Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia

by Benjamin Tromly

Overview

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA committed to supporting Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War Two or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA's Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA's patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192576828
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/19/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Benjamin Tromly is Professor of History at University of Puget Sound, where he teaches Russian and European History. He is the author of Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I: The Many Faces of Russian Anti-Communism
• 1: A Fissile National Community: The Political World of Russian Émigrés
• 2: 'A Political Maze based on the Shifting Sand': the Vlasov Movement and the Gehlen Organization in postwar Germany
• 3: Socialists and Vlasovites: War Memories and a Troubled Cross-Continental Encounter
• Part II: The Transnational Quest for Russian Liberation
• 4: American Visions and Émigré Realities: The American Project to Unify the Russian Exiles
• 5: Builders and Dissectors: Émigré Unification and the Russian Question
• 6: Reluctant Chieftains: The Ascendance of the American Committee for Liberation from Bolshevism
• Part III: The CIA Operational Front
• 7: From Revolution to Provocation: The NTS and CIA Covert Operations
• 8: Spies, Sex, and Balloons: Émigré Activities in Divided Berlin
• 9: The Real Anti-Soviet Russians? Soviet Defectors and the Cold War
• Part IV: The End of the Affair: The Decline of Émigré Anti-Communism
• 10: 'All will be Forgiven': The Soviet Campaign for Return to the Homeland
• 11: Unreliable Allies: The German Crucible and Russian Anti-Communism
• Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"Detailed, well written and accessible to general readers, the book mines rich veins of paradox and complexity." — Gregory Feifer, Times Literary Supplement

"With lively stories from the everyday of espionage, Tromly shows how Cold War spy operations moved between borders and national groups. Scholars of Cold War intelligence, postwar Germany, and the transnational aspects of Russian history will want to read this book." — Seth Bernstein, University of Florida, Gainesville, Canadian Slavonic Papers

"Cold War Exiles and the CIA makes a strong case against covert action programs conducted by inexperienced intelligence officers and supervised by managers overseen by politicians, all seeking outcomes not supported by operational reality." — Studies in Intelligence

"Tromly's book...will remain an essential guide to the murky world of covert operations, anti-Soviet plots, and propaganda in the early Cold War." — Mark Edele, University of Melbourne, Australian Book Review

From the Publisher