The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare: Cold War Organizations Sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/ Free Europe Committee

I: At War While at Peace: United States Cold War Policy and the National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc.

7 At War While at Peace “The National Committee for a Free Europe is engaged in active ideological warfare against communism and soviet totalitarianism.” NCFE, Inc. Secretary Frederic Dolbeare, May 15, 1952 At War While at Peace Sixty-eight years after the end of World War II, it seems fitting to begin to examine more thoroughly the other, more unconventional war, the psychological war for “men’s minds” that shortly was to follow the armistice . Termed the “Cold War”, it was fought with great intensity by all sides while the world was at “peace”. It pitted the Soviet Union and the world wide Communist movement against the forces of democracy led by the United States in a propaganda war that lasted the better part of four decades. This Cold War between the two world superpowers was at the peak of its intensity during the first decade after its inception, having been fueled by the realization by the United States that one conflict had, to a degree, been replaced by another and by the ideological fervor of the anti-communist movement in the United States. The Cold War sprang from the realization by the West that the political vacuum created by the Axis defeat was quickly being filled by the Soviet Union and the world wide Communist movement, and that this represented a very real threat to the survival of democracies, particularly in politically fragile areas of the Far East, the Indian sub-continent, • At War While at Peace: United States Cold War Policy and the National Committee for a Free Europe, Inc. Katalin Kádár Lynn i Katalin Kádár Lynn 8 Latin America and even in Europe, where the communist movement emerged with great strength from the ashes of WWII. This essay will discuss the events that led to the onset of the Cold War and how United States policy makers chose to develop a plan of “organized political warfare”1 to counteract Soviet influence in Europe. It will describe in general the tactics utilizing psychological warfare that were chosen and the programs put in place as part of this strategy. It will also describe the various institutions created to fight this battle as it related to the nations that by 1947–1948 had become Soviet satellites in Central and East Europe. To this day, there are still programs and organizations put in place as a result of the Truman Doctrine that have not been fully researched. These programs were the outgrowth of policies arising from the policy of containment and an aggressive stance against Soviet expansionism that the Truman Doctrine espoused. This essay will introduce how refugees fleeing from the Soviet takeover of their nations constituted a tool for the United States to wage psychological warfare via the National Councils , Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the organizations termed “the internationals”. It will also illustrate the wide range of US-sponsored activities related to all of these organizations, both in the United States and abroad. While the history of “the radios” has been extensively researched and written about, that of the other sponsored entities has not, leaving a void in the history of the Cold War. The Run-Up to War’s End Several years before the end of the war, Washington policy makers were already secretly discussing post war relations with the Soviet Union, and by 1943 their conversations included the structure of the postwar world and relations among its leading powers. Warnings of Soviet ambitions for world domination were voiced by experienced Soviet hands such as William Bullitt, the first US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and Charles E. Bohlen, who served with Bullitt in Moscow and as US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s interpreter at the Teheran Conference and at Yalta.2 Their warnings were swept aside. 9 At War While at Peace During the conduct of the war, the relationship between the three Great Powers was never quite one of trust and comfort. Early on in their relationship, Roosevelt thought he could bring his considerable charm to bear on Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and said to Bullitt, “I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing in return, noblesse oblige he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”3...