approach to political warfare still lacked conviction. On May 4, 1948, in an atmosphere of near war-panic caused by the Soviets’ launch of the Berlin blockade, Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff presented a plan for “the inauguration of organized political warfare” that involved the creation of a new “covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government.”46
If the Long Telegram provided the theoretical rationale for the overt dimensions of U.S. Cold War foreign policy, the PPS’s May 1948 memo supplied the intellectual basis for its covert aspects. Kennan’s first aim was to persuade government officials who still had qualms about a democracy’s conducting covert operations in peacetime that political warfare was not only proper, it was also necessary given the circumstances in which the United States currently found itself. Other nations had long accepted the legitimacy of this kind of warfare: the British, for example, had made extensive use of it, and its conduct by the Soviet Union was “the most refined and effective of any in history.” American politicians needed to overcome the “popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war” and “recognize the realities of international relations” (note the appeal to realism and easy assumption of the right to bypass popular opinion, both typically Kennanesque moves). Doing so might come easier if they realized that they were already engaged in an overt form of political warfare without knowing it: such measures as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were, after all, originally conceived as responses to Soviet provocations. Covert operations of whatever kind—“clandestine support of ‘friendly’ foreign elements, ‘black’ psychological warfare, and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states”—were in this sense merely an extension of existing U.S.
government policies. In any case, the country’s “international responsibilities” were now such that, “having been engaged by the full might of the Kremlin’s political warfare,” Americans had no choice but to respond in kind.
Having demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, the ethical propriety of covert action, Kennan then proceeded to describe “specific projects” that the United States might undertake. A possible first step was to set up public “liberation committees,” which would serve as foci for “political refugees from the Soviet world” to foment resistance to the communist regime. “This is primarily an overt operation,” the memorandum ex-
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plained, “which, however, should receive covert guidance and possibly assistance from the Government.” The example of Comintern-funded front organizations was not explicitly cited here—the justification offered was the patriotic one that private U.S. citizens would eagerly participate in such committees because of a long American tradition of voluntary association in support of “people suffering under oppression”—but the spirit of Willi Münzenberg could be detected in the passing observation that the communists had “exploited this tradition to the extreme, to their own ends and to our national detriment, as witness the Abraham Lincoln brigade during the Spanish Civil War.” Another suggestion was the “support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world, . . . a covert operation again utilizing private intermediaries.”
A reference to communist-inspired industrial strikes in France intended to disrupt the delivery there of Marshall aid suggests that Kennan already had particular U.S. labor groups in mind for this purpose. Third, the memorandum raised the possibility of “preventive direct action in free countries”—that is, paramilitary operations—but only as a last resort, when other political and psychological methods had failed. Finally, Kennan recommended the establishment of an entirely new government body, under the cover of the National Security Council but answerable to the Secretary of State, which was to have “complete authority over covert political warfare operations.”47
In just one document, George Kennan had set the agenda for all of the United States’s front operations in the first years of the Cold War. Here, in embryonic form, were the CIA’s émigré organizations, its covert labor program, and its many other clandestine efforts to aid the European
“non-communist left” using equivalent American groups as go-betweens.
Ironically, though, the immediate effect of Kennan’s proposals was to reduce the Agency’s control over covert operations. While his recommendation that the State Department take complete control of political warfare from the CIA was rejected (thanks to a combination of half-hearted resistance by Director Hillenkoetter and a reluctance on the part of foreign-service traditionalists to give a home to the “dirty tricks” brigade), such was the sense of crisis pervading Washington in the summer of 1948