Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-mp689 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T17:35:59.646Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor Alliance (NTS), United States Intelligence Agencies and Post-War Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2019

Benjamin Tromly*
Affiliation:
University of Puget Sound – History, Tacoma, Washington, 98416-0001, United States

Abstract

This article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The author would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for Contemporary European History and participants in ‘From Hot War to Cold War: Transnational Trajectories’, a workshop at Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies at Columbia University, who commented on an earlier version of this paper. Research for this article was made possible by Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Columbia University Libraries, and University of Puget Sound.

References

1 Summary of Proposed Plan for Aerosol, 1–8, United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Second Release, Entry ZZ-19 (Subject Files), 230/86/25/03, box 24, AESAURUS/AENOBLE (henceforth AESAURUS), vol. 1, pt. 1; Su: REDBIRD/Summary of projects for [redacted], 30 June 1951, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.

2 Otchetnyi doklad Predsedatelia Soiuza za trekhletie svoikh polnomochii, ot 24-1-1952 goda, 12, Georgetown University Archives and Special Collections, Victor M. Baydalakoff Collection (henceforth Baydalakoff Collection), box 1, fol. 9.

3 Transmittal of Report of Meeting between CABOCHE 7, CACCOLA 2 [BLANK] to Chiefs of Foreign Divisions M and S and Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, 4 Dec. 1951, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.

4 The best account of the emergence of liberation policy is Mitrovich, Gregory, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. See also Grose, Peter Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000)Google Scholar; Prados, John, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006)Google Scholar; Stöver, Bernd, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus: amerikanische Liberation Policy im Kalten Krieg 1947–1991 (Köln: Böhlau, 2002)Google Scholar; Kovrig, Bennett, The Myth of Liberation: East-Central Europe in U.S. Diplomacy and Politics since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

5 National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, Washington, 18 June 1948, document 292, FRUS, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292, (last visited 2 Jan. 2017).

6 Heuser, Beatrice, ‘Covert Actions within British and American Concepts of Containment, 1948–1951’, in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945–1951 (London: Routledge, 1992), 7778Google Scholar.

7 Philby, Kim, My Silent War (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 152Google Scholar.

8 British involvement with NTS remains poorly studied, in part due to restrictions on archival access. See Tromly, Benjamin, ‘The Making of a Myth: The National Labor Alliance, Russian Émigrés, and Cold War Intelligence Activities’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 18, 1 (2016), 104 n. 113Google Scholar.

9 Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin; Borhi, László, ‘Rollback, Liberation, Containment, or Inaction? U.S. Policy and Eastern Europe in the 1950s’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 1, 3 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Corke, Sarah-Jane, US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare (London: Routledge, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 This is from Christopher Simpson’s description of US exploitation of Ukrainian émigrés in Simpson, Christopher, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 173Google Scholar.

11 See Mikkonen, Simo, ‘Exploiting the Exiles: Soviet Émigrés in U.S. Cold War Strategy’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 14, 2 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Antoshin, A. V., Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’ (seredina 1940-kh-seredina-1960-kh gg.) (Ekaterinburg: Izd. Ural’skogo universiteta, 2008)Google Scholar; the pieces collected in Lynn, Katalin Kádár, ed., The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare: Cold War Organizations Sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/Free Europe Committee (Saint Helena, CA: Helena History Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

12 Tromly, ‘The Making of a Myth’; Albanese, David C. S., ‘“It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian”: The National Union of Labor Solidarists, Nationalism, and Human Intelligence Operations in the Cold War’, Intelligence and National Security, 32, 6 (2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As will become clear, the argument that Western governments deliberately fostered ‘hate-based nationalism’ is flawed. In Search of a Lesser Evil: Anti-Soviet Nationalism and the Cold War, PhD diss., Northeastern University, 2015, 1213Google Scholar. See also Antoshin, Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’, 112–8, 205–13.

13 The main US government sources are files released in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, Second Release (RG 263), and Records of the Army Staff (RG 319), Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Records of the Investigative Records Repository (IRR), both located in NARA.

14 See Reisman, Michael, ‘Governments-in-Exile: Notes toward a Theory of Formation and Operation’, in Yossi Shain, ed., Governments-in-exile in Contemporary World Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 239241Google Scholar.

15 Williams, Robert C., ‘European Political Emigrations: A Lost Subject’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 12, 2 (1970), 142CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raeff, Marc, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 44Google Scholar; Andreyev, Catherine and Savický, Ivan, Russia Abroad: Prague and the Russian Diaspora, 1918–1938 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xiiixvGoogle Scholar.

16 Robinson, Paul, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 131148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Wraga, Ryszard, ‘Russian Emigration after Thirty Years’ Exile’, The Eastern Quarterly, 6, 1 (1951), 24Google Scholar.

18 The history of the Alliance’s pre-Second World War origins remains poorly explored. See Klimovich, Liudmila, ‘Narodno-trudovoi soiuz rossiiskikh solidaristov: rannye stranitsy istorii’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 91 (May 2013), at http://www.nlobooks.ru/node/4018 (last visited 1 Aug. 2015)Google Scholar; Kiselev, A. F., ed., Politicheskaia istoriia russkoi emigratsii, 1920–1940 gg.: dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Vlados, 1999), ch. 6, pt. 1, at http://www.rus-sky.com/history/library/emigration/index.htm (last visited 3 Aug. 2017)Google Scholar; Andreyev, Catherine, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 185187CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robinson, The White Russian Army, 157–64, 202–5.

