On 22 February 1946, George Kennan sent an eight thousand word telegram from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to the State Department warning Washington that the Soviet Union had a warlike view of relations with the west: capitalism and communism, they said, could not peacefully coexist. The "long telegram" is a celebrated document, one of the key texts of the cold war. In it Kennan argued that the Soviets posed a serious, long-term threat all over the world but particularly in Europe. Stalin, he maintained, was taking every opportunity to weaken the West, using "an underground operating directorate of world communism, a concealed comintern tightly coordinated and directed by Moscow to reach their goal of world domination." It was thus vital, Kennan concluded, to resist communist attempts to subvert, discredit and overthrow Western institutions.0
In his memoirs Kennan recalled that he had been issuing such warnings for eighteen long months but that they had fallen on unreceptive ears. This time, however, the response was different. Just the week before Kennan sent his telegram, an extensive Soviet spy ring had been uncovered in Canada which had betrayed atomic secrets to the Russians. This brought home to Americans that sooner or later the Soviets would have the bomb too, and the bomb was, thus far, the factor which gave the United States an insurmountable advantage over the Soviets in any military confrontation.
The exposure of the Canadian network was followed by a whole series of spy scandals: Elizabeth Bentley, Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and, most sensational of all, the Burgess-Maclean-Philby affair.
The European scene was particularly disturbing to the Truman administration. Eastern Europe was firmly under Soviet control. The Baltic states had been annexed by Stalin in 1940 and now Rumania, Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia and parts of Finland were added to them. Poland, eastern Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Albania were either occupied directly by the Soviet army or controlled by communist-influenced governments. Despite Yalta and Potsdam, the Soviets ignored demands for free elections in nearly all these countries.
In Washington, western Europe seemed on the verge of sliding under Soviet control as well. Within nine months of V-E Day, de Gaulle had resigned in France; in Britain, Churchill had been voted out of power by an electorate which was physically and emotionally drained by the war; there was a bitter communist-instigated civil war in Greece. Secret Soviet support was going to the communist parties in France and Italy, and to communist-controlled trade unions and newspapers, fomenting strikes and political disruption.
In 1946 the United States was the only country capable of dealing with the Soviet threat. The British had been crippled financially by the war and the abrupt curtailment of lend-lease (by which they received U.S. dollars to buy U.S. goods) in August 1945 had left their economy on the verge of collapse. In July, 1946 Truman authorised a $3.7 billion loan to Britain and although this eased British problems temporarily, it was obvious that they were finding it difficult to meet military and occupation commitments to their allies around the world.
On 21 February 1947, the first secretary at the British embassy in Washington, H M Sichell, hurried to the State Department for an urgent meeting. He handed in two documents from his government. The first concerned Greece and stated that unless the Greek government received $200 million immediately, the communist guerrillas would win the civil war. The second document was no less bald and warned that a similar fate awaited Turkey. Britain was in dire financial straits, the documents stated, and could no longer afford to support her allies in the eastern Mediterranean. It was clear that the American government had to intervene or else accept the consequences of a British withdrawal.
Truman agonized over whether to give aid to Greece and Turkey. Isolationist pressure was still strong and he was distrustful of British motives. But in the end he concluded that the U.S. must intervene. He, George Marshall, the secretary of State, and Dean Acheson, the under secretary of State, met senior congressional leaders to secure their support. Acheson recalled:
"I knew we were met at Armageddon ... These congressman had no conception of what challenged them: it was my task to bring it home ... In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open these continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe. The Soviet Union was playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost ... We and we alone were in a position to break up the play."1
Acheson's record provides a fascinating glimpse of the arrival in the U.S. of a global and long distance perspective in foreign affairs. It was, as yet, unsophisticated. There is little evidence to show that contamination spread: Greece going communist was no guarantee that Turkey would follow. It was the start of the domino theory, the subtext of which was that Lenin had been right to think that there was a world revolution waiting to happen. In fact, Lenin had been discredited by 1921 when, despite his and Trotsky's attempts, communism stayed in the Russian empire. The failure of south east Asia to go communist after the fall of South Vietnam to communist forces in 1975, finally demonstrated Lenin's and the domino fallacy.
On 12 March Truman addressed a joint session of Congress, and set out what became known as the Truman Doctrine:
"We must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way... Totalitarian regimes forced upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States."
He asked for $400 million in military and economic assistance for Greece and Turkey. "Should we fail to aid Greece and Turkey in this fateful hour, the effect will be far reaching to the West as well as to the East". Congress - Democrats and Republicans - agreed. The money was used overtly in Greece and Turkey and additional covert action was undertaken by the CIA in France and Italy to help democratic political parties, trade unions, newspapers and magazines in the propaganda and political battle against the communists.
The Truman Doctrine was followed three months later by the Marshall Plan. With Europe suffering from the devastation of the war, Truman, Acheson and Marshall believed that support for the non-communist European economies was a vital part of the measures to defend democratic values in the west. Marshall appointed George Kennan as head of the State Department's policy planning staff and Kennan recommended a programme of long-term economic assistance which would eradicate the poverty and distress which were such a fertile breeding ground for the communists.
PLAYING HARDBALL WITH THE COMMUNISTS
It was against this background of fear and urgency that the CIA began to engage with the Soviets. The Italian elections in April 1948 were the first big test for the agency. As in France, communists had played a leading role in the wartime resistance movement and used this as a base to bid for power. For almost two years after the end of the war, communists shared power in coalition governments in France, Belgium and Italy. In March 1947, the Belgian socialist premier, Paul Henri Spaak, excluded the communists from his administration. In May, the governments of the socialist Paul Ramadier in France and the christian democrat Alcide de Gasperi in Italy expelled the communists from their coalitions. In Italy, the commu
