Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain

Dates Covered: 1945 - 1990
ISBN: 0395516064
HH Rating:

Our Take

On Feburary 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his infamous crusade to oust perceived from the Communists. After waving about a piece of paper he claimed to have alternately 205, then 57, and then 81 names of suspected Communists in the American government, he began to sling about conjecture as if it were fact. He insinuated that there were hidden armies waiting to erupt into wild Marxist fervor and overthrow democracy in this nation, better known then as "the American way of life".

Given this paranoia, it's not surprising that Uncle Sam was secretly hoping the same sort of thing would happen in the Soviet Union, with the main difference being that capitalism and democracy would break out instead. In Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain, author and historian Peter Grose tells the saga of various American intelligence agencies and their attempts to overthrow Communism. These methods range from contacting and training revolutionaries in various Soviet satellites (Albania received a lot of attention) to sneaking agents on to the editorial boards of intellectual newspapers, in order to sway public opinion.

Grose, already a biographer of Allen Dulles, CIA director and all-around spy guy, has his work pretty well cut out for him. The myriad intelligence organizations in existence during World War II make the beginning of Grose's history disjointed. At the time, Roosevelt and other New Dealers found themselves a little intrigued by the socialist experiment, and were more interested in seeing how it turned out rather than trying to halt its advance. That is, except for George F. Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union and later director of various intelligence activities. Kennan's round denunciation of the Soviet state, who, Grose claims, pretty much started espionage prior to the Cold War.

Upon reflection, Kennan alikened himself to "one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley below, shuddering and wincing and each successive glimpse of disaster."

Fair enough. In later years, when the author of Bambi, Jay Vivian Chambers, was found to be a Communist, anti-Commie forces combed through the work, searching for subliminal messages (no, they didn't find any, smart mouth). We suspect this is the sort of shuddering and wincing Kennan felt he must have evoked.

Unfortunately, it got a little worse. As Truman decided to curtly deny friendship to Joseph Stalin, everything went downhill from there. Grose paints a fascinating portrait of American intelligence agents recruiting Albanian, Ukrainian and Polish guerilla forces and accidentally getting all of them killed. A high-level Soviet double-agent named Kim Philby was at the ready for the planning of most of the missions; he simply passed the word on and Soviet troops were waiting when the doomed paratroopers hit earth.

Episodes like this imply that Operation Rollback didn't work, and that implication would be correct. For all the monies spent on espionage in attempts to foment democratic and capitalistic revolution on Communist soil, nothing happened. Pretty much like nothing happened in the United States, despite all of McCarthy's blathering. However, at least we get a good story out of it, thanks to Grose.

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