Abstract
From George Kennan’s description of the Soviet government as “a conspiracy within a conspiracy” in 1946 to President Reagan’s vilification of the USSR as an “evil empire” in 1983, US-Soviet relations were marked during the Cold War by deep aversion and distrust.2 Attempts to normalize these relations through diplomacy proved difficult, if not impossible. Leaders in both East and West occasionally recognized the futility of the superpower contest, but convictions on both sides that they represented “a superior way of life” ultimately prevented any real concessions.3 In this fundamental clash of interests, both sides “needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies”.4 The existence of an enemy also served useful purposes. Stalinist propaganda directed its criticism at a duplicitous West encircling and threatening the Soviet Union, thereby justifying the Soviet empire abroad and the repression of dissent at home.5 This “war on the mind” was driven by fear — fear of defeat, of destruction, of being inferior and second-best to a despised adversary.6 This fear was expressed on both sides, from the witch-hunts of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s through to the silencing of Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s. “Don’t talk to communists,” the message went in the West, “because if you do, you’ll lose the debate and become brainwashed.”
How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
President Ronald Reagan, Arlington, 1987
Karl Marx stated that theories and ideas become material power as soon as they have conquered the consciousness of the masses. Let us see that this dictum proves true in our sense and in accordance with our intentions.
Rolf Geyer, 19681
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Notes
Rolf Geyer, ‘Conclusions’, in Communist Reassessment of Capitalism, Its Resultant Strategy and the Western Response (The Hague: Interdoc, 1968), p. 68.
George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Boston: Bantam, 1969), p. 588; Reagan’s 8 March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, is his first recorded use of the phrase ‘evil empire’.
Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), p. 8.
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4.
Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 6.
Philip Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Day (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 250.
Nigel Gould-Davis, ‘The Logic of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy’, Diplomatic History, 27 (April 2003), p. 195.
Wyn Rees and Richard J. Aldrich, ‘European and US Approaches to Counterterrorism: Two Contrasting Cultures?’ in Ronald Tiersky and Erik Jones (eds), Europe Today: A Twenty-First Century Introduction (Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) pp. 441–442.
See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray, 2001), p. 5.
See H. Bradford Westerfield, ‘America and the World of Intelligence Liaison’, Intelligence and National Security 11 (1996), pp. 523–560;
Chris Clough, ‘Quid Pro Quo: The Challenges of International Strategic Intelligence Cooperation’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 17 (2004), pp. 601–613;
Jennifer E. Syms, ‘Foreign Intelligence Liaison: Devils, Deals, and Details’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 19 (2006), pp. 195–217.
Wesley Wark, ‘The Origins of Intelligence Cooperation between the United States and West Germany’, in Detlef Junker (ed.), The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1968, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2004), p. 248.
See Giles Scott-Smith, ‘Not a NATO Responsibility? Psychological Warfare, the Berlin Crisis, and the formation of Interdoc’, in A. Locher and C. Nuenlist (eds), Challenges Beyond Deterrence: NATO in the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 31–49;
Linda Risso, ‘“Enlightening Public Opinion”: A Study of NATO’s Information Policies between 1949 and 1959 based on Recently Declassified Documents’, Cold War History 7 (February 2007), pp. 45–74;
Valérie Aubourg, ‘Creating the Texture of the Atlantic Community: The NATO Information Service, Private Atlantic Networks and the Atlantic Community in the 1950s’, in V. Aubourg et al. (eds), European Community, Atlantic Community? (Paris: Soleb, 2008), pp. 390–415.
Sean McMeekin, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003);
Martin Ceadel, ‘The First Communist “Peace Society”: The British Anti-War Movement 1932–1935’, Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990), pp. 58–86.
‘Report by the National Security Council on Coordination of Foreign Information Measures’, NSC 4, 17 December 1947, Document 252 in C. Thomas Thorne Jr. and David S. Patterson (eds), Foreign Relations of the United States 1945–1952: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996), pp. 640–641.
Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 361.
Marshall Shulman, Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 80–103.
See Rolf Steininger, The German Question: The Stalin Note of 1952 and the Problem of Reunification (New York: Columbia University, 1990);
Klaus Larres and Ken Osgood (eds), The Cold War after Stalin’s Death: A Missed Opportunity for Peace? (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
Quote taken from a report submitted by Soviet atomic scientists to the Politburo in March 1954. See Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente1950–1991 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 34.
Robert Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind: Studies in Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), pp. 180–222.
Ken Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Laurence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2006), p. 24; Ken Osgood, ‘The Perils of Coexistence: Peace and Propaganda in Eisenhower’s Foreign Policy’, in Larres and Osgood (eds), The Cold War after Stalin’s Death, pp. 40, 41–42;
see also Blanche Wiesen Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), pp. 149–183.
Evron Kirkpatrick (ed.), Year of Crisis: Communist Propaganda Activities in 1956 (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 7. This book was prepared with material from USIA’s Office of Research and Information.
