But that was only the beginning. Next came radio interviews, then lucrative speaking engagements at Daughters of the American Revolution and American Legion conventions. The powerful Henry Holt publishing company issued a book made up largely of Boldyreff’s commentaries exposing both real and imagined Stalinist assassination plots. Last but not least, Boldyreff made the circuit in Washington of congressional investigating committees, which sought out his advice on fighting communism, psychological warfare, and spotting supposed Red agents inside U.S. government agencies.18
Whatever one may think of Boldyreff’s politics, none of his personal actions in this country are known to have been illegal. At the same time, however, the actions of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in promoting his entry into American politics were, on their face, an apparent violation of U.S. law and of the CIA’s charter. Legal questions aside, it is clear that Boldyreff was only one of a long train of more or less similar ex-Fascist leaders whose publicity work on behalf of “liberation” during the late 1940s and early 1950s was underwritten at least in part by the U.S. government.
Ironically, George Kennan and Charles Thayer—who once had helped sponsor the U.S. political warfare programs that had rehabilitated the NTS and similar groups—were among the first men targeted by the radical right once the liberation message started to catch on. What was needed, the far right argued, was a much more aggressive American policy overseas. The United States should underwrite the “revolutionary” activities of anti-Communist émigrés such as the NTS on a much larger scale, they said. The “rollback of communism” in the East should become the touchstone of U.S. efforts on the Continent. America should make a public declaration of its intent to “liberate” Eastern Europe, exiles like Boldyreff and their supporters argued, in order to encourage discontent with Soviet rule. The CIA should then deliver clandestine U.S. arms and money to the rebels to back up that promise. Some even argued that the United States should send in American troops.
Supporters of liberation had no patience for Kennan’s ten- to fifteen-year strategy for the containment and eventual collapse of the USSR, even if it actually worked. “The expression in those days was ‘We’re sitting on our suitcases,’” says Vladimir Petrov, a leading Russian scholar in the United States and a onetime Vlasov Army adviser. “They were ready to go back at any time.”19 Many believed that the sooner a U.S.-USSR war over Europe broke out, the better.
George Kennan became a target within the Truman administration for the radical right. Regardless of what the diplomat may have backed as far as clandestine U.S. policy was concerned, he favored U.S. government recognition of the reality of Soviet power in Eastern Europe, and many extremist émigrés saw that as a sellout of their aspirations to return to power in their former homelands. As the political fortunes of the radical right in the United States rose, Kennan grew increasingly disillusioned with the results of the American foreign policy he had once been instrumental in formulating. He clashed sharply with Truman’s new secretary of state, Dean Acheson, over such key issues as the establishment of NATO, the permanent division of Germany, and large-scale U.S. intervention in Asia, all of which Kennan opposed. Soon Acheson’s disdain and Kennan’s stomach ulcers got the better of Kennan. He was hospitalized briefly, and when he returned to work, he discovered that he had been frozen out of Acheson’s inner circle of advisers, then stripped of his oversight authority in clandestine operations as well.20
The émigré anti-Communist movement continued to accelerate. Soon there emerged in the United States “one vocal and not uninfluential element that not only wanted war with Russia, but had a very clear idea of the purposes for which, in its own view, such a war should be fought,” as Kennan noted later in a discussion of his views on the possibility of war with the USSR during the early 1950s. “I have in mind the escapees and immigrants, mostly recent ones, from the non-Russian portions of the postwar Soviet Union, as well as from some of the Eastern European satellite states.
“Their idea,” he writes, “to which they were passionately and sometimes ruthlessly attached, was simply that the United States should, for their benefit, fight a war against the Russian people to achieve the final breakup of the traditional Russian state and the establishment of themselves as the regimes of the various ‘liberated’ territories.” Kennan is referring here to the spokesmen of the so-called “Captive Nations” movement, particularly Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists.
