Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain. - Review - book review

Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain. By Peter Grose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 256 pages. $25.00.

Early in 1946 the new American President, Harry S. Truman, became skeptical about the tenuous US wartime collaboration with Soviet Russia. In Moscow, Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, the multimillionaire who directed disbursement of American Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets during the war against Hitler became impatient with daily life under communism and the effort necessary to try to maintain cordial relations with Josef Stalin. The Ambassador sensed that he had worn out his welcome and late in January withdrew from his appointment and turned over the embassy to his deputy chief of mission, George F. Kennan.

Kennan had graduated from Princeton in 1925 and joined the Foreign Service, serving abroad almost continuously thereafter. Selected early in his career for training as a Soviet affairs specialist, he became a member of an exclusive group of Soviet experts in the Department of State.

In February 1946, shortly after Ambassador Harriman had departed, the State Department and Treasury sent two routine inquiries to the Moscow embassy asking for an "interpretative analysis" of recent Soviet statements about international financial institutions that could be used to develop US policy. The only unusual aspect of these inquiries at the time was that the officer responsible for the reply was George Kennan. He thought about the question for several days and then, on the eve of his 42d birthday, decided to seize the opening that had eluded him during years of bureaucratic drudgery. "Now, suddenly, my opinion was being asked," he said. At 9 p.m. on 22 February, Kennan sent a cable to Washington that was 8,000 words of elegant and descriptive prose. All during the Cold War, Kennan's dispatch, number 511, would be better known as "The Long Telegram." The cable was widely circulated in Washington and studied closely by Defense Secretary James V. Forrestal. Returning to Washington, Kennan was assigned t o the National War College and tasked by Forrestal to produce an essay covering the material in his telegram. The theme of his article was this: "The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Kennan's sabbatical at the War College was abruptly canceled at the end of 1947, and he was appointed head of the State Department's new Policy Planning Staff. Unable to withdraw his article, he agreed to permit its publication under the pseudonym "Mr. X."

In June the following year, President Truman and the National Security Council formally committed the US government to an unprecedented program of counterforce against communism, moving beyond propaganda and economic warfare to authorize "preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures," as well as "subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas, and refugee liberation groups." The Truman Administration directed that all such activities were to be carried out under ruses and deceptions and that the US government would "plausibly disclaim any responsibility." This program would take the name of Operation Rollback. The newly established CIA and all of the other US intelligence organizations wanted to have nothing to do with Operation Rollback; they firmly believed the mission and function of intelligence was collection and analysis of information, not the actions described above. So, initially, a new indep endent organization, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), was created and conducted its activities until 1952, when it was absorbed into the CIA.

Peter Grose, author of the consummate biography of Allen W. Dulles, was a longtime foreign and diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, later executive editor of Foreign Affairs, and is now a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He has produced a gripping account of the brave, patriotic, and resourceful Americans who, with refugees from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, struggled against the Soviet colossus. Grose is sympathetic to the good intentions of these courageous individuals; however, he also describes the naivete, folly, and ineptitude of so many of those who believed that their anticommunism alone would be able to overcome the conflicting ambitions and agendas of the refugees. The planned use of displaced persons and refugees, as related by Grose, is a melancholy tale of organizations thoroughly penetrated by the communist security services. The imaginative schemes to undermine the communist governments, while successful in a few instances (such as Ra dio Free Europe), produced comic results in others. In one case, the plan to employ World War II surplus meteorological balloons and prevailing air currents to carry propaganda leaflets east over the Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia fell victim to a change in direction of the winds, causing in several cases puzzlement in Scotland when sheepherders received Russian-language pamphlets from the heavens. When General Walter Bedell Smith, the acerbic Director of Central Intelligence who thoroughly disapproved of these activities, learned of one balloon which malfunctioned and dropped its entire load of leaflets on a Rhine barge (which promptly sank), he observed, "That was the greatest achievement of psychological warfare in Europe."

Perhaps the best-known book about war is Carl von Clausewitz's posthumous philosophical treatise On War. In the English translation the most frequently quoted dictum of Clausewitz is, "War is the continuation of policy by other means." This definition would be simpler if that is what the author actually wrote and meant to say. What Clausewitz wrote is that "war is the continuation of political intercourse" (des politischen Verkehrs) "with the intermixing of other means" (mit Einmischung anderer Mittel). The original German text expresses a more subtle and complex idea than the accepted English translation, and certainly applies to the kind of war described by Peter Grose in this eminently readable and useful work.

Colonel Richard S. Friedman, USA Ret., who served in a variety of intelligence assignments in the Army and subsequently with the Central Intelligence Agency.

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