Sir Humphrey Trevelyan (Foreign Office) to M.A.M. Robb (British Embassy, Washington, DC), 19 February 1962, FO 1110/1489, Papers of the Information Research Department, National Archives, London (hereafter IRD NAL); ‘The Answer to Peaceful Co-Existence’, n.d. [1962], FO 1110/1489, IRD NAL; Christopher Mayhew, Coexistence-Plus: A Positive Approach to World Peace (London: Bodley Head, 1962).
See also Lynn Smith, ‘Covert British Propaganda: The Information Research Department, 1947–77’, Millennium 9/1 (1980), pp. 67–83.
“Maar bovenal was internationale samenwerking noodzakelijk om te komen tot een uitwisseling van gegevens over een wereldomvattende beweging, die vanuit enkele centrale punten (Moskou en later Peking) gedirigeerd wordt.” Louis Einthoven, Tegen de Stroom In (Apeldoorn: Semper Agindo, 1974), p. 200.
Details of Geyer’s biography from Michel Garder, Rolf Geyer et al., Einstellung zum Krieg in West und Ost (Kopernicus Verlag: München, 1980), p. 144; Gunhild Bohm-Geyer, interview with the author, Würthsee, 4 July 2008 and correspondence thereafter.
On the Albrecht Group see C.M. Schulten, ‘En verpletterd werd het juk’: Verzet in Nederland 1940–1945 (The Hague: Sdu, 1995);
J.W.M. Linssen, ‘De Albrechtgroep: een fenomeen ontleed’, in P. Koedijk et al. (eds), Verspreiders voor het Vaderland (The Hague: Sdu, 1996), pp. 37–84; Anon., Albrecht meldt zich (Wageningen: Zomer en Keunings, 1946).
Rens Broekhuis, Chris Vos et al., De Geheime Dienst: Verhalen over de BVD (Amsterdam: Boom, 2005), pp. 13, 34–35. As former BVD officer Frits Hoekstra put it, the World War II experience defined the outlook of both the Christians and the communists: ‘they were each other’s mirror image’ (“zij waren elkaars spiegel-beeld”). Herman Veenhof, ‘Hoofdrol orthodoxe christenen in BVD’, available online at http://intel.web-log.nl/intel/2006/07/hoofdrol_orthod.html (accessed 22 June 2011).
On Van den Heuvel’s “dirty tricks” campaign against the Dutch Communist Party see Dick Engelen, Geschiedenis van de Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst (The Hague: Sdu, 1995), pp. 222–224. A similar campaign was successfully waged against the Danish Communist Party:
see Peer Henrik Hansen, ‘Upstairs and Downstairs: The Forgotten CIA Operations in Copenhagen’, International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 19 (2006–2007), pp. 685–701.
Isaiah Berlin, ‘Soviet Russian Culture’, in Berlin (ed. Henry Hardy), The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2004), p. 155.
C.C. van den Heuvel et al., ‘Possibilities of Psychological Defence against Soviet Influence’ (study group report on the US (The Hague, Netherlands) April 1959), p. 3.
C.C. van den Heuvel, East-West Confrontation: A Psychological Strategy (The Hague: Interdoc, 1967), p. 5.
See David Engerman, Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). The phrase “military-intellectual complex” is taken from
Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
S.W. Couwenberg, Oost en West op de drempel van een nieuw tijdperk (The Hague: Pax Nederland, 1966), pp. 188–199.
For instance, correspondence shows that Helmut Gruber, ‘Willi Münzenberg’s Communist Propaganda Empire 1921–1933’, Journal of Modern History 38 (1966), pp. 278–297, was on the Interdoc reading list.
See W. Scott Lucas, ‘Mobilizing Culture: The State-Private Network and the CIA in the Early Cold War’, in Dale Carter (ed.), War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy1942–1962 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) pp. 83–107;
Scott Lucas, Freedom’s War: The American Crusade against the Soviet Union (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999);
Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and Post-war American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002);
Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War (London: Frank Cass, 2003), pp. 193–224, 262–296.
Ian Richardson et al., Bilderberg People: Elite Power and Consensus in World Affairs (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 18.
Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Transnational Networks in European Governance’, in Wolfram Kaiser et al. (eds), The History of the European Union: Origins of a Trans- and Supranational Polity1950–72 (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 15;
Wolfram Kaiser et al., ‘Transnational Networks in European Integration Governance: Historical Perspectives on an Elusive Phenomenon’, in Kaiser et al. (eds), Transnational Networks in Regional Integration: Governing Europe1945–83 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2.
Ken Osgood, ‘Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War’, Journal of Cold War History 4 (Spring 2002), p. 86.
On CEDI and CIDCC see Johannes Grossman, ‘Ein Europa der “Hintergründigen”: Antikommunistische christliche Organisationen, konservative Elitenzirkel und private Außenpolitik in Westeuropa nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Johannes Wienand and Christianne Wienand (eds), Die kulturelle integration Europas (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2010), pp. 303–340; on the Pinay Circle see David Teacher, Rogue Agents: Habsburg, Pinay, and the Private Cold War 1951–1991, available online at www.cryptome.org/2012/01/cercle-pinay-6i.pdf.
Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (London: Frank Cass, 2003), p. 254.
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Scott-Smith, G. (2012). Introduction: The Communist Challenge. In: Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137284273_1
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