by Oliver Stone
Once again, Henry Wallace led the opposition. The day after Truman’s speech, he took to the airwaves on the NBC radio network to decry the “utter nonsense” of describing the Turkish or Greek governments as democratic and accused Truman of “betraying” Roosevelt’s vision for world peace. “When President Truman proclaims the world-wide conflict between east and west,” he warned, “he is telling the Soviet leaders that we are preparing for eventual war.” People the world over were feeling hungry and insecure and demanding change. Trying to thwart that change was not only futile, it was counterproductive. “Once America stands for opposition to change,” he prophesied, “we are lost. America will become the most hated nation in the world.” Military aid was not the answer. “Truman’s policy,” he predicted, “will spread communism in Europe and Asia. When Truman offers unconditional aid to King George of Greece, he is acting as the best salesman communism ever had.”76
The Soviets responded angrily. Pravda accused the United States of “imperialist expansion under the guise of charity” and trying to “extend the Monroe Doctrine to the Old World.”77 Howard K. Smith, who was in Moscow covering the conference of the Council of Foreign Ministers for CBS, wrote that Truman’s message had changed the atmosphere in Moscow and throughout Eastern Europe. In late May, the Soviets sponsored a Communist coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in Hungary. The New York Times opined, “The coup in Hungary is Russia’s answer to our action in Greece and Turkey.”78
The Greek civil war grew bloodier, and U.S. personnel began arriving in the war zone in June 1947. They used Greece to test tactics, some new and some old, that would later be employed in Vietnam, such as the destruction of unions, torture, napalming villages, forced mass deportations to concentration camps without trial or charges, mass imprisonment of wives and children of subversives, mass executions ordered by military court martials, and censorship of the press. Greece was thus kept in the hands of monarchists and wealthy businessmen, many of them Nazi collaborators; the victims were primarily the workers and peasants who’d resisted the Nazis.
Fighting raged on for a couple more years. Historian George Herring described it as “an especially savage conflict with atrocities on both sides in which even children became pawns.”79 In addition to sending a large contingent of “advisors,” the United States armed the right-wing Greek monarchy to the teeth.
The Soviet Union temporarily assisted the left-wing forces but then cut off aid. In February 1948, Stalin ordered Yugoslavia’s Marshal Josip Broz Tito to stop supporting the “guerrilla movement” in Greece, precipitating an open rift with his closest ally. When the Yugoslavs pushed back, Stalin thundered, “they have no prospect of success at all. What do you think, that Great Britain and the United States—the United States the most powerful nation in the world—will permit you to break their line of communication in the Mediterranean Sea! Nonsense. And we have no navy. The uprising in Greece must be stopped, and as quickly as possible.” When Tito refused to go along with the Soviet demands, the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia.80 The State Department reported, “For the first time in history we may now have within the international community a communist state . . . independent of Moscow. . . . 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.”81 Despite providing covert support for Tito, the United States never adjusted its rhetoric to reflect the fact that international communism was not as monolithic as once believed.
Churchill later told an American journalist, “Stalin never broke his word to me. We agreed on the Balkans. I said he could have Romania and Bulgaria and he said we could have Greece. . . . He signed a slip of paper and he never broke his word. We saved Greece that way.”82
Stalin’s halting of support for the uprising spelled doom for the rebels, and Truman heralded the United States’ victory. The Greek people weren’t so sure. More than 100,000 people died, and 800,000 became refugees. The Greek action also had other troubling implications. Though it was a largely homegrown insurgency, Truman treated it as part of a Soviet plan for world domination, setting the stage for U.S. intervention to support right-wing governments in the name of anticommunism. The United States substituted force for diplomacy, embracing unilateralism instead of the United Nations and repression instead of treating the socioeconomic causes of popular discontent. Historian Arnold Offner concluded, “The legacy of this action was that for about three decades, successive Greek governments used the state apparatus—decrees, the police, the military, and a Central Service of Information modeled on the CIA—to systematically persecute their former enemies and deny them their basic rights and livelihood.”83
Marshall adopted a more positive approach to the crisis in Europe: he invited European countries to come up with a plan for economic recovery and development, which the United States would finance. Seventeen European countries requested $27 billion. The United States eventually spent $13 billion between 1948 and 1952.84 Great Britain, France, and Germany were the largest recipients, adding to the Soviet fears that the United States was recklessly restoring German power and creating a Western bloc. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were invited to participate but were offered terms that U.S. policy makers knew Stalin would reject. The Soviets were coming to realize that their earlier expectations that Western unity would run aground on the shoals of imperialist rivalry were mistaken.
