CIA’s intervention, however, considered it a great success. Although Kennan had pushed for the agency’s involvement in Italy the previous fall, his Manila telegram and the Lippmann letter suggest that he did not know the full extent of what was going on. When he found out, he rushed to get ahead of what he had not seen coming. From having warned, in mid-March, that Washington was getting Italy horribly wrong, he went to arguing by the end of April that it had gotten Italy brilliantly right—so much so that its actions there should become a model for the future.12
“Political warfare,” Kennan argued in a closely held and therefore unnumbered Policy Planning Staff paper completed early in May, was Clausewitz in peacetime. It employed all means short of war to achieve national objectives. These included overt initiatives like alliances, economic assistance, and “white” propaganda but also the clandestine support of “friendly” foreigners, the use of “black” psychological warfare, and even the encouragement of underground resistance in unfriendly states. The British had long relied on such methods, and Lenin had so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare had become the most effective in history. Americans, in contrast, had traditionally viewed war as an extension of sports, free from any political context at all.
Now, facing global responsibilities and an intensifying conflict with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer afford such innocence. It should not again have to scramble “as we did at the time of the Italian elections.” The Policy Planning Staff had been studying possibilities: secret support for refugee organizations that might become liberation movements if war broke out; strengthening indigenous anticommunists in countries threatened by Moscow’s political warfare; and, “in cases of critical necessity,” direct action to prevent the sabotage of facilities or the capture of key personnel by Kremlin agents. Tight control would be necessary: “One man must be boss.” And he would have to be “answerable to the Secretary of State.”13
What Kennan was proposing now was a sustained covert complement to the Marshall Plan. The United States required an organization that could “do things that very much needed to be done, but for which the government couldn’t take official responsibility.” The model, Davies added, would be something like the British Special Operations Executive or the American Office of Strategic Services in World War II, but it would operate in peacetime, chiefly in Western Europe. Otherwise, “the Marshall Plan would be undone.”14
Where to put such a unit, though? Kennan knew that the State Department could not handle it. He worried that the CIA might act too independently. Could not the NSC provide cover for such a program, perhaps under the leadership of Allen Dulles, an OSS veteran who had been conducting a review of CIA effectiveness? But Dulles wasn’t interested, and the director of central intelligence, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, wasn’t about to relinquish the agency’s jurisdiction. If State would not “go along with CIA operating this political warfare thing,” he snapped at one point, then “[l]et State run it and let it have no connection at all with us.”15 Which, of course, would mean no program at all.
The National Security Council, in mid-June, approved an unwieldy compromise. An Office of Special Projects within the CIA would take over the responsibility for covert operations, but Marshall would nominate its head with Hillenkoetter’s assent. Hillenkoetter would ensure political and military coordination, working through an advisory committee made up of representatives from the Departments of State and Defense. Kennan was skeptical: the new organization, he worried, would be too remote from the conduct of foreign policy, and it would be hard to find the right person to run it. Nonetheless, he advised Marshall to accept the plan. “It is probably the best arrangement we can get at this time.”16
At Kennan’s suggestion, Marshall nominated Frank Wisner, another OSS alumnus now in the State Department, to run the OSP. “I personally have no knowledge of his ability,” Kennan was careful to say, despite the fact that he and Annelise were regular guests at the Wisners’ potluck dinners in Georgetown, and the Wisners were occasional visitors at the Pennsylvania farm. Kennan, in turn, became the State Department representative on the OSP’s advisory committee. He made it clear, at a meeting with Wisner and Hillenkoetter early in August, that he would want “specific knowledge of the objectives of every operation and also of the procedures and methods employed in all cases where those procedures and methods involve political decisions.” By the end of the month, Kennan had approved his first covert operation: it was Project Umpire, a program of clandestine radio broadcasts from the American zone in Germany, beamed toward Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had done so not on State Department stationery but on plain paper, he explained to Lovett: “This means that I am ostensibly acting in a personal capacity, and can, if necessary, be denied by the Secretary.”17
In this way the Policy Planning Staff became—officially at least—the overseer of all covert activities: perhaps with Kennan’s concerns in mind, the Office of Special Projects was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination. “If effectively conducted,” he wrote in a letter drafted for Lovett, “the new organization’s activities might well enhance possibilities for achieving American objectives by means short of war.” But the fundamental premise behind the OPC, Kennan reminded his superior a few weeks later, had been that “while this Department should take no responsibility for [Wisner’s] operations, we should nevertheless maintain a firm guiding hand.” As late as January 1949, Kennan was encouraging Wisner to think expansively: “Every day makes more evident the importance of the role which will have to be played by covert operations if our national interests are to be adequately protected.”18
Kennan had few if any moral or legal qualms about such activities. He had maintained contacts with the anti- Hitler resistance in Germany before the United States entered the war, and had helped the OSS monitor espionage activities in Lisbon during it. He facilitated the immigration of German diplomats and spymasters who might have useful information about the U.S.S.R., even if they had worked for the Nazis: to leave them in Germany, he believed, risked having Soviet agents kill or co-opt them. He had been advising the Washington intelligence establishment since returning from Moscow in 1946, emphasizing particularly the need to work closely with Russian expatriates. He had called, in his first National War College lecture, for the pursuit of strategic objectives “with all the measures at our disposal,” and he had acknowledged, shortly after the formation of the CIA in 1947, that it might be essential to “fight fire with fire.” When he spoke to the Canadians about a “dialectical” approach that would appear to reflect “arbitrary inconsistency,” he had Lenin’s example of political warfare in mind. Setting up the OPC, therefore, was more a continuation of past practices than a dramatic innovation for him.19
It was also one of many Policy Planning Staff responsibilities: after the OPC was established, “I scarcely paid any attention to it.” That, Kennan was sure in retrospect, was “probably the worst mistake I ever made in government.” The plan had been, Davies recalled, that secret operations should not be entrusted to an enormous bureaucracy: “Well, O.P.C. went the other way.” By 1952 it had forty-seven overseas stations, its budget was seventeen times what it had been in 1949, and it employed twenty times the number of people. Convinced that he had created a monstrosity, Kennan came to regret “all part that I or the staff took in any of this. I should never have accepted for the PPS the duty of giving political advice to Wisner’s outfit. The fact that we are all prone to error does not comfort me greatly when I think about it.”20
Kennan’s regrets, in retrospect, seem disproportionate. He did propose giving the CIA a covert action capability, but it seems unlikely, had he not done so, that someone else would not have suggested this, or that the agency would not have thought of it on its own.21 “The feeling in Washington,” Dean Rusk recalled, was that “the Soviet Union was already operating with such methods. It was a mean, dirty, back-alley struggle, and if the U.S. had stayed out it would have found out what Leo Durocher [the legendary manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers] meant when he said ‘nice guys finish last.’” That said, there was one aspect of Kennan’s CIA involvement that made no more sense then than it does now. This was his continuing belief that he could do everything himself—that he could run covert operations against the Soviet Union, while conducting overt negotiations with the same country if they ever got under way, while planning all other aspects of American foreign policy. Annelise, as usual, was more practical: “There isn’t the possibility in one man to do all this.”22