“These recent refugees were by no means without political influence in Washington,” Kennan adds. “Connected as they were with the compact voting blocs situated in the big cities, they were able to bring direct influence to bear on individual Congressional figures. They appealed successfully at times to religious feelings, and even more importantly [sic] to the prevailing anti-Communist hysteria.” Among the countries the Captive Nations movement represented were several that the diplomat admits had been “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry during the recent war.”21
Agitation by these émigrés became a part of dozens of CIA-sponsored exile operations in the United States during the early 1950s. Almost all these affairs were sponsored by the CIA covert operations directorate’s International Organizations Division, which was then administering the NCFE, the CFF, and similar overlapping projects. This division organized and bankrolled the CFF with an initial grant of $180,000, according to former RFE/RL chief Mickelson. The agency, working through the NCFE, then went on to pour at least $5 million into CFF propaganda work inside the United States over the next five years.22
That $5 million figure is only a pale reflection of the true scope of the CFF’s effort, however. The campaign arranged with the nonprofit Advertising Council of America for thousands of hours of free radio and television time as well as for countless free magazine and newspaper promotions. The crusade paid only for the actual production of the proliberation political advertising, which was then broadcast or published without charge by media outlets enjoying substantial tax deductions for airing these “public service” announcements. This unique program “made it possible for the American people to read, hear and see The Crusade Story in all media of communications,” the National Committee for a Free Europe boasted in an annual report, including “newspapers, magazines, outdoor advertising, radio, television and newsreels.”23
But the CIA’s $5 million direct contribution to anti-Communist education through the CFF can serve, at least, as a yardstick for comparing the scope of the crusade promotion to other political propaganda efforts undertaken in this country at about the same time. That $5 million contribution exceeds, for example, the combined total of all the money spent on the Truman/Dewey presidential election campaign of 1948. It establishes the CIA (through the CFF) as the largest single political advertiser on the American scene during the early 1950s,24 rivaled only by such commercial giants as General Motors and Procter & Gamble in its domination of the airwaves.
The campaign’s program began by naming a board of directors headed by General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin airlift, who was falsely given credit for originating the Crusade for Freedom concept in order to enhance the program’s patriotic appeal. Next came the casting of a ten-ton bronze “Freedom Bell” (to “let Freedom ring”), and a ticker-tape “Freedom” parade up Broadway in New York City, culminating in a huge rally on the steps of City Hall. The Freedom Bell became the centerpiece of a national promotion tour led by a phalanx of political notables, including many anti-Communist exile leaders. They loaded the bell onto a special “Freedom Train” and shuttled it to propaganda events from coast to coast. There were stops at Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and at least thirteen other major cities. Each event came complete with a continuous drumbeat of publicity in radio, newspapers, magazines, churches, and social clubs of every description. Posters, handbills, billboards, commercials, and even fund-raising telethons filled out the picture. (America’s first simultaneous coast-to-coast
television broadcast, in fact, was a Crusade for Freedom telethon.)25
The CFF consistently stressed the leading role of anti-Communist exiles in the liberation campaign. It was “essential to maintain as many [émigré] leaders as we can,” said NCFE President Dewitt Poole, “[to prepare for] the day of their country’s liberation.”26 Spokesmen for organizations founded and controlled in large part by such Nazi collaborators as the Free Albania Committee and the Committee for a Free Latvia, discussed above, appeared at many of these events side by side with leaders of more respectable associations, such as the Hungarian National Council, Bulgarian National Committee, and the various other groups gathered under NCFE’s wing. They testified to their determination to free their homelands from Communist domination.
