Book Review

Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain
By Peter Grose
Houghton-Mifflin Company, 2000

Reviewed by Brian J. Auten, Ph.D. Candidate, For Intelligence Forum

Peter Grose's Operation Rollback will find a secure niche with any professors or instructors looking for a solid, introductory text on the offensive aspects of US policy toward the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early Cold War period. In his book, Grose outlines the origins of US thinking and planning behind "political warfare"; that is, the use of exile organizations, influence-buying, sabotage, and propaganda for the purpose of unsettling or, in the extreme, overthrowing Soviet power behind the Iron Curtain. Grose weaves a fascinating tale around an extraordinary cast of characters: statesmen, Congressmen, military officers, public officials, as well as private citizens, Émigrés and political exiles. Despite this sheer number of participants, though, the book's predominant focus is on George Kennan's concept of "counterpressure" (orienting one's activities to physically and psychologically push back against the Soviet Union), the initial operationalization of this concept and its eventual "mutation" (210) as a result of ideologically-charged domestic politics.

Operation Rollback is divided into six sections: (1) a prologue on Kennan, covering his articulation of containment in the Long Telegram and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" as well as the Lippman and Burnham critiques of containment; (2) an outline of World War II intelligence services, the cooperation of these services during wartime with partisan forces, and the haphazard utilization of these resistance networks against the Soviets in the immediate postwar environment; (3) a flashback narrative covering the Washington DC ideological scene during the New Deal, including a short history of Soviet penetration of the Roosevelt administration and VENONA; (4) an examination of the evolution of "political warfare" in the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC); (5) a run-down of OPC's political operations, including work with exiles and US/European intellectuals (like the Congress of Cultural Freedom); and finally, (6) an overview at the reasons behind the conceptual movement from "counterpressure" against the Soviet Union to "rollback" in the early-to-mid 1950's.

Looking at this structure, Grose's overarching argument is readily discernible — the OPC as an instrument of US "political warfare" was the intersection of Kennan's "counterpressure" concept with the OSS (and SOE) secret intelligence/special operations experience from the Second World War.

Unfortunately, Grose abruptly interrupts his own argument with his section on the ideological composition of the Roosevelt administration and the issue of pre-war and wartime Soviet intelligence penetration. In Chapter Two, Grose provides an excellent introduction of (albeit unsuccessful) pre-OPC resistance activity involving Baltic peoples, Ukrainians, and Russians in the immediate postwar environment, but he does not return to the issue of "political warfare" and partisan organizations until Chapter Five. The storyline, therefore, jumps back chronologically from 1946-47 to the early 1930's at the turn of a single page. Grose may have planned Chapters Three and Four as a means of clearly contrasting the Roosevelt and Truman administrations' views toward the Soviet Union, as well as to provide some historical context for the political and ideological battles of the late 1940's and early 1950's, but in this reviewer's opinion, the section digresses from the book's central focus.

This reviewer was especially interested in Grose's description and analysis of the strategic ferment within which Kennan's ideas on "political warfare" arose; namely, from where did the ideas for utilizing Émigré and exile organizations for strategic effect originate? State? SANACC? NSC? Private citizens? On pages 94-95, Grose explains that throughout 1947, many in and out of government evaluated the potential use of Émigrés (the former OSS'ers Frank Lindsay-Charles Thayer presented an unconventional warfare plan in September, military intelligence reports on partisan warfare landed on Kennan's PPS desk throughout the year, as well as early CIA analyses). If we also take into consideration Evan Thomas' The Very Best Men, Frank Wisner was busy during the summer of 1947 in Europe with the Office of Occupied Territories and, upon his return that autumn, set up a Study Group on "Utilization of Refugees for the USSR in US National Interest" (Thomas, 24-25). The Study Group's work was apparently turned into a Policy Planning Staff Memorandum with the same name and, in March 1948, passed to SANACC and CIA for implementation. (Miscamble, 183). It is unclear though, even in Grose's work, how much overlap existed between outside plans, Wisner's Study Group conclusions, PPS 22/1, the ideas articulated by Kennan in the amazing May 4, 1948 "political warfare" memorandum (96-97), and the Émigré-based activities eventually performed and/or supported by OPC (including Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty). Grose demonstrates, using material from the FRUS intelligence volume, that Wisner's Study Group and Kennan's staff were working along similar lines. According to Grose, Kennan actually asked Lovett if he would "rein in" Wisner's group (109), but it would make for good follow-up to check for cross-pollination. All-in-all, there is still more clarification needed to completely understand the evolution of Kennan's thinking behind the use of exile organizations for "political warfare." It is a difficult subject to analyze, considering the lack of declassified source material as well as the politically-charged atmosphere because of the issue of using Émigrés who were either former Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Allegedly, the use of Émigrés and exiles ties closely together with the operation called BLOODSTONE, so this reviewer looks forward to any new discoveries in the material recently released through the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG).

One surprising aspect of Grose's book is his continual representation of a discrete "Rollback" with a capital R. He calls the early Eastern European and Soviet Émigré groups as the "original shock troops of Rollback" (220). He argues that Kennan's original concept of "counterpressure" transformed around the election of 1952 into "the conservative battle cry of Rollback" (210). He even refers to "authentic records of the Rollback operations." (187). While Grose is careful to differentiate between Kennan's "political warfare" approach and the later use of "liberation" as a partisan instrument for attacking what was believed to be an overly-defensive foreign policy strategy, his consistent use of "Rollback" to describe what in reality was a multitude of various "rollbacks" is disconcerting. In this reviewer's mind, the title of the book suffers from this problem as well — it infers that "rollback" was a single, cohesive operation ("Rollback") rather than a host of approaches that evolved over time.

Grose demonstrates his skill as a writer by deftly integrating the deluge of recently-released primary and secondary source material. And, as with his magisterial biography of Allen Dulles, Gentleman Spy, he tells the story with flair. Unlike Gentleman Spy, though, Operation Rollback is a fairly short book that covers a lot of territory. As a result, knowledgeable readers may find much of the material has been provided in more detail elsewhere. Graduate students and scholars familiar with the subject might find Grose's presentation too light or basic for their tastes.

Even so, lecturers should find little difficulty in spicing up their talks with anecdotes from Grose's text and graduate students desiring a firmer background in postwar US intelligence history and/or early covert action will find the footnotes to be a singularly useful road map for their own further research. For a class of undergraduates, however, Grose's book is highly recommended. It is not hard at all to envision students in a lower-division "History of the Cold War" course really enjoying selected portions or even the whole of Operation Rollback. Both groups are unfortunately faced with the book's most glaring omission — it lacks a bibliography or a bibliographic essay. Despite these criticisms, Grose still provides the layman, as well as students of American foreign policy and American intelligence history, with a great, one-stop introduction of "rollback" in the early Cold War.

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