A reference to communist-inspired industrial strikes in France intended to disrupt the delivery there of Marshall aid suggests that Kennan already had particular U.S. labor groups in mind for this purpose. Third, the memorandum raised the possibility of “preventive direct action in free countries”—that is, paramilitary operations—but only as a last resort, when other political and psychological methods had failed. Finally, Kennan recommended the establishment of an entirely new government body, under the cover of the National Security Council but answerable to the Secretary of State, which was to have “complete authority over covert political warfare operations.”47
In just one document, George Kennan had set the agenda for all of the United States’s front operations in the first years of the Cold War. Here, in embryonic form, were the CIA’s émigré organizations, its covert labor program, and its many other clandestine efforts to aid the European
“non-communist left” using equivalent American groups as go-betweens.
Ironically, though, the immediate effect of Kennan’s proposals was to reduce the Agency’s control over covert operations. While his recommendation that the State Department take complete control of political warfare from the CIA was rejected (thanks to a combination of half-hearted resistance by Director Hillenkoetter and a reluctance on the part of foreign-service traditionalists to give a home to the “dirty tricks” brigade), such was the sense of crisis pervading Washington in the summer of 1948
that Kennan’s idea of creating a new government body devoted exclusively to covert operations won widespread support. The result was a compromise whereby the CIA was to house the new organization—supply it
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with “quarters” and “rations,” to employ the military parlance still in common use at the time—and the Secretary of State (meaning, in effect, Kennan’s PPS) provide it with policy guidance. NSC directive 10/2, approved on June 18, 1948, superceded NSC 4-A by creating an Office of Special Projects endowed with powers to conduct “any covert activities” related to “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anticommunist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”48
To carry out this mission, the intellectual Kennan turned to the men of action, the Park Avenue cowboys. William Donovan’s best days, it was generally agreed, were now behind him, so Kennan’s first pick to head the new political warfare outfit (whose name was soon changed to the deliberately more opaque Office of Policy Coordination, or OPC) was Wild Bill’s European deputy, Allen Dulles. Mistakenly believing that he would become Director of Central Intelligence in a Republican administration following the 1948 presidential election, Dulles declined the invitation.
Kennan then turned to the former chief of OSS eastern European operations, the hard-driven Frank Wisner, who had rejoined government service in 1947 as a State Department official overseeing intelligence operations in occupied Germany.49 As the Assistant Director for Policy Coordination, Wisner lost no time in recruiting to the OPC men like himself, OSS old boys and professionals with European experience, in the process creating, in the words of one recruit, future CIA Director William Colby, “the atmosphere of an order of Knights Templars, to save Western freedom from Communist darkness.”50
The new recruits were assigned either to headquarters in Washington (housed in a collection of dingy huts strewn along the Mall) or undercover positions in diplomatic posts and military bases abroad. The Washington-based personnel were split into five “Functional Groups”—psychological warfare, political warfare, economic warfare, preventive direct action, and “miscellaneous”—and, in deliberate imitation of the Marshall Plan, six geographical divisions, the heads of which controlled the field staff.51 In practice, however, OPC officers abroad, who were usually second-in-command at their embassy, enjoyed a large measure of autonomy,
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often initiating their own operations, or “projects,” as they were called.52
The independence of individual officers was mirrored by that of the organization as a whole, which, although housed by the CIA and guided by Kennan’s PPS, was practically nonaccountable thanks to the broad mandate of NSC 10/2 and Wisner’s secret access to the unvouchered “counterpart funds” set aside for Marshall Plan administrative expenses, which amounted to roughly $200 million a year.53 The determined interventionists had triumphed: covert operations had at last acquired truly effective organizational form.
