George F. Kennan: An American Life (56 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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“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.”
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One of the reasons Kennan pushed so hard for control over covert activities may have been his sense that he was losing control of the rapidly evolving U.S. relationship with Western Europe. The minimalist strategy he advocated in 1947 had rested on two interlocking assumptions: that (a) the promise and provision of Marshall Plan aid would be all that was necessary to reassure the Europeans, because (b) the Soviet Union had no intention of attacking them. The first proposition depended upon the second, for if the Red Army ever did strike, then American economic assistance, however generous it might be, would do the Europeans little good. They had no means of defending themselves; nor had the United States offered them any.

These assumptions, in turn, depended on Kennan’s proficiency as a mind reader. They would hold up only if he had accurately sensed what European and Soviet leaders were thinking. If the Europeans began to show nervousness, or if the U.S.S.R. began to exhibit aggressiveness, all bets would be off. Both developments had occurred by the time Kennan returned to his office at the end of April 1948. “As you know, I came in late on the work which is being done,” he wrote Marshall and Lovett on the twenty-ninth. But he had now familiarized himself with the situation and consulted Bohlen, who agreed with what he had to say. The problem was not doubt about American support if the Soviet Union attacked—the presence of U.S. occupation forces in Germany left no reason for Europeans to worry about that. Rather, it reflected uncertainty about what to do if that happened. All that was needed were “realistic staff talks” to reassure them.
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By this time, though, top-secret negotiations on the possibility of a North Atlantic collective defense treaty had already taken place with the British and the Canadians. Meanwhile Marshall had secured the agreement of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to sponsor a “Vandenberg Resolution” confirming congressional approval. Kennan’s proposed reconsideration went nowhere. His frustration showed while he was in Ottawa at the end of May: did the Europeans not realize that “if the United States gave this guarantee, it would be doing something which would be in the interests of Western Europe but not necessarily in the interests of the United States, since the United States could, at any time, make a deal with the Soviet Union?” “We naturally took him up on this and he withdrew from this exposed position,” Escott Reid, the Canadian assistant under secretary for external affairs, reported to his superiors. It was indeed exposed, with the Smith-Molotov exchange having failed. The exchange left Reid with the uneasy sense “that if you scratch almost any American long enough, you will find an isolationist.”
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Kennan was no isolationist, but as Sir Oliver Franks, now the British ambassador in Washington, recalled, he did tend to see things from an “Anglo-Saxon” perspective: “All those other chaps were rather more difficult. Therefore stick with what you know.” The planning process, in Kennan’s absence, had gone well beyond that. “I have always reproached myself,” he later admitted, “for not taking my own views to the General and making more of an issue of it.” His door still led directly into Marshall’s office, but “I’m afraid I didn’t use it enough. I was always so afraid of abusing this privilege.... I think that I may have been too hesitant [and] that I should have.”
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So what might Kennan have said, had he been bolder? “Look, for goodness sake, let well enough alone, nobody is going to attack you,” he remembered wanting to tell the Europeans.

With his State Department colleagues, he would have been blunter:

Finally, he would have questioned the cultivation of Vandenberg. The Republicans were jealous, Kennan believed. They had supported the Marshall Plan but now wanted a plan of their own upon which they could put their stamp. Such people did not deserve “admiring applause every time they could be persuaded by the State Department to do something sensible.”
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As far as we know, Kennan made none of these arguments—at least not openly—within the department. It’s safe to assume, though, that they lay behind the questions he did raise while participating in talks with British, French, Canadian, Belgian, and Dutch diplomats in Washington during the late summer of 1948. Might not the building of military strength distract attention from European economic recovery and the eventual unification of the entire continent? Could there not be two loosely linked alliances—a dumbbell arrangement—made up of the Americans and Canadians at one end, and the British, the French, and the Benelux countries at the other? If there had to be a single alliance, should its membership not be limited to those countries? If it were not, how many countries could the United States afford to defend? There was more than a hint of desperation in these queries, and Hickerson, the principal American negotiator, had no trouble deflecting them. “I consider that a compliment,” he responded when told years later that Kennan considered him the State Department colleague with whom he had disagreed most. “Thank you.”
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There were still moments, though, when the policy process worked as Kennan thought it should. One came in late June 1948, after members of the Cominform, meeting in Bucharest, openly denounced the Yugoslav Communist Party. Under Josef Broz Tito’s leadership, they claimed, the Yugoslavs were pursuing a policy unfriendly to the U.S.S.R. and in violation of Marxist principles. Because Stalin controlled the Cominform, the complaint carried weight. Kennan had been predicting trouble in Eastern Europe for some time, but he thought it would come in the north, not in the Balkans. He missed the hints of Tito’s heresy conveyed in American diplomatic reporting from the region but rallied quickly, taking only two days to complete PPS/35, “The Attitude of This Government Toward Events in Yugoslavia.” It was the most immediately effective policy paper he ever produced.
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Unusually for Kennan, it was brief—only four and a quarter typed pages—but it compressed a lot into that space. It placed the Cominform’s condemnation of Tito within a historical perspective, while projecting its significance into the future. At one point Kennan distilled into just three sentences his Gibbon-inspired doubts about the stability of empires, his belief that an internationalist ideology could not indefinitely command national loyalties, and his conviction that Stalin, for all his craftiness, had overreached: