The Making of a Myth: The National Labor Alliance, Russian Émigrés, and Cold War Intelligence Activities

This article examines the role of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right organization of Russian exiles, in U.S. intelligence operations during the early Cold War. Drawing on declassified archival documents and émigré sources, the article discusses how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the NTS in covert operations to undermine Communism in Europe. Early operations to penetrate Soviet borders failed, as NTS members who were sent into the USSR were quickly rounded up amid suspicions of internal betrayal. Following Soviet attempts to kidnap and assassinate NTS leaders in Germany in 1954, the CIA adopted a new approach, using the émigré organization as a tool of political and psychological warfare. Borrowing political strategies used by the exiles themselves, the CIA promoted a false image of the NTS as a powerful underground organization in order to provoke the Soviet state into costly and destabilizing countermeasures against it. As a result, the NTS became a mythical organization, and the intelligence agencies of both superpowers sought to manipulate it to their advantage.