment anticipated the more aggressive strategy of “liberation” more commonly associated with the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles.43
The first significant victory for the determined interventionists came in December 1947, when the National Security Council gave the CIA its covert operation charter in the shape of top-secret directive NSC 4-A, instructing Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Hillenkoetter to undertake “covert psychological operations” against the Soviet Union.44 The Agency used its new powers in the spring of 1948 to prevent communist victory in elections taking place in Italy, distributing anticommunist literature, providing pro-western newspapers with scarce newsprint, and conducting a disinformation (or “black”) propaganda campaign under the leadership of future counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.45 The communists were defeated at the polls, whether as a result of the U.S. intervention or the conservatism of Italian voters is not entirely clear. But the interventionists were not satisfied. Moscow was tightening its stranglehold over eastern Europe—witness the brutal coup that had taken place in Czechoslovakia in February—and, under Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s
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approach to political warfare still lacked conviction. On May 4, 1948, in an atmosphere of near war-panic caused by the Soviets’ launch of the Berlin blockade, Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff presented a plan for “the inauguration of organized political warfare” that involved the creation of a new “covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government.”46
If the Long Telegram provided the theoretical rationale for the overt dimensions of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, the PPS’s May 1948 memo supplied the intellectual basis for its covert aspects. Kennan’s first aim was to persuade government officials who still had qualms about a democracy’s conducting covert operations in peacetime that political warfare was not only proper, it was also necessary given the circumstances in which the United States currently found itself. Other nations had long accepted the legitimacy of this kind of warfare: the British, for example, had made extensive use of it, and its conduct by the Soviet Union was “the most refined and effective of any in history.” American politicians needed to overcome the “popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war” and “recognize the realities of international relations” (note the appeal to realism and easy assumption of the right to bypass popular opinion, both typically Kennanesque moves). Doing so might come easier if they realized that they were already engaged in an overt form of political warfare without knowing it: such measures as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were, after all, originally conceived as responses to Soviet provocations. Covert operations of whatever kind—“clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare, and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states”—were in this sense merely an extension of existing U.S.
government policies. In any case, the country’s “international responsibilities” were now such that, “having been engaged by the full might of the Kremlin’s political warfare,” Americans had no choice but to respond in kind.
Having demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, the ethical propriety of covert action, Kennan then proceeded to describe “specific projects” that the United States might undertake. A possible first step was to set up public “liberation committees,” which would serve as foci for “political refugees from the Soviet world” to foment resistance to the communist regime. “This is primarily an overt operation,” the memorandum ex-
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plained, “which, however, should receive covert guidance and possibly assistance from the Government.” The example of Comintern-funded front organizations was not explicitly cited here—the justification offered was the patriotic one that private U.S. citizens would eagerly participate in such committees because of a long American tradition of voluntary association in support of “people suffering under oppression”—but the spirit of Willi Münzenberg could be detected in the passing observation that the communists had “exploited this tradition to the extreme, to their own ends and to our national detriment, as witness the Abraham Lincoln brigade during the Spanish Civil War.” Another suggestion was the “support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world, . . . a covert operation again utilizing private intermediaries.”