George F. Kennan : an American life

The United States should do all it could, therefore, to ensure Tito’s survival, without at the same time endorsing the nature of his regime.²⁶

The Chinese Communists were “deeply suspicious” of the United States, Kennan added on February 25. But any further aid to Chiang Kai-shek would only alienate the Chinese people, perpetuating the illusion that China’s interests lay with the U.S.S.R. Mao would discover that this was not the case: the Soviet Union would have no more success shaping events in China than had the United States. Eventually a new revolution would either overthrow the Communists or change their character. That would take time, but the Americans could afford to wait: “We are under no Byzantine Tartar compulsion to shackle as our own captive the revolution which we seek to release.”²⁷

Implied in all of this was another homage to Bismarck, who after unifying Germany in 1871 had turned its enemies’ animosities upon themselves. “Our safety depends,” Kennan told the war college students in his lecture the previous December, “on our ability to establish a balance among the hostile or undependable forces of the world.” Adversaries should

spend in conflict with each other, if they must spend it at all, the intolerance and violence and fanaticism which might otherwise be directed against us, [so] that they are thus compelled to cancel each other out and exhaust themselves in internecine conflict in order that the constructive forces, working for world stability, may continue to have the possibility of life.

Such a strategy would achieve containment without overcommitment, and Titoism—the first tangible evidence of hostility among communists—made it seem possible. Smith, now back from three years as ambassador in Moscow, caught Kennan’s meaning precisely when he reminded the Policy Planning Staff, on March 1, that “the Russians fear Titoism above everything else.... [T]he United States does not fear communism if it is not controlled by Moscow and not committed to aggression.”²⁸

But as Davies, together with his staff colleague Ware Adams, reminded Kennan, acting on Smith’s assumption would require shifting the official portrayal of international communism. The Truman administration had been describing it as “a single, coherent, unitary, self-consistent doctrine,” and no doubt Soviet leaders wished that it were. But not all communists were Moscow’s agents. By treating them all as such, Washington’s rhetoric was forcing them into that position. If it could distinguish communism from Russian imperialism, “we would thus ... remove from the communists in China and elsewhere throughout the world a strong force tending to compel them to collaborate with the Soviet Union.” This would give the United States a much more effective weapon “than is the blunderbuss of primitive ‘anti-communism,’ aimed against a vaguely defined, out of date, self-contradictory, and possibly dying, set of political theories.”²⁹

Kennan’s response is not on record, but shortly after returning from Germany at the end of March, he did tell the staff that the United States should do everything possible “to increase the suspicion between the Kremlin and its agents abroad.” Titoism was a “disintegrating force” within international communism and “should be stimulated and encouraged by all devices of propaganda.”³⁰ The problem would be to make this work in a domestic political climate that was growing more hospitable, not less, to rhetorical blunderbusses.

Defending communists of any kind had never been popular in the United States, and the onset of the Cold War had made it much less so. The Truman Doctrine was widely regarded as a declaration of war against communists everywhere. During the 1948 presidential campaign, the president denounced “Henry Wallace and his communists,” while former State Department official Alger Hiss—an old friend of Acheson’s—was charged with spying for the Soviet Union, raising fears that communists had infiltrated the U.S. government. Meanwhile, the pro-Nationalist “China Lobby” was whipping up support for Chiang Kai-shek in Congress and the media: Mao’s triumph, it insisted, would be a disaster for the United States. Acheson had dropped Program A because it unsettled allies. To what extent would he support an even riskier Kennan strategy that—at least in the eyes of domestic critics—attempted to distinguish “good” communists from “bad” ones?³¹

V.

As it happened, Acheson did just that. It was an “obvious interest” of the United States, he commented in February, that Tito survive. Once it became clear that Yugoslavia had stopped assisting the Greek communists, Acheson favored relaxing restrictions on trade with that country, even to the point of allowing the sale of a militarily significant steel mill. That got him into trouble with the new secretary of defense, Louis Johnson—Forrestal had resigned after suffering a nervous breakdown, and then committed suicide. When the word got out that the United States was selling steel mills to communists, Johnson fumed, the resulting furor might sink the Democratic Party’s chances in the next election. Acheson stood his ground, however, won Truman’s approval for the sale, and to Kennan’s relief it went through. The American objective, he suggested at the end of August 1949, should not be to promote democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe but rather to encourage other communists like Tito to follow a nationalist line. Acheson got the point. The Yugoslav dictator might be a son-of-a-bitch, he observed the following month, but he was “our son-of-a-bitch.”³²

Nor did Acheson object to less public methods of undermining Soviet authority in Eastern Europe. Kennan had been content at first to let Tito’s example do that, but with Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination available, it was hard to resist the temptation to speed the process. By 1949 Kennan was helping to set up an ostensibly private National Committee for a Free Europe—actually funded through the OPC—to provide financial support and employment opportunities for Eastern European emigres, as well as anti-Soviet broadcasts to their homelands through its subsidiary, Radio Free Europe. The OPC was also collaborating with “defectors, deserters and escapees” from the region: they were, a Policy Planning Staff paper noted in June, the “most effective agents to destroy the communist myth of the Soviet paradise.” When asked, several months later, about more aggressive initiatives, Kennan replied that “some covert operations should be applied at the appropriate time,” perhaps in Poland even immediately.³³

Did these include the possibility of assassinations? Kennan acknowledged years later that a unit had existed within the OPC “specifically charged with this sort of activity if and when we ever decided to conduct it.” But its chief, Boris Pash, an Army colonel whose military intelligence career went back to the Manhattan Project, had been vague about his authority: “If any such responsibility was written into his charter (and [Pash] couldn’t remember that it was), it was because the list of dirty tricks with which they were charged had been taken over, practically verbatim, from the list of responsibilities of the corresponding division of the wartime O.S.S., which apparently did not preclude this sort of thing.” Kennan was sure “that no assassinations were conducted during our time on the Planning Staff, and [that] the very idea of such a thing was decisively put down by higher authority.”³⁴

The OPC was already at work in Albania. Kennan had endorsed an operation there the previous April but remained unsure about its objectives. Should the United States, working with the British, seek to overthrow the regime of Enver Hoxha, still loyal to Moscow but caught between Tito’s Yugoslavia and the failing communist insurgency in Greece? Should Tito be encouraged to do that? What might the Soviet reaction be? But when Bevin asked Acheson, in September, whether the United States would agree to “bring down” Hoxha, the secretary of state replied—cautiously—in the affirmative. Caution would have been advisable, for over the next three years the OPC and the British secret intelligence service MI6 tried repeatedly to infiltrate agents and even paramilitary forces into Albania, with unvaryingly disastrous results. The principal reason was not Kennan’s insufficient oversight of the OPC, but the fact that MI6’s liaison officer to Wisner’s organization was the spy Kim Philby, who exposed each of the Albanian expeditions to Soviet intelligence and, through them, to Hoxha. Kennan had reason to regret his role in these activities, but the responsibility for their failure went well beyond him.³⁵