19 Rogger, Hans, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 See Dvinov, Boris L., Politics of the Russian Emigration (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1955), 115118Google Scholar. Dvinov’s account might be biased by his identity as a Social Democratic opponent of the NTS, but his account is well sourced.

21 Prianishnikov, B. V., Novopokolentsy (Silver Spring, MD: Multilingual Typesetting, 1986), 3944, 113–8Google Scholar.

22 A perhaps surprisingly candid account appears in the memoirs of the NTS’s longstanding leader. Baidalakov, V. M., Da vozvelichits’ia Rossiia, da pogibnut nashi imena: vospominaniia predsedatelia NTS: 1930–1960 gg. (Moscow: Avuar Konsalting, 2002), 117Google Scholar.

23 Betr: National-Sozialer Bund der Neuen Russischen Generation, Geheime Staatspolizei to Auswärtiges Amt, 7 June 1938, 1–3, Auswärtiges Amt-Politisches Archiv (henceforth AA-PA) R-104377.

24 Georg Leibbrandt of the Ostministerium had approved of the invitation extended to the Russians. Baidalakov, Da vozvelichits’ia Rossiia, 26.

25 Ausarbeitung über due russische Emigration (Stand März 1954), no author indicated, 34, AA-PA B12/455.

26 The best source on the organisation’s wartime plans is Boris Prianishnikov, a longstanding NTS member who supported the alliance’s wartime activities but left the organisation after the war. Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 27–9. See also ‘NTS–The Russian Solidarist Movement’, 10 Jan. 1951, US Department of State External Research Staff, Series, 76, 1–5; Chuev, G., Spetssluzhby Tret’ego Reikha, book 1 (Moscow: Neva, 2003), 254273Google Scholar; Chuev, Spetssluzhby Tret’ego Reikha, book 2, 232–5 and 242–8.

27 Beyda, Oleg and Petrov, Igor, ‘The Soviet Union’, in David Stahel, ed., Joining Hitler’s Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 381382Google Scholar; Zhukov, Dmitrii and Kovtun, Ivan, ‘Boris Khol’mston-Smyslovskii i NTS: Istoriia sotrudnichestva i protivostoianiia’, in A. Martynov, ed., Istoriia otechestvennoi kollaboratsii: materialy i issledovaniia (Moscow: Staraia Basmannaia, 2017), 297–233Google Scholar; Radchenko, Yuri, ‘“We Emptied our Magazines into Them”: The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and the Holocaust in Generalbezirk Charkow, 1941–1943’, Yad Vashem Studies, 41, 1 (2013), 6398Google Scholar; Makarov, V. G., ‘Poruchik SD. Nikolai Rutchenko-Rutych i ego nepredskazuemoe proshloe’, Rodina, 3 (2007), 8387Google Scholar; ‘Iz direktivy NKVD SSSR no. 136 ob aktivizatsii agenturno-operativnoi raboty po prosecheniiu podryvnoi deiatel’nosti zarubezhnoi antisovetskoi organizatsii NTSNP, 19 March 1943’, in S. V. Stepashin and V. P. Iampol’skii, eds., Organy gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti SSSR v Velikoi Otechestvennoi voine: sbornik dokumentov, vol. 4, book 1, Sekrety operatsii “Tsitadel’”: 1 ianvaria-30 iiunia 1943 goda (Moscow: Kniga i biznes, 1995), 311Google Scholar.

28 Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 158–9.

29 These activities remain poorly studied. For pro-NTS accounts, see ibid. 146–81; Il’inskii, P. D., ‘Tri goda pod nemetskoi okkupatsiei v Belorussii (Zhizn’ Polotskogo okruga 1941–1944 godov)’, in K. M. Aleksandrov, ed., Pod nemtsami: vospominaniia, svidetel’stva, dokumenty. Istoriko-dokumental’nyi sbornik (St. Petersburg: Skriptorium, 2011), 42138Google Scholar.

30 See Dallin, Alexander, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1957), 526Google Scholar; Antoshin, Rossiiskie emigranty v usloviiakh ‘kholodnoi voiny’, 206.

31 For the published memoirs of such wartime recruits of the NTS, see Budnitskii, O. V. and Zelenina, G. S., eds., Svershilos’-prishli Nemtsy! Ideinyi kollaboratsionizm v SSSR v period Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2014)Google Scholar. See also Budnitskii, O. V., ‘The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42’, Kritika, 15, 4 (2014)Google Scholar.

32 See excerpt from SI-05606 (1944), NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-18, CIA Name Files – 2nd Release, 230/86/23/04, box 77, Viktor Larionoff (henceforth Larionoff), vol. 1. See also an NTS report from 1944 or 1945, seemingly genuine, that is reproduced in Krivosheev, S. A., KGB Protiv NTS (Moscow: Trovant, 2015), 2636Google Scholar.

33 For a useful overview, see Gross, Jan T., ‘Themes for a Social History of War Experience and Collaboration’, in István Deák et al., eds., The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and Its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1535CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 The best overall account remains Elliot, Mark R., Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America’s Role in their Repatriation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

35 For NTS criticism of the ‘cacophony’ of liberal democracy, see Kolin, A., ‘Strategiia Solidarizma’, Volia, 2 (1949), 19Google Scholar.

36 V. D. Poremskii, who had worked under the Germans as an instructor of Russian propagandists during the war, was arrested by US military government but quickly released in 1945. There is no evidence that US authorities ‘instructed’ Poremskii to reorganise the core of the NTS, as a later German state security report alleged. Information zu der Emigrantenorganisