As his biographer John Lewis Gaddis noted, Kennan was pointing out to Washington the painful truth that the end of the war had “accomplished the only objective—military victory—that the USSR shared with anyone else.” Earlier, Kennan had suggested that the only realistic option was to counter the Soviets’ implacable self-interest with old-fashioned balance-of-power politics: simply divide Europe in half and accept Soviet domination of the East and forget all of the idealistic hopes for a new international order based on collective security, economic cooperation, and principle above might that the UN and the World Bank were meant to create. But in the long telegram Kennan offered a different prospect, a strategy of patience, of the West’s matching the Soviet long view with one of its own; the only thing that would bring about a change in Soviet behavior was if some future Soviet leader finally recognized that the strategy of fomenting perpetual conflict abroad was no longer reaping the benefits to the regime it always had in the past. That required “long-term, patient, but firm and vigilant containment” to deny the Soviets any success, particularly when it came to territorial demands such as those Stalin was now peppering the West with for parts of Iran, control of the Turkish Straits, even naval bases on the Mediterranean in North Africa.12
Kennan later ruefully remarked that his dispatch reminded him of one of “those primers put out by the Daughters of the American Revolution designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy,” but the fact was that his five-thousand-word message contained more than a few home truths that Washington had been painfully slow to wake up to. (Stalin, whose intelligence service quickly supplied him a copy of Kennan’s classified cable, ordered his ambassador in Washington to send an equally long telegram to Moscow analyzing “American monopolistic capitalism” as the force behind the United States’ policy of “striving for world supremacy.”)13
Just how cruelly barbaric the Soviet state’s leader was and how accustomed he was to playing a double game—not only in overt diplomacy but in the ruthless deployment of covert forces abroad and repression at home—was not nearly so widely understood in the late 1940s as it would be a half century later. In Stalin, as Gaddis observed, “narcissism, paranoia, and absolute power came together.” A “convinced Marxist fanatic from his youth,” he maintained an air of “eerie calm,” his short, stocky figure and ostentatious pipe projecting the air of a simple Georgian peasant elder; General Eisenhower, meeting him in 1945, was just one of many to be charmed by the act, calling him afterward “benign and fatherly.”14 But that outward pose, noted Stalin’s biographer Simon Montefiore, concealed
a super-intelligent and gifted politician for whom his own historic role was paramount, a nervy intellectual who manically read history and literature, and a fidgety hypochondriac suffering from chronic tonsillitis, psoriasis, rheumatic aches….Garrulous, sociable, and a fine singer, this lonely and unhappy man ruined every love relationship and friendship in his life by sacrificing happiness to political necessity and cannibalistic paranoia. Damaged by his childhood and abnormally cold in temperament, he…believed the solution to every human problem was death, and was obsessed with executions….No one alive was more suited to the conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman sternness of Lenin’s Party.15
In common with his predecessor, the Soviet leader possessed an utter indifference to human suffering and a complete lack of remorse for the millions of innocent people sent to their deaths on his orders. Neither Lenin nor Stalin was a sadist, in the sense of deriving pleasure from the infliction of physical torment; rather, they saw terror as “an indispensable instrument of revolutionary government,” the historian Richard Pipes observed, and seemed genuinely puzzled at the idea that they should be troubled over the fate of individuals who might have to be sacrificed on the way to achieving the ideals of the worker’s state. “How can you make a revolution without executions?” Lenin asked in exasperation as he ordered death “on the spot” for “counterrevolutionary agitators.” Finding the normal system of justice too unreliable and lenient for his purposes, he created, in the utmost secrecy, the Cheka to carry out the job. Modeled directly on the hated czarist secret police, the Cheka was instructed by Lenin to “exterminate” and “liquidate” the state’s “class enemies,” subject not to any formal law but constrained only by something he termed “revolutionary conscience.”
As one of its first acts the Cheka ordered that nothing could be published about the organization without the approval of the Cheka itself. Its first chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was a man thoroughly in the bloodless Bolshevik mold, an ascetic ideologue “capable of perpetrating the worst imaginable cruelties without pleasure, as an idealistic duty,” as Pipes described him. In the courtyard and basement cells of the Cheka’s Lubyanka prison in the heart of Moscow, executions and torture sessions were carried out while truck engines idled to muffle the shots and screams.16
Stalin’s Great Terror, which began in 1937, aimed to eliminate once and for all the “anti-Soviet elements” who dared to weaken the state in “even their thoughts.” Each region of the country was assigned a quota to meet goals the Politburo set: 72,950 in “Category One,” to be shot; 259,450 in “Category Two,” to be arrested and sent into internal exile. The actual number eliminated in 1937–38 was 700,000, so enthusiastically was the order carried out. A million children of those executed or arrested, often for nothing more than being a troublesome personal rival to a local Communist Party boss, were taken away and placed in state orphanages; most did not see not their mothers again for twenty years. Stalin himself reviewed the execution lists, writing “for” to signify his approval; a tiny crayon dash mark could save a man’s life, but Stalin seldom found any reason to be merciful. “An Enemy of the People is not only one who does sabotage but one who doubts the rightness of the Party line,” he told his chief of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. “And there are a lot of them and we must liquidate them.” To hide the appalling extent of the purge, Stalin ordered the 1937 census falsified, then had all of his top census administrators arrested, many of them shot.17 George Kennan recalled the crushing sense of fear that gripped Russian society at the time. When the purges began, Russians simply cut off even the most ordinary social contact with foreigners, leaving the staff of the American embassy in Moscow completely isolated.18
Stalin may not have been a sadist, but Beria unquestionably was, one of the many in Stalin’s inner circle who took advantage of the terrifying official power they wielded to act with personal impunity. The NKVD chief kept a collection of blackjacks in his office so that he could personally take part in the torture of victims when he chose; he also stored there an array of women’s silk underwear, schoolgirls’ sports outfits, sex toys, and pornography. Accountable to no one but Stalin, Beria routinely had women he spotted picked up and brought to his office, where he seduced or more commonly just raped them, in either case having his driver take the woman home afterward in his limousine and present her with a bouquet of flowers as a parting gift. To encourage one of his victims to submit, Beria promised he would release her adored father from prison, knowing that he had already been executed.19
By the late 1940s the NKVD and NKGB (reconstituted as full-fledged ministries after the war, they had become the MVD and MGB by then) were sprawling, all-powerful bureaucracies that encompassed the secret police, the vast network of Gulag slave labor camps, and multiple divisions of armed troops organized as regular military units; they were responsible for internal security, foreign espionage and subversion, cryptology, counterintelligence, and ideological supervision. In conducting foreign intelligence operations they acted with the same ruthlessness and impunity with which they suppressed dissent at home. It would not be until 1956 that the successors of the Cheka would finally be stripped by Nikita Khrushchev of their assumed power to carry out secret executions. “The failure of the Bolshevik government to make public, at the time of its founding, the functions and powers of the Cheka had dire
consequences,” Pipes observed, “because it enabled the Cheka to claim authority which it had not been intended to have.”20
—
In April 1947, fourteen months after Kennan’s long telegram, George Marshall returned from a meeting in Moscow profoundly upset and discouraged. The former Army chief of staff, who had quietly and adroitly shaped America’s military strategy through World War II, had recently been named secretary of state by Truman. He was reserved, unflappable, courteous, dignified; Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.”
But his patience had been sorely tried at the meeting of the wartime allies’ foreign ministers. Stonewalled day after day by Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, Marshall had finally sought a session with Stalin, only to get the runaround there too when he attempted to raise the problems of postwar Europe, in particular the future of Germany, which was still divided into separate American, British, French, and Soviet military occupation zones. Stalin doodled on his notepad, drawing wolves’ heads in red pencil, a favorite tactic the dictator used to disconcert foreign visitors, as he blandly suggested that there was no urgency in the matter. “All the way back to Washington,” recalled an aide, Marshall spoke of “the importance of finding some initiative to prevent the complete breakdown of Western Europe.”21
In March, Truman had asked Congress to provide $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey to counter Communist guerrillas now threatening their independent survival. It was one one-thousandth what the United States had spent to win World War II, but it represented a huge psychological step for the country, since it meant “going into European politics,” Truman pointed out. But Marshall had been adamant that the choice was “acting with energy or losing by default.”
Now the secretary of state asked George Kennan to draw up a far grander proposal to seize the initiative in Europe. His one instruction to Kennan was “avoid trivia.”22
The European Recovery Program, which instantly became known as the Marshall Plan, was unveiled in a speech Marshall gave in June at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree. His proposal was cast not as a response to Communist pressure but rather as a means to revive the economies of war-ravaged countries so that free institutions would grow and thrive on their own. The price tag was a staggering $17 billion, and though Americans and Europeans would rightly come to see the Marshall Plan as a historic act of American altruism at its best, it was the darkening realities of Stalin’s intentions that finally prompted the Republican Congress, initially scornful of “global New Dealism,” to approve the appropriation almost a year later, in April 1948. The most alarming event had been a brutal and swift coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948, in which the local Communist Party, backed by the Red Army, overthrew the only remaining democratically elected government in Eastern Europe. Almost as worrisome was the upcoming election in Italy scheduled for April, which the Communists seemed poised to win with substantial financial backing from Moscow.23
In the end, this immediate threat to extend Soviet control into Western Europe was turned back not by the overt aid of the Marshall Plan but covert aid to Italian political parties from the newly established Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA had been created in the sweeping bill passed by Congress the previous year that overhauled the entire defense establishment. The National Security Act of 1947 unified the military services (including the newly created Air Force) in a single department under a new secretary of defense; set up a National Security Council under the president to direct national security policy; and took the first quiet step into the dark business of covert operations by replacing the Central Intelligence Group, which had proved to be a mostly ineffectual coordinating office, with an independent civilian agency under the direct control of NSC.
