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Coup d’État For most Americans the fires and mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki meant the end of war. The troopships reversed course in mid-voyage to Tokyo Bay; sailors pushed airplanes into the South China Sea and the victorious aircraft carriers set their course for Hawaii; the troops marched from their hometown victory parades to college campuses suddenly forced open to unprecedented numbers—and types—of students by the GI Bill. Even Yale filled with students too battle-hardened and too poor to be absorbed by the old system of casual study and serious socializing. In Washington the managers of the war turned their attention to demobilization and the dismantling of the great machine that had brought victory, while their civilian colleagues destroyed the now suspect New Deal agencies. Factory managers thanked the women who had produced the tanks that had helped win the war and sent them home to have babies, while returning men went into the factories to make Fords and Frigidaires—and after work went home to the new suburbs, their wives, and their new babies. Madison Avenue turned from marketing war bonds to marketing the ensuing deluge of consumer goods, and the lights on Wall Street burned late as brigadiers-turned-bankers toiled to dispose of the floods of money that were the fruits of victory—as devastated Europe shivered and starved in the dark. Sometime four or five years earlier the capital of the world had moved from Whitehall to Washington, but the move still seemed temporary, as if at any moment peace would truly come and Washington would return to its southern slumbers. There was, it is true, a double line of great office buildings marching on either side of the Mall from the Washington Monument to the Capitol, most of a classical style uniform with the late-Imperial offices that form the core of London; some decorated with the squared columns and eagles common to what now appears to have been the international style of state power, as ubiquitous in Berlin and Rome as Washington and Paris. And the bridges across the Potomac were solid enough, guarded by heroic figures in the best Socialist Realist manner, a gilded celebration of equine and human buttocks and pectorals. But, slightly to one side of the tremendous force field extending 76 chapter five from Old State across the bridge to the still new Pentagon in Arlington—the dipole of the emerging Cold War—the Mall itself was littered with flimsy temporary buildings. Those near the reflecting pool housed what was left of the OSS, which with increasing urgency was being converted into a new agency, Donovan’s dream, a Central Intelligence Agency with both intelligence coordination and intelligence procurement functions.1 Blanketed with the alternating rain, snow, and ice storms of the Washington winter, the dank heat of endless Foggy Bottom summers, the future was stirring fitfully in those insecure spaces. That Washington dominated the world as no power had since the Rome of the Caesars or the Chung-tu of the Great Khans was evident to everyone except, perhaps, a few men in the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, their colleagues commuting between New York and Washington, and scattered remnants of the OSS in Washington, Berlin, and Rome, busy with the next war. Staring out over the ramparts on the Potomac, they thought the world looked grim. The Red Army had not matched the demobilization of its allies; Communist unions controlled the factories and docks of France and Italy; Communist parties were bidding for power from Prague to Paris, and even Britain had a Socialist government. Matters seemed particularly grave in Italy, where the Communist Party had acquired immense prestige and something like majority support, not to mention military experience. Italian democracy seemed fragile and, from Washington’s point of view, untrustworthy. Some people, it was thought in Washington, were not to be trusted with democracy. It was a sentiment that would gain currency there with the Cold War. Eventually it applied even at home. Back in Rome, Angleton had learned through his penetration agent, SAILOR, who still held a key position in Italian military intelligence, that early in 1946 elements in the Italian military command were beginning to lean toward the United States among the competitors for the favor of the emerging Italian government. “Intending to mount a serious campaign, Angleton asked [Washington] to be forewarned by cable of any government speech seemingly favorable to Italy that...

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