Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

In February 1946, less than a year after the war in Europe was over, Washington posed a question to the U.S. embassy in Moscow—what the hell are the Russkies up to? U.S. ambassador Averell Harriman chose George Kennan, a bored and brooding junior foreign service officer with a keen mind, a degree from Princeton, and a flair for writing, to craft an intelligent response to that rather embarrassing question. Kennan was a logical embassy choice. He spoke Russian fluently and, like his father, had traveled to all corners of the country, including Siberia and its gulags. A serious student of Russian history, politics, and literature, Kennan understood the “Russian soul” better than any foreign service officer, including Harriman.

From his sickbed, Kennan dictated an answer to a stenographer in what is known as the Long Telegram, a six-thousand-word cable that suggested—for the first time—a clear and coherent U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. The Long Telegram also became the first link in a chain of decisions leading to a U.S. open-door policy for former Nazi war criminals and established Kennan as America’s top Kremlinologist, ensuring him a primary role in formulating that policy.

After treating Washington to a much-needed lesson on the nature and character of the Russian people, Kennan offered two reasoned and sobering conclusions about how to deal with the Soviet Union. First, there could be “no permanent peaceful coexistence” with the USSR because the Kremlin never compromised by signing treaties and pacts. The Soviets were so insecure that they could only maintain power by ruthlessly destroying rivals. Second, “military intervention [was]… sheerest nonsense [and] should be forestalled at all cost.”

By eliminating the two options of peaceful coexistence and war, Kennan left Washington with only one choice—containment. The United States, he argued, could ultimately defeat communism if it prevented the cancer from spreading to the non-Soviet nations of Western Europe, and if it developed strategies and programs that fractured the Soviet empire in so many places that it would slowly crumble.

Kennan planted several seeds in the Long Telegram that would bear fruit in the next four years. First, the best way to contain the Soviets was to help rebuild the nations of Western Europe (and Japan) so that they would have the will, strength, and resources to fight and defeat Soviet influences in their homelands. That seed would soon flower into the five-year Marshall Plan.

To outsmart the Soviets, the United States must understand Russia and its aims because “there is nothing as dangerous or as terrifying as the unknown.” That seed would flower into the hiring of hundreds of Eastern European scholars to help America collect and analyze intelligence about the Soviet Union.

To defeat the Soviets, the United States must encourage and support the growth of nationalism in the communist satellite countries until the Soviet Union lost control and collapsed. That seed would flower into covert propaganda and espionage operations aimed at destabilizing the Soviet world.

The State Department considered the 1946 Long Telegram so important that it shared the cable with every high-placed bureaucrat in Washington who could read. Secretary of State George C. Marshall offered Kennan the job of directing State’s new and powerful Policy Planning Staff. The PPS mandate was to think long-term, paint large canvases, and write top-secret policy papers for consideration by the National Security Council (NSC) and ultimately by the president.

How could Kennan say no?

“Over the next two years,” Kennan’s official biographer John Lewis Gaddis observed, “the PPS became the principal source of ideas for the NSC.” Papers prepared by PPS were routinely relabeled as NSC documents with few changes. If approved by President Truman—as they were in most cases—they became national policy.

Recognizing that it needed someone with espionage experience to help develop PPS intelligence-related policy papers, the State Department hired Frank Wisner as deputy assistant secretary for occupied countries. Wisner was an interesting choice for the job. Unlike Kennan, he was neither a deep thinker nor a brilliant analyst. During the war, he had gotten his feet wet as an OSS covert operative in Cairo and Amman. From the Middle East, OSS sent him to Bucharest, where he set up a network of spies, code name Hammerhead, that included Nazi collaborator Nicolae Malaxa and other Romanian Iron Guard war criminals.

History is ambivalent about Wisner. To some, he was an espionage rogue elephant; to others, a sincere, dedicated, competent spy, and a good administrator. To still others, he was a gullible dreamer full of contradictions. Charming, warm, funny, and gregarious, he loved to dance, sing, and drink into the wee hours. At the same time he was as secretive and illusive as the spy world he lived in.

As enigmatic as Wisner was, however, friends and critics alike agreed on one thing—his burning intensity and hatred of communism bordered on clinically obsessive. And without doubt, he was one of the most important of the Cold War strategists responsible for opening the U.S. door to former Nazi war criminals.

Frank Gardiner Wisner was born into privilege in Laurel, Mississippi, a town his family owned, from the local bank to the sawmill that made the Wisners rich. He grew up in a world that was, as one writer put it, “secretive, insular, elitist, and secure in the rectitude of its purposes.” Maids dressed him. He had little contact with the outside world. His only playmates were his cousins. He was driven and competitive, traits he learned from playing parlor games with his mother, a woman who hated to lose, even to her son. Sickly as a child, Wisner built up muscles by pumping iron. He never walked. He ran.

Unlike so many of the Cold War warriors and armchair generals he would later hire, Wisner did not attend an Ivy League school. He went to the University of Virginia, which was at the time more like a private institution than a public university. Besides being a driven student, he was such a good athlete that the U.S. Olympic Committee invited him to attend the 1936 Olympic trials as a sprinter and hurdler. His father said no.

After college and law school, Wisner ended up at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn. Life as a corporate attorney was so boring that he joined the navy six months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The navy assigned him to a desk shuffling papers. With the help of a former UVa law professor who had contacts in Washington, Wisner got himself transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, which would soon become his home.

With the code name Typhus, Wisner arrived in Soviet-occupied Bucharest in August 1944. Besides spying on the Romanian Communist Party, his job as OSS station chief in the Romanian capital was to negotiate the safe return of eighteen hundred American fliers shot down over that nation’s oil fields, which he did to the complete satisfaction of Washington.

In Bucharest Wisner rented a mansion, threw lavish parties for the Romanian elite, and became an informal advisor to King Michael and the queen mother. All the while he fed Washington a steady stream of accurate information, filled with dire warnings about an impending communist takeover. Washington read his communiqués with interest, but did nothing. In January 1945, Wisner watched helplessly as the Soviets rounded up eighty thousand ethnic German men ( Volksdeutsche ), ages seventeen to forty-five, and ethnic German women, ages eighteen to thirty, and forced them into boxcars bound for slow death in the work camps and mines of the Soviet Union. His helplessness soon turned to despair as he saw King Michael driven into exile and his Romanian friends disappear into the night, never to be heard from again. Washington still read his communiqués with interest, and still did nothing.