Such were the origins of the CIA’s Mighty Wurlitzer. Willi Münzenberg had pioneered the front organization in Berlin, then during the 1930s watched it take root in the United States, that society of inveterate joiners. With the approach of World War II, a group of “fading Wilsonians”54
who habitually thought of their private and the public interest as one and the same thing, overcame an innate American aversion to government secrecy and established the nation’s first central intelligence agency. (The great expansion of federal power that had taken place under the New Deal made this change much easier to accomplish than it might otherwise have been.) Immediately after the war, as Soviet-American friendship gave way to enmity and the OSS was revived in the shape of the CIA, George Kennan grafted the communist front tactic onto the new Cold War U.S. intelligence apparatus. All that was needed now was for the dashing young Ivy Leaguers in Frank Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination to translate this plan for political warfare into action.
T W O
Secret Army
É M I G R É S
As George Kennan and other “determined interventionists” discussed possible means of not only containing the spread of communism but also rolling back the Soviet empire in a campaign of liberation, they kept coming back to the same idea: the possible usefulness to their cause of the numerous exiles from the communist world now living in the west.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, American occupation forces in Germany had gathered a great deal of valuable information from former Nazis with special knowledge of communist Russia, such as Reinhard Gehlen, who had been Hitler’s chief of military intelligence on the eastern front. By the summer of 1946, the War Department was systematically spiriting away to the United States Germans who had desirable
“technical” expertise (and, often, terrible records as war criminals) in a secret operation code-named “Paperclip.”1 Kennan and his fellow interventionists now advocated taking a similar approach to the many thousands of eastern-bloc citizens who were either crowded into prisoner of war (POW) and displaced person (DP) camps in Germany or scattered around various western capitals: captured Russian soldiers who had fought with the Nazis against their own communist government, refugees from Baltic and Balkan territories “liberated” by the Soviets, and disillusioned ex-communist intellectuals. As well as being exploitable for intelligence purposes, this drifting, desperate population could be deployed in anti-Soviet political warfare operations, both paramilitary and psychological. The mere fact of the presence in the west of these political refugees
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testified to the hatefulness of communist rule and the possibility of escape from it.
How, though, to harness this “potential secret army?” Various suggestions were considered. Kennan proposed the creation of a political warfare school to train exiles in “air support, communications, local security, counter-intelligence, foraging, sabotage, guerrilla tactics, field medicine, and propaganda.” Two veterans of the OSS, Stanford-educated guerrilla specialist Franklin Lindsay and State Department-trained Sovietologist Charles Thayer, came up with a plan “to extract for U.S. advantage disaffected foreign nationals from Soviet-dominated areas.” Shortly before taking over the Office of Policy Coordination, Frank Wisner, who had toured German DP camps in 1947 while working for the State Department, led a high-level study group investigating the “Utilization of Refugees from USSR in U.S. National Interests.” When the group reported in May 1948, it made particular play of the exiles’ “fortitude in the face of Communist menace” and know-how “in techniques to obtain control of mass movements,” including “Socialist, trade union, intellectual, moderate right-wing groups, and others.” Wisner wanted to see the relaxation of U.S. immigration controls and a secret government disbursement of $5
million to expedite the recruitment of these “natural antidotes to Communism.” The resulting program, Operation Bloodstone, echoed its predecessor Paperclip by admitting a number of war criminals. As Harry Rositzke, a Soviet expert in the CIA, explained, “It was a visceral business of using any bastard as long as he was anti-communist.”2
The employment of such elements in intelligence-gathering and paramilitary operations was clearly something that had to be done secretly.
Psychological warfare, however, was a different matter. Inspiring resistance within the “captive” populations of the eastern bloc and demoralizing the communist leadership were goals that could only be achieved with public pronouncements by anticommunist exiles. The problem was how to lend support to such exiles without at the same time discrediting them by making them look like American agents. The answer lay in Kennan’s May 1948 memorandum on political warfare: the formation of “a public American organization” to “sponsor selected political refugee committees” that would receive “covert guidance” and “assistance” from the government.3 In addition to providing U.S. officials with the ability to deny plausibly that they were subverting a foreign government in peacetime,