George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  All of this may have clarified things for the Canadians, but Kennan’s vehemence suggested how much the Smith-Molotov episode had shaken him: for the first time since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, he had failed to anticipate what Stalin would do. With a single sleazy trick, the old dictator had undermined Kennan’s credibility as a Soviet expert. Kennan had let himself become too hopeful too soon. Even worse, he had transformed that hope into a failed policy initiative. His career did not suffer, because he still had Marshall’s support. But his faith in himself did, along with the reputation his expertise hitherto had earned him.

  II.

  He had already been wrong about Italy. The prospect of a communist takeover there had so haunted Kennan that in his ill-conceived “short telegram” from Manila on March 15, he raised the possibility of canceling the upcoming elections and outlawing the communist party, even at the risk of civil war and an American reoccupation of military bases on the peninsula. The situation was still worrying him as he finished his letter to Lippmann on April 6: Italy was, he wrote, the only remaining weak spot in Western Europe. On the day after Kennan got back to the office, however, it became clear that the Italian Communist Party had suffered a decisive defeat in the April 18–19 elections. Alarmed by events in Czechoslovakia, encouraged by the prospect of Marshall Plan aid, the Italians had turned back a Moscow-inspired conquest from within, on their own and by democratic means. Or so it seemed.

  In fact, Italy had been the site, over the past few weeks, of the CIA’s first major covert operation. It’s difficult, even today, to assess the importance of the secret funding the agency cobbled together for the Christian Democrats as against other influences on the election outcome: the Vatican’s implacable anticommunist offensive; the massive Italian American letter-writing campaign warning that a communist victory would end economic assistance from the United States; the extent to which the Czech coup discredited the Italian communists. Those who knew about the CIA’s intervention, however, considered it a great success. Although Kennan had pushed for the agency’s involvement in Italy the previous fall, his Manila telegram and the Lippmann letter suggest that he did not know the full extent of what was going on. When he found out, he rushed to get ahead of what he had not seen coming. From having warned, in mid-March, that Washington was getting Italy horribly wrong, he went to arguing by the end of April that it had gotten Italy brilliantly right—so much so that its actions there should become a model for the future.12

  “Political warfare,” Kennan argued in a closely held and therefore unnumbered Policy Planning Staff paper completed early in May, was Clausewitz in peacetime. It employed all means short of war to achieve national objectives. These included overt initiatives like alliances, economic assistance, and “white” propaganda but also the clandestine support of “friendly” foreigners, the use of “black” psychological warfare, and even the encouragement of underground resistance in unfriendly states. The British had long relied on such methods, and Lenin had so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare had become the most effective in history. Americans, in contrast, had traditionally viewed war as an extension of sports, free from any political context at all.

  Now, facing global responsibilities and an intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer afford such innocence. It should not again have to scramble “as we did at the time of the Italian elections.” The Policy Planning Staff had been studying possibilities: secret support for refugee organizations that might become liberation movements if war broke out; strengthening indigenous anticommunists in countries threatened by Moscow’s political warfare; and, “in cases of critical necessity,” direct action to prevent the sabotage of facilities or the capture of key personnel by Kremlin agents. Tight control would be necessary: “One man must be boss.” And he would have to be “answerable to the Secretary of State.”13

  What Kennan was proposing now was a sustained covert complement to the Marshall Plan. The United States required an organization that could “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” The model, Davies added, would be something like the British Special Operations Executive or the American Office of Strategic Services in World War II, but it would operate in peacetime, chiefly in Western Europe. Otherwise, “the Marshall Plan would be undone.”14

  Where to put such a unit, though? Kennan knew that the State Department could not handle it. He worried that the CIA might act too independently. Could not the NSC provide cover for such a program, perhaps under the leadership of Allen Dulles, an OSS veteran who had been conducting a review of CIA effectiveness? But Dulles wasn’t interested, and the director of central intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, wasn’t about to relinquish the agency’s jurisdiction. If State would not “go along with CIA operating this political warfare thing,” he snapped at one point, then “[l]et State run it and let it have no connection at all with us.”15 Which, of course, would mean no program at all.

  The National Security Council, in mid-June, approved an unwieldy compromise. An Office of Special Projects within the CIA would take over the responsibility for covert operations, but Marshall would nominate its head with Hillenkoetter’s assent. Hillenkoetter would ensure political and military coordination, working through an advisory committee made up of representatives from the Departments of State and Defense. Kennan was skeptical: the new organization, he worried, would be too remote from the conduct of foreign policy, and it would be hard to find the right person to run it. Nonetheless, he advised Marshall to accept the plan. “It is probably the best arrangement we can get at this time.”16