Truman described his new doctrine and the Marshall Plan as “two halves of the same walnut.”85 Abandoning all hope for continued collaboration with the West, the Soviets offered Eastern Europe its own Molotov Plan. They also cracked down with renewed intensity. The last remaining non-Communists were soon forced out of government in Bulgaria. Early the following year, the Red Army helped overthrow the Czech government, putting an end to Czech democracy.
George Kennan provided the theoretical rationale for the new U.S. policy. His article titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” appeared in the July issue of Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X.” A Soviet expert who had served in Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, Kennan emphasized the Soviet Union’s global appetites and laid out a plan to “contain” Soviet expansion with the goal of breaking up Soviet power and maintaining U.S. hegemony. The previous October, he had taken a more nuanced stance, writing, “I think it is a mistake to say that the Soviet leaders wish to establish a Communist form of government in the ring of states surrounding the Soviet Union on the west and south. What they do wish to do is to establish in those states governments amenable to their own influence and authority. The main thing is that these governments should follow Moscow’s leadership. . . . In certain countries which are already extensively under Soviet influence, as for example Poland, there has been as yet no effort to establish what we might call a Communist form of government.”86
A man labors in West Berlin on a Marshall Plan–funded project (as indicated by the sign in the background) in June 1948. The United States spent $13 billion on European recovery between 1948 and 1952. With Britain, France, and Germany as its largest recipients, the plan exacerbated Soviet fears of both a rearmed Germany and capitalist encirclement.
The distinction between the two interpretations of Soviet postwar intentions is crucial. Not only did the Soviet Union not have a blueprint for postwar Sovietization of Eastern Europe, it hoped to maintain friendly and collaborative relations with its wartime allies. The last thing it wanted was confrontation with the West. As Russian scholars Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov explain, there was “no master plan in the Kremlin, and Stalin’s ambitions had always been severely limited by the terrible devastation of the USSR during World War II and the existence of the American atomic monopoly.”87
George F. Kennan, a Soviet expert who served in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the 1930s and 1940s, provided the rationale for U.S. policy with his “containment” theory.
Unfortunately, Kennan’s F
oreign Affairs article offered a monochromatic analysis of a Soviet Union bent on conquest. Kennan would long regret that his words were interpreted as support for the kind of militarized response to the Soviet Union that he later abhorred. In looking back, he was appalled by even the more measured message in his telegram, which struck him as if it had been written “by the Daughters of the American Revolution” during an anti-Communist tirade.88 Journalist Walter Lippmann criticized Kennan for resorting to military rather than peaceful settlements and for the global sweep of his containment policy, which failed to differentiate between vital interests and peripheral ones. He feared that the policy would mean “unending intervention in all the countries that are supposed to ‘contain’ the Soviet Union.” And it would undermine the Constitution by vesting too much power in the president as commander in chief.89
While Truman scared the hell out of the American people about Communists abroad, the Republicans did the same regarding Communists at home. Truman decided to steal the Republicans’ thunder. Just nine days after delivering his call for an international crusade against communism, he unveiled an elaborate program to root out “subversives” working for the federal government, even though, as White House aide Clark Clifford later admitted, “the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it. . . . We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria.”90 Truman mandated loyalty checks on all government employees. Those accused could neither confront their accusers nor ascertain the basis of the accusations. Having the wrong views on religion, sexual behavior, foreign policy, or race could brand one as disloyal. An Interior Department Loyalty Board chairman observed, “Of course the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove that he’s a communist, but it certainly makes you look twice, doesn’t it?” The FBI conducted field investigations of suspect employees. Even Truman feared that under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI could become “an American Gestapo.” Clifford believed that Hoover “was very close to being an American fascist.”91 The government organized large meetings at which employees sang “God Bless America” and took freedom pledges. Loyalty boards fired approximately three hundred government employees outright and forced ten times that number to resign between 1947 and 1951, thereby institutionalizing guilt by association and encouraging a stultifying conformity in which much of the nation equated dissent with disloyalty.
In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) held public hearings on Communist influence in Hollywood. The committee called eleven unfriendly witnesses, including some of Hollywood’s most prominent writers and directors. Invoking the First Amendment, ten refused to answer questions about whether they were members of the Communist Party, which was perfectly legal, and were cited for contempt of Congress. The eleventh, playwright Bertolt Brecht, denied being a Communist and escaped to East Germany. Brecht had earlier moved to Hollywood to escape from the Nazis. Rather than stand up for their employees, Hollywood studio executives denounced the “Hollywood Ten” and pledged not to hire anyone with suspect affiliations. Among the friendly witnesses who testified that the Communist menace in Hollywood was real was Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan. Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, and Walt Disney agreed. Far greater numbers of Hollywood celebrities publicly denounced the congressional witch hunts, including Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Gene Kelly, William Wyler, Lucille Ball, Frank Sinatra, Burt Lancaster, Edward G. Robinson, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles, Katharine Hepburn, Pete Seeger, Henry Fonda, Ethel Barrymore, Benny Goodman, and Groucho Marx. Despite those efforts, all ten were convicted of contempt the following year and sentenced to prison.