Similarly, the NCFE used its economic muscle to rent meeting halls and provide the public relations support that puffed up scores of otherwise minor émigré events into major “news” stories that enjoyed extensive play in the American media. Former Nazis did not control such programs, but they were sometimes able to make use of the prevailing anti-Communist hysteria to promote policies that they favored. The NCFE gave the annual Baltic Freedom Day Committee free use of Carnegie Hall once a year for at least three years, according to the organization’s annual reports, then used its influence to line up noted speakers, including a half dozen U.S. senators, the president of the NCFE itself, and a leading board member of the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission to grace the event. Most important to the favored Baltic politicians was a flood of endorsements arranged by the NCFE that included a proclamation by the governor of New York and public messages of solidarity from the then president of the United States, Harry Truman, and the man who was soon to be Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. These were obviously not “Nazi” political gatherings. The major theme was support for democracy and for national independence of the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from the USSR. Even so, the Vanagis among the Latvians and other extreme-right-wing forces within the Baltic immigrant community succeeded in placing speakers at the rostrum at Carnegie Hall to promote the myth that the Baltic Waffen SS legions were simply anti-Communist patriots and to press for changes in U.S. immigration regulations that would permit easy entry of such persons into this country under refugee relief programs.27
The crusade was only one part of a much broader CIA-sponsored effort to shape U.S. (and world) public opinion. Related programs included book publishing, scholarly studies of the USSR by carefully selected researchers, and bankrolling hundreds of rallies, commemorations, and other media events. The principal political point of this program was to provide extensive publicity for all available evidence that the USSR was a dangerous imperial power. The agency went on to emphasize news of the “liberation” movements of the exiles as an important morale booster and an illustration of the resistance to Soviet expansion.
The CIA financed a literary campaign explicitly designed to promote former Nazi collaborators as appropriate leaders of liberation movements among their respective nationalities. The German author Heinz Bongartz (pen name Jiirgen Thorwald) recounts how he was approached in 1950 by a CIA officer named Pleasants with a proposal that he write a promotional account of the Vlasov Army for distribution in both the United States and Europe. Pleasants had read an earlier Bongartz tract that was strongly sympathetic to Vlasov and “he thought I would be the ‘right fellow’” to write further material on the subject, Bongartz remembers.
The German author accepted Pleasants’s offer. The CIA—with the cooperation of Heinz Danko Herre, a senior officer in the Gehlen Organization—provided him with stenographers, translators, travel expenses, a substantial grant, access to secret U.S. records, and assistance in locating SS and Vlasov Army veterans scattered all over Europe. Bongartz’s glowing report of Vlasov was published in German and English two years later, and it remains an often-cited work in the field.28 The book presents a thoroughly whitewashed picture of the Vlasov movement, but Bongartz deserves credit, at least, for openly discussing the sponsors of his book, more than can be said for a number of other scholars of the period.
This broad-based, multifaceted effort legitimized for many Americans what the extreme-right-wing émigré movement had been saying since the end of World War II. The United States could easily liberate Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union and even dismember the USSR, the theory went, by bankrolling stepped-up subversion programs in the East.
“It became an article of faith that the USSR was going to fall apart at any time,” notes scholar Vladimir Petrov. “The idea was that communism was a small conspiracy of men sending out the revolution, that it was hated by the people, [and so] naturally they wanted to overthrow it right away. Communists killed people to maintain their power, so the first chance [the people] had there would be a rebellion.”29
John Foster Dulles articulated this myth neatly in congressional testimony that went entirely unchallenged at the time. “Some dozen people in the Kremlin,” he proclaimed, “are seeking to consolidate their imperial rule over some 800,000,000 people, representing what were nearly a score of independent nations.”30 With those kinds of odds—800 million against 12—the overthrow of communism from within would seem like a fairly simple task.
“That was the theory at the time,” Petrov says. “There was a lot of enthusiasm. Many people thought that communism could be very simply gotten rid of.” But in reality, Petrov reflects with a sigh, “this just wasn’t true.”
The liberation message struck an extraordinarily responsive chord in the United States, one which reverberated far beyond the relatively narrow community of Eastern European exiles. Its potent blend of anti-Communist paranoia, American patriotism, and the self-perceived generosity of doing something practical to aid people seen as suffering from persecution abroad appealed to millions of Americans.
It is probably impossible today to determine the impact that the CIA’s émigré programs and domestic propaganda efforts had on the election of 1952 or other mainstream political events of the period with any degree of scientific certainty. The information detailing the full extent of the agency’s efforts to shape domestic public opinion remains buried in classified files, if it has not been purged from the record altogether. The carefully controlled surveys of public opinion that might enable scholars to disentangle the specific effects of the CIA’s immigration and propaganda programs from the broader political impact of the media’s day-to-day coverage of international events were not taken at the time, and it would be pointless to try to take them today, thirty-five years later. It is not surprising that sociologists and political scientists of the period failed to make use of surveys and other statistical tools to examine the impact of CIA clandestine action campaigns in the United States; after all, the fact that a systematic propaganda effort even existed was a state secret at the time.
But the anecdotal evidence concerning the significance of these programs is strong. The role of former Nazi collaborators and U.S. intelligence agencies in promoting the penetration of liberationist political thinking into the American body politic may be traced through several clear steps. First, the rhetoric and the detailed strategies for the “liberation” of the USSR and Eastern Europe were originally generated before World War II by pro-Fascist émigré organizations enjoying direct sponsorship from Nazi Germany’s intelligence agencies, which were intent on using these groups as pawns in their plans to exterminate European Jewry and to achieve a military victory in the East. The Nazis significantly developed both the liberation strategies and their exile constituencies during the war, despite the Germans’ own internal factional fighting over how to make best use of collaborators.31 Secondly, after the war U.S. intelligence agencies brought leaders of a number of these pro-Fascist groups—the Ukrainian OUN, the Russian nationalist NTS, the Albanian Balli Kombetar, certain of the Baltic Nazi collaborators, etc.—into the United States through programs the specific purpose of which was, in part, the generation of ef
fective anti-Communist propaganda.32 Next, these same exile leaders aggressively promoted essentially the same liberation propaganda in the United States that they had advocated under Nazi sponsorship, though now with a new appeal to American values, such as democracy and freedom, rather than the earlier open advocacy of racial politics and fascism. The CIA gave these domestic publicity campaigns multimillion-dollar clandestine backing during the 1950s by providing operating cash, salaries, and logistic and publishing support and—not least—by facilitating endorsements from respected mainstream politicians.
Neither the Eastern European exile community in America nor, still less, the minority of former Nazi collaborators among them had the political muscle to force adoption of a liberation agenda on the American public by themselves. But they could, and did, often serve as catalysts that helped trigger the much bigger political “chemical reaction,” so to speak, that was then under way, the primary ingredients of which were East-West disputes over economic and military spheres of influence. The first and in some ways most credible spokesmen in the United States for liberationist thinking were exiled activists who were, like NTS executive Constantine Boldyreff discussed above, “well known to American intelligence [and] vouched for by high American officials.”33 Their message and slogans caught on with millions of Americans during the first half of the 1950s, especially among conservatives and others alarmed by the spread of communism abroad. In 1952 the public support in the United States for threats to liberate Eastern Europe and the USSR from their Communist governments was sufficiently broad that the Republican party adopted an explicit call for liberation as the main foreign policy plank in its party platform and as a central theme in its presidential and congressional election campaigns.
The Republicans’ campaign platform demanded “the end of the negative, futile and immoral policy of ‘Containment,’” as the New York Times reported, “which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism.” The GOP pledged to “revive the contagious, liberating influences that are inherent in freedom” and to mark the “beginning of the end” for Communist party rule in Eastern Europe and the USSR.34 America, the Republicans’ primary foreign policy spokesman, John Foster Dulles, wrote in Life magazine, “wants and expects liberation to occur.” This anti-Communist revolution, he claimed disingenuously, would come about “peacefully.”35 The Republicans used this liberation rhetoric as a means of distinguishing their promises of a new, tougher foreign policy from the program of the Democrats. What exactly Eisenhower intended to do to promote the liberation of Eastern Europe once the election campaign was over, however, was usually left vague.
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