  At Kennan’s suggestion, Marshall nominated Frank Wisner, another OSS alumnus now in the State Department, to run the OSP. “I personally have no knowledge of his ability,” Kennan was careful to say, despite the fact that he and Annelise were regular guests at the Wisners’ potluck dinners in Georgetown, and the Wisners were occasional visitors at the Pennsylvania farm. Kennan, in turn, became the State Department representative on the OSP’s advisory committee. He made it clear, at a meeting with Wisner and Hillenkoetter early in August, that he would want “specific knowledge of the objectives of every operation and also of the procedures and methods employed in all cases where those procedures and methods involve political decisions.” By the end of the month, Kennan had approved his first covert operation: it was Project Umpire, a program of clandestine radio broadcasts from the American zone in Germany, beamed toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had done so not on State Department stationery but on plain paper, he explained to Lovett: “This means that I am ostensibly acting in a personal capacity, and can, if necessary, be denied by the Secretary.”17

  In this way the Policy Planning Staff became—officially at least—the overseer of all covert activities: perhaps with Kennan’s concerns in mind, the Office of Special Projects was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination. “If effectively conducted,” he wrote in a letter drafted for Lovett, “the new organization’s activities might well enhance possibilities for achieving American objectives by means short of war.” But the fundamental premise behind the OPC, Kennan reminded his superior a few weeks later, had been that “while this Department should take no responsibility for [Wisner’s] operations, we should nevertheless maintain a firm guiding hand.” As late as January 1949, Kennan was encouraging Wisner to think expansively: “Every day makes more evident the importance of the role which will have to be played by covert operations if our national interests are to be adequately protected.”18

  Kennan had few if any moral or legal qualms about such activities. He had maintained contacts with the anti-Hitler resistance in Germany before the United States entered the war, and had helped the OSS monitor espionage activities in Lisbon during it. He facilitated the immigration of German diplomats and spymasters who might have useful information about the U.S.S.R., even if they had work
ed for the Nazis: to leave them in Germany, he believed, risked having Soviet agents kill or co-opt them. He had been advising the Washington intelligence establishment since returning from Moscow in 1946, emphasizing particularly the need to work closely with Russian expatriates. He had called, in his first National War College lecture, for the pursuit of strategic objectives “with all the measures at our disposal,” and he had acknowledged, shortly after the formation of the CIA in 1947, that it might be essential to “fight fire with fire.” When he spoke to the Canadians about a “dialectical” approach that would appear to reflect “arbitrary inconsistency,” he had Lenin’s example of political warfare in mind. Setting up the OPC, therefore, was more a continuation of past practices than a dramatic innovation for him.19

  It was also one of many Policy Planning Staff responsibilities: after the OPC was established, “I scarcely paid any attention to it.” That, Kennan was sure in retrospect, was “probably the worst mistake I ever made in government.” The plan had been, Davies recalled, that secret operations should not be entrusted to an enormous bureaucracy: “Well, O.P.C. went the other way.” By 1952 it had forty-seven overseas stations, its budget was seventeen times what it had been in 1949, and it employed twenty times the number of people. Convinced that he had created a monstrosity, Kennan came to regret “all part that I or the staff took in any of this. I should never have accepted for the PPS the duty of giving political advice to Wisner’s outfit. The fact that we are all prone to error does not comfort me greatly when I think about it.”20

  Kennan’s regrets, in retrospect, seem disproportionate. He did propose giving the CIA a covert action capability, but it seems unlikely, had he not done so, that someone else would not have suggested this, or that the agency would not have thought of it on its own.21 “The feeling in Washington,” Dean Rusk recalled, was that “the Soviet Union was already operating with such methods. It was a mean, dirty, back-alley struggle, and if the U.S. had stayed out it would have found out what Leo Durocher [the legendary manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers] meant when he said ‘nice guys finish last.’” That said, there was one aspect of Kennan’s CIA involvement that made no more sense then than it does now. This was his continuing belief that he could do everything himself—that he could run covert operations against the Soviet Union, while conducting overt negotiations with the same country if they ever got under way, while planning all other aspects of American foreign policy. Annelise, as usual, was more practical: “There isn’t the possibility in one man to do all this.”22

  III.

  One of the reasons Kennan pushed so hard for control over covert activities may have been his sense that he was losing control of the rapidly evolving U.S. relationship with Western Europe. The minimalist strategy he advocated in 1947 had rested on two interlocking assumptions: that (a) the promise and provision of Marshall Plan aid would be all that was necessary to reassure the Europeans, because (b) the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking them. The first proposition depended upon the second, for if the Red Army ever did strike, then American economic assistance, however generous it might be, would do the Europeans little good. They had no means of defending themselves; nor had the United States offered them any.