In July 1947, following five months of hearings and heated debate, Congress passed the greatest military reform in U.S. history. The National Security Act created the National Military Establishment (later called the Department of Defense), consisting of the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, headed by a secretary of defense, and a Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Truman appointed the anti-Soviet hard-liner James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense. Creating a new U.S. Air Force separate from the army confirmed the importance of atomic warfare in future military planning.
The act also created the National Security Council, a War Council, the National Security Resources Board, and the Central Intelligence Agency, all of which Marshall opposed because they gave the military too much influence over foreign policy and abridged the constitutional authority of the president and secretary of state. Truman himself feared that the CIA could turn into a “Gestapo” or “military dictatorship.”92 The Agency’s clandestine nature troubled Acheson, who wrote, “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.” Although the act specifically authorized the Agency only to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence, it also empowered it to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” The Agency used that vague wording to conduct hundreds of covert operations, including eighty-one during Truman’s second term alone.
In late September 1947, Kennan urged Forrestal to establish a “guerrilla warfare corps”—a suggestion Forrestal heartily endorsed—although the JCS recommended against establishing a “separate guerrilla warfare school and corps.” In December, Truman approved secret annex NSC 4-A, authorizing the CIA to conduct covert operations. He had dismantled the OSS’s covert paramilitary operations capabilities in September 1945, but now he brought them back in force. In the summer of 1948, he approved NSC 10/2, which called for “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.” These activities were to be done in a way that would always afford the U.S. government plausible deniability. In August 1948, Truman approved NSC 20, which authorized guerrilla operations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.93
Even the seemingly benign Marshall Plan provided a cover for subversion. Half of the 10 percent of the money allocated for administrative costs was siphoned off to fund covert actions through the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, whose director, Frank Wisner, would actually report to the secretaries of defense and state. Tim Weiner described it as “a global money-laundering scheme.” Colonel R. Allen Griffin, who headed the Marshall Plan’s Far East division, confessed, “We’d look the other way and give them a little help. Tell them to stick their hand in our pocket.” Kennan, the architect of this effort, described it as “the inauguration of organized political warfare.” With the diverted funds, the CIA established a network of phony front organizations that recruited foreign agents as frontline warriors in the propaganda wars that ensued. Sometimes they went beyond propaganda, infiltrating unions and other existing organizations and establishing underground groups. Forrestal and the Pentagon wanted the programs to go further, including “guerrilla movements . . . underground armies . . . sabotage and assassination.”94
Some of the diverted Marshall Aid money went to supporting a guerrilla army in Ukraine called Nightingale, which had been established by the Wehrmacht in the spring of 1941 with the help of Stephan Bandera, head of the Ukrainian National Organization’s more radical wing OUN-B. The following year, Mikola Lebed founded the organization’s terrorist arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It was made up of ultranationalist Ukrainians, including Nazi collaborators, who wreaked havoc in the region, assisting in or directly carrying out the murder of thousands of Jews, Soviets, and Poles, and occasionally also fighting the Germans, who opposed OUN-B’s plan for a separate Ukrainian sta
te. In 1944, Lebed helped form the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (UHVR), which served as the organization’s political arm.
At the end of the war, Lebed fled to Rome and contacted the Allies. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps started working with him in 1947 and smuggled him to Munich, where he began collaborating with the CIA the following year. In June 1949, the CIA brought him to the United States. When the Justice Department later tried to deport him, Allen Dulles claimed he was of “inestimable value to this Agency” and was assisting in “operations of the first importance.”95
Among those operations, Wisner’s “Special Projects,” was one masterminded by Munich-based CIA officer Steve Tanner, who, in late 1948, started working with the UHVR. The following year, he readied operatives to infiltrate back into Ukraine. On September 5, 1949, the CIA parachuted the first of its Ukrainian agents back into the country. The operation continued for another five years but had little success. Although the Soviets made quick work of most of the infiltrators, such operations clearly signaled the lengths to which the U.S. was willing to go to dislodge Soviet control in Eastern Europe.96
The Soviets tightened their grip. The last remaining non-Communists had already been driven out of the Bulgarian and Czechoslovakian administrations. Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk’s manner of death—falling or being pushed out of his bathroom window—would come to haunt Forrestal. After Soviet imposition of a puppet regime in Czechoslovakia, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States froze over. The brutal Eastern European dictatorships would last another four decades.
