“All Will Be Forgiven”

Chapter 10 addresses “redefection,” or the movement of Russian exiles back across the Iron Curtain from West to East. In mid-decade, in part as a reaction to Amcomlib’s emergence as a viable sponsor of psychological-warfare programs, the Kremlin launched a massive campaign to convince Soviet exiles to relocate to the USSR. The chapter depicts the return campaign, pursued through a KGB-front organization called the Committee for Return to the Homeland, as an effective tool for destabilizing and demoralizing the Russian anti-communists in Germany. While the return campaign damaged the émigré anti-communist camp badly, it also had the unanticipated consequence of encouraging American cold warriors and Russian anti-communists to bury their differences after the fiasco of the united-front campaign. In this way, the return campaign demonstrated the difficulty both superpowers experienced in influencing the Russian émigré milieu, as each step by one side produced a countermove by the other.

Spies, Sex, and Balloons

Chapter 8 examines the Russian exiles’ anti-communist activities in divided Germany and particularly Berlin, the city whose penetrable internal border made it the essential base for Cold War human-intelligence activities. The CIA utilized the NTS and another Russian organization, the Central Representation of Postwar Emigrants (TsOPE), in operations devoted to inciting defection among Soviet soldiers and civilians positioned in East Germany. Utilizing documents from the East German Ministry for State Security, the chapter examines the Berlin operations and the Soviet and East German actions to thwart them. It focuses attention on how Russian exile agendas in Germany became reliant on the East German civilians who were recruited to spread propaganda and interact with Soviet soldiers and civilians. In this way, the espionage conflicts in Berlin were a transnational affair involving cross-national contacts and networks.

Builders and Dissectors

This chapter examines a series of meetings of anti-communist organizations in West Germany from 1951 to 1953 devoted to creating a united-front organization of Soviet exiles. The project, supported by a CIA front organization called the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism, Inc. (Amcomlib), had the unanticipated consequence of launching a many-sided debate about national identities. Inadvertently, the Americans spearheaded a virtual dismemberment of Russian nationhood, as ethnic Russians promoted a conception of Russia as a multiethnic nation and non-Russian exile groups invited to take part defended national self-determination for their peoples.

American Visions and Émigré Realities

Chapter 4 addresses the origins of the CIA project to create a Russian political center abroad. The chapter argues that transnational flows of ideas and historical memories were important for a major CIA psychological warfare project. George F. Kennan and other policymakers involved in the project were driven by a romantic attachment to Russian history and the conviction that exiles were potent weapons for psychological warfare against the USSR. Accordingly, plans for the political center—its political complexion and structure—emerged from the interactions of influential Americans and Russian émigrés. The dependence of US psychological-warfare projects on exile politics would prove dysfunctional, as the OPC planners read the state of Russian opinion in the USSR through the distorting lens of exile anti-communism.

Conclusion

Russian émigré activities took place in crowded meeting halls, in Bavarian hotels, in Frankfurt print shops, in posh New York office buildings, at balloon launch sites in German forests, and in the more intimate setting of safe houses in West Berlin. In the late 1950s, the émigrés’ struggle to free Russia found a new setting: tourist centers in Western Europe. With the slow opening up of the USSR after Stalin’s death, the CIA increasingly focused its human-intelligence operations on the exploitation of different forms of cross-bloc movement such as tourism, travel by official delegations, and academic exchanges....

“A Political Maze Based on the Shifting Sands”

Chapter 2 examines Russian exile politics of the late 1940s, when anti-communist organizations emerged in the displaced-person camps of West Germany. The early efforts of White exiles to forge a right-wing movement went awry. The younger Vlasovites, Soviet subjects until the recent war, resisted pressure to take up the cause of historic Russia. A postwar Vlasov movement emerged but became mired in the murky espionage world of divided Germany. The exiles found backers in the Gehlen Organization, an intelligence outfit assembled from Hitler’s defunct military intelligence unit Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East) which received funding from the US army after the war. However, the intermixing of anti-communist politics and espionage threw the Vlasov movement into chaos. The Gehlen Organization funded clashing exile clans, while Soviet intelligence stepped up efforts to paralyze the anti-communist circles through penetration agents and harassment—all of which virtually paralyzed the exiles’ nascent anti-communist agendas.

Introduction

In 1949, Harper & Brothers published Thirteen Who Fled, a book purporting to be about “typical Russian men and women – all recently escaped – [who] tell their personal stories.”1 The authors told of tragic lives that had inspired them to flee their homeland, recalling starving peasants, despotic commissars in the Red Army, loved ones who disappeared during the Great Terror of the 1930s, and the ubiquitous threat of denunciation. The book’s editor, the American writer and former communist fellow traveler Louis Fischer, drew the logical conclusion from the testimonies: Soviet society was mired in poverty, fear, and corruption, and “the moment the door opens Russians escape to the West.”...

The Real Anti-Soviet Russians?

Chapter 9 examines Soviet defectors, citizens who fled Soviet rule, with a focus on Germany. The United States developed elaborate programs to utilize defectors as sources of unattainable information about the enemy, as recruits for psychological warfare or espionage operations, and as symbols of Western superiority in the clash of ideological systems. This chapter draws on previously unused sources to draw a collective portrait of Soviet defectors. Rather than committed cold warriors, most defectors were low-level soldiers or personnel who fled the Soviet bloc for non-political reasons and then experienced an isolated and fearful existence in West Germany. They constituted an unreliable cohort in American political-warfare efforts, as shown by the history of TsOPE, the CIA’s defector organization. They were also a problematic addition to the Russian political exiles in Germany, as the defectors blended into and even encouraged the internecine conflict that was the norm in Russian diaspora politics.

From Revolution to Provocation

Chapter 7 examines the CIA espionage and psychological-warfare operations against the USSR that involved the most important and most controversial Russian exile organization, the People’s Labor Alliance. Operations to infiltrate agents directly into the USSR by plane ended in fiasco due to Soviet counterintelligence, which thwarted the NTS operations and pursued measures to penetrate and subvert the émigré organization from within. In response, the CIA turned to a strategy of utilizing the NTS as an instrument of psychological warfare, spreading disinformation about the exiles in order to incite the Soviet state into costly countermeasures. Such an effort to manipulate the fiction of émigré political influence demonstrated the increasingly complex and marginal-gains nature of Cold War competition between intelligence agencies.

Reluctant Chieftains

Chapter 6 examines the transformation of CIA propaganda operations involving Amcomlib and Russian exiles. In the mid-1950s, after negotiations to create an exile united front had fallen apart, the American Committee stepped in as a sponsor of the anti-communist operations that were supposed to come under the émigrés’ leadership, the most important of which was the Munich-based Radio Liberation that broadcast to the USSR. The chapter corrects scholarship that presents Amcomlib’s assertion of control as a natural consequence of the dysfunctional politics of the exiles. For several years after the united front dissipated, Amcomlib remained committed to its original position that its radio operation could only be effective if it was sponsored by an émigré body, and even resisted pressure from Washington to shift its strategy. Instead, Amcomlib’s decisive turn away from exile anti-communism occurred later in the decade as part of a wider delegitimizing of US policies of liberation and rollback toward the Soviet bloc. The extended confusion surrounding the course of Amcomlib, the chapter argues, illustrated the unintended consequence of CIA strategies that vested power in non-state “public-private committees.”