  These assumptions, in turn, depended on Kennan’s proficiency as a mind reader. They would hold up only if he had accurately sensed what European and Soviet leaders were thinking. If the Europeans began to show nervousness, or if the U.S.S.R. began to exhibit aggressiveness, all bets would be off. Both developments had occurred by the time Kennan returned to his office at the end of April 1948. “As you know, I came in late on the work which is being done,” he wrote Marshall and Lovett on the twenty-ninth. But he had now familiarized himself with the situation and consulted Bohlen, who agreed with what he had to say. The problem was not doubt about American support if the Soviet Union attacked—the presence of U.S. occupation forces in Germany left no reason for Europeans to worry about that. Rather, it reflected uncertainty about what to do if that happened. All that was needed were “realistic staff talks” to reassure them.23

  By this time, though, top-secret negotiations on the possibility of a North Atlantic collective defense treaty had already taken place with the British and the Canadians. Meanwhile Marshall had secured the agreement of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to sponsor a “Vandenberg Resolution” confirming congressional approval. Kennan’s proposed reconsideration went nowhere. His frustration showed while he was in Ottawa at the end of May: did the Europeans not realize that “if the United States gave this guarantee, it would be doing something which would be in the interests of Western Europe but not necessarily in the interests of the United States, since the United States could, at any time, make a deal with the Soviet Union?” “We naturally took him up on this and he withdrew from this exposed position,” Escott Reid, the Canadian assistant under secretary for external affairs, reported to his superiors. It was indeed exposed, with the Smith-Molotov exchange having failed. The exchange left Reid with the uneasy sense “that if you scratch almost any American long enough, you will find an isolationist.”24

  Kennan was no isolationist, but as Sir Oliver Franks, now the British ambassador in Washington, recalled, he did tend to see things from an “Anglo-Saxon” perspective: “All those other chaps were rather more difficult. Therefore stick with what you know.” The planning process, in Kennan’s absence, had gone well beyond that. “I have always reproached myself,” he later admitted, “for not taking my own views to the General and making more of an issue of it.” His door still led directly into Marshall’s office, but “I’m afraid I didn’t use it enough. I was always so afraid of abusing this privilege.... I think that I may have been too hesitant [and] that I should have.”25

  So what might Kennan have said, had he been bolder? “Look, for goodness sake, let well enough alone, nobody is going to attack you,” he remembered wanting to tell the Europeans.

  Don’t talk about this, we’ll get at the question of your military weakness as soon as we can, but give the Marshall Plan a chance to [work]. It’s a field in which we are strong—the economic field—the military one is the field where we are weak. Let’s not call attention to our weakness by making a big splash about the military situation now.

  With his State Department colleagues, he would have been blunter:

  All right, the Russians are well armed and we are poorly armed. So what? We are like a man who has let himself into a walled garden and finds himself alone there with a dog with very big teeth. The dog, for the moment, shows no signs of aggressiveness. The best thing for us to do is surely to try to establish, as between the two of us, the assumption that the teeth have nothing whatsoever to do with our mutual relationship—that they are neither here nor there.

  Finally, he would have questioned the cultivation of Vandenberg. The Republicans were jealous, Kennan believed. They had supported the Marshall Plan but now wanted a plan of their own upon which they could put their stamp. Such people did not deserve “admiring applause every time they could be persuaded by the State Department to do something sensible.”26

  As far as we know, Kennan made none of these arguments—at least not openly—within the department. It’s safe to assume, though, that they lay behind the questions he did raise while participating in talks with British, French, Canadian, Belgian, and Dutch diplomats in Washington during the late summer of 1948. Might not the building of military strength distract attention from European economic recovery and the eventual unification of the entire continent? Could there not be two loosely linked alliances—a dumbbell arrangement—made up of the Americans and Canadians at one end, and the British, the French, and the Benelux countries at the other? If there had to be a single alliance, should its membership not be limited to those countries? If it were not, how many countries could the United States afford to defend? There was more than a hint of desperation in these queries, and Hickerson, the principal American
negotiator, had no trouble deflecting them. “I consider that a compliment,” he responded when told years later that Kennan considered him the State Department colleague with whom he had disagreed most. “Thank you.”27

  IV.

  There were still moments, though, when the policy process worked as Kennan thought it should. One came in late June 1948, after members of the Cominform, meeting in Bucharest, openly denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party. Under Josef Broz Tito’s leadership, they claimed, the Yugoslavs were pursuing a policy unfriendly to the U.S.S.R. and in violation of Marxist principles. Because Stalin controlled the Cominform, the complaint carried weight. Kennan had been predicting trouble in Eastern Europe for some time, but he thought it would come in the north, not in the Balkans. He missed the hints of Tito’s heresy conveyed in American diplomatic reporting from the region but rallied quickly, taking only two days to complete PPS/35, “The Attitude of This Government Toward Events in Yugoslavia.” It was the most immediately effective policy paper he ever produced.28

  Unusually for Kennan, it was brief—only four and a quarter typed pages—but it compressed a lot into that space. It placed the Cominform’s condemnation of Tito within a historical perspective, while projecting its significance into the future. At one point Kennan distilled into just three sentences his Gibbon-inspired doubts about the stability of empires, his belief that an internationalist ideology could not indefinitely command national loyalties, and his conviction that Stalin, for all his craftiness, had overreached:

  A new factor of fundamental and profound significance has been introduced into the world communist movement by the demonstration that the Kremlin can be successfully defied by one of its own minions. By this act, the aura of mystical omnipotence and infallibility which has surrounded the Kremlin power has been broken. The possibility of defection from Moscow, which has heretofore been unthinkable for foreign communist leaders, will from now on be present in one form or another in the mind of every one of them.