Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Gregory V. Raymond examining Thailand's response to Soviet-backed Vietnam's occupation of Cambodia from 1979 to 1989. Vietnam's intervention in Cambodia in 1979 had the positive effect of bringing an end to the murderous violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge (resulting in the deaths of up to 2 million people), but Vietnam established a brutal occupation regime of its own in Cambodia and fought a devastating war against Khmer Rouge insurgents, who sought to return to power. The presence of Vietnamese forces along Thailand's borders posed an exigent security threat, not least because Vietnamese troops conducted cross-border raids against presumed Khmer Rouge positions, shelled border towns in Thailand, and drove refugees onto Thai territory. Raymond shows that Thai leaders responded to this threat not by significantly beefing up their military forces but by vigorously pursuing diplomacy and coalition-building. He explains this choice as a product of Thailand's strategic culture, which took shape in the late nineteenth century during the Thai struggle against colonial occupation.

The next article, by Henry V. Fetter, looks at the role of a senior U.S. State Department official, Alger Hiss, during the U.S.-British-Soviet conference in Yalta in early 1945. Soviet intelligence documents that have come to light in the post-Soviet era confirm that Hiss worked as a spy for the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s, vindicating the allegations brought against him in the late 1940s, for which he was eventually convicted and imprisoned on charges of perjury. At Yalta, however, Hiss prepared a brief memorandum titled "Arguments against Inclusion of Any of the Soviet Republics among the Initial Members," which was partly at odds with the official Soviet position at the time. Soviet leaders had been seeking to gain multiple seats for Soviet republics as well as the USSR itself in the newly founded United Nations (UN) Organization. The highest U.S. policymakers, however, were strongly opposed to the idea from the very start, wanting only one vote per member. The firmness of senior officials' opposition to the Soviet proposal accounts for why Hiss could not openly endorse the Soviet view. He did not want to risk compromising his espionage work for Moscow, and therefore he had to appear to go along with the unanimous view in Washington on UN voting, lest he seem conspicuously pro-Soviet and thus raise suspicion. However, as Fetter shows, Hiss markedly weakened his case by omitting the key U.S. objection to the Soviet proposal and focusing only on minor points. Because he was intimately familiar with the issues involved, his omission of the main objection was apparently deliberate. The weak case he offered was evidently used by U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius in his negotiations at Yalta with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, enabling Molotov to gain a crucial edge over the U.S. side. Hence, the Hiss Memorandum, far from diminishing the strength of the allegations against Hiss, actually reinforces them.

The next article, by Andrea Scionti, looks at the impact of the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF) in Italy and France. The CCF was secretly funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to support intellectuals, especially those on the political left, who wanted to curb the spread of Communism and Communist sentiment in post-1945 Europe. Because Italy and France were the only two West European countries with large and politically influential Communist parties, they were a crucial focus of the CCF's work. Scionti examines the CCF's activities in those two countries, showing how French and Italian intellectuals were eager to demonstrate their autonomy from the CCF International Secretariat and the U.S. personnel involved with it, a phenomenon that at times complicated the organization's work. Taking issue with Frances Stonor Saunders's polemical analysis of the CCF, which depicts European intellectuals as unwitting pawns of U.S. spymasters, Scionti shows that instead the CCF allowed a great deal of cultural freedom for French and Italian intellectuals, who were both leftist and anti-Communist. They established autonomous and remarkably vibrant intellectual cultures in their countries...