On the Edge of the Cold War: A Reply

Vít Smetana’s review of my On the Edge of the Cold War: American Diplomats and Spies in Postwar Prague makes several ominous claims but says little to indicate what the book is primarily about.¹ It is a study of the political crisis in postwar Prague from the point of view of the U.S. embassy, focusing on the U.S. diplomatic and intelligence personnel who served at the Schönborn Palace from the end of World War II to roughly 1949. The activities of Harry Truman, Iosif Stalin, Winston Churchill, and other big players or their respective aides, such as George C. Marshall or George F. Kennan or Vyacheslav Molotov, are not my topic. My objective was to look at the escalating early stages of the Cold War as they appeared on the frontline between the two opposing blocs, not in the distant command posts in Washington, Moscow, and Western Europe.

The book is based primarily on documents from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) repository in College Park, Maryland, and all the relevant archival collections in the Czech Republic. To this base, I was able to add crucial new evidence gained from interviewing close to thirty U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers and their Czech colleagues who had served in Prague. I also drew information from the unpublished memoirs that several of them had generously shared with me.

In addition to exploring diplomatic matters, the book deals with U.S. intelligence activities in Prague. It introduces the key officers, some of whom have previously received no attention from historians, and reveals that among their ranks was, in all likelihood, a Soviet mole. A former chief of the counter-intelligence division of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and deputy chief of the Soviet-bloc division wrote that the book “single-handedly uncovered what was probably the first staff-level penetration of the agency operations against the SovBloc.” Smetana devotes but one sentence to the intelligence segment of the book.

Let me turn now to the specific points Smetana makes, starting with the large ones. Smetana asserts that my book has three main problems. First, none of what I say “is really new.” His proof? That two books have already been written on the topic.² The first book he mentions, by Walter Ullmann, is wonderful, but it is almost forty years old and dated—in part because Ullmann was unable to work in the Prague archives. The other book, by Justine Faure, is also a fine contribution, but it covers a period of twenty-five years, whereas my book deals with less than three. Faure maps out a good deal of territory, whereas I go into greater depth. She uses binoculars, whereas I work with a microscope. Neither of these two other books says much, if anything, about the internal workings of the embassy and its diplomatic and intelligence personnel, my main interest.

Despite Smetana’s claim that my book contains “nothing new,” I am inclined to think that, before reading it, he knew little or nothing about Walter Birge, Louise Schaffner, Spencer Taggart, or Reinhold Pick, all pivotal characters in the U.S. embassy in postwar Prague. He did not read the memoirs by Dulcie Ann Sherlock (Laurence Steinhardt’s daughter), the memoirs of Birge, or Taggart’s diaries. I suspect that Smetana knew little or nothing about Ambassador Steinhardt’s family situation and his private life, his business activities, his reaction to the Yalta Conference, or the U.S. embassy’s self-satisfied dormancy during the crucial year 1947.

Second, Smetana laments that the book offers no “positive alternative”; that is, it fails to spell out what specifically the United States “would have had to do to reverse Czechoslovakia’s drift to Communism.” That sounds like a good point, until one is reminded what the book is trying to accomplish. As its subtitle makes clear, it is about “American diplomats and spies in postwar Prague.” The book is not, as the title of Smetana’s essay falsely suggests, about the political and national security elites in...