Although CIA had no explicit statutory authority to carry out overseas operations, the NSC wasted little time filling that breach, issuing on its own initiative a directive in June 1948 that authorized the intelligence agency to engage in
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 anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.24
The State Department had urged this vastly expanded role. Kennan acknowledged that in adopting the very tactics of the totalitarian state that the United States hoped to counter, it risked compromising its most basic values, and indeed undermining the very premise of the Marshall Plan, namely that the most effective answer to Soviet influence was for America to show the way with its example of openness, freedom, and the rule of law. But he thought that as long as the State Department kept a close eye on the CIA’s operations, and that they were infrequent enough and circumspect enough so that, as the NSC’s directive had put it, “the U.S. government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them” if uncovered, it would be all right. “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived,” Kennan would later admit, with considerable understatement. Much later he more frankly said that supporting the CIA’s covert operations was “the greatest mistake I ever made.”25
“Plausible deniability” had seemed like a clever way out of the dilemma at the time, but the catch was that Americans’ belief that their government told the truth was at the very heart of the extraordinary trust they placed in their country’s leaders. In the 1950s 75 percent of Americans said they trusted their government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. The Cold War’s greatest casualty would be Americans’ faith in their government, which fell to 25 percent by the 1980s—in no small part because of the Machiavellian compromises with the truth that had been made in the covert war against the Soviet Union. The discovery that America, too, had become a “nation of stage managers” engendered a cynicism and disillusionment that were never to be undone once they became habitual features of the political landscape.26
Kennan had presciently warned in his long telegram that “the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet Communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.” He stressed, “We must have the courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.”27 Faced with the irreconcilable contradiction between American “conceptions of human society” and the subterfuges it now increasingly employed, U.S. officials in succeeding years would dig themselves ever deeper. An NSC review of strategy in 1950 by Kennan’s successor as head of the State Department’s policy staff, Paul Nitze, took a fateful step down the road of moral doublethink by arguing that, in effect, when the United States did it, it was acceptable because it was merely the recourse of necessity; deep down, America was morally in the right, so—unlike the “evil men” in the Kremlin—telling a lie didn’t make Americans liars, nor did America’s moral values preclude actions that violated those very same values:
The integrity of our system will not be jeopardized by any measures, overt or covert, violent or non-violent, which serve the purposes of frustrating the Kremlin design, nor does the necessity for conducting ourselves so as to affirm our values in action as well as words forbid such measures, provided only that they are appropriately calculated to that end and are not so excessive or misdirected as to make us enemies of the people instead of the evil men who have enslaved them.28
The easiest way to duck the issue was with ever-greater secrecy, and that would be the story of American intelligence and covert operations throughout the Cold War. No president tried to justify publicly what a high-level review of CIA covert action a few years later acknowledged was its “fundamentally repugnant philosophy”: that in seeking to counter the Soviets on their own familiar playing ground of deceit, sabotage, subversion, and espionage, “there are no rules in such a game.” Secrecy accordingly begat secrecy; it was not merely to protect operations and sources but to avoid having
to confront basic questions of legality and morality raised by covert operations that the Cold War intelligence establishment retreated ever further from the democratic norms of open government and constitutional accountability.29
—
Signals intelligence had always been different. It was a cleaner, technical, noninvasive way to gain an inside advantage over a foe, and it also offered the promise of being much more reliable than the messy and dangerous business of spies and human betrayal. But even signals intelligence could not escape the moral black hole that secrecy drew everything into.
The breaking of the NKGB/MGB traffic presented one moral and legal dilemma almost immediately. One of the first of the American spies identified by name from the messages Meredith Gardner began reading in 1947 was a Soviet agent code-named SIMA, who according to the deciphered cables was working in 1945 in the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration section and who had previously been in the department’s Economic Warfare section. The FBI, which began working directly with Arlington Hall in October 1948 to follow up on leads from the broken messages, quickly determined that only one person fit that description. Judith Coplon had been a member of a Communist student group at Barnard College, and her job in the Foreign Agents Registration office had allowed her to tip off the Soviets to FBI investigations of suspected agents. The FBI tailed her and arrested her in the act of handing over documents to a Soviet MGB agent in New York who was operating under diplomatic cover at the United Nations. But the FBI agents were ordered not to disclose at her trial the source of the lead that had brought her to their attention—on the witness stand they resorted to elaborate circumlocutions, referring to a “confidential informant” who could not be named—and her conviction was overturned on the grounds that the government lacked probable cause to place her under surveillance in the first place. She was retried, convicted again, and acquitted on appeal again for the same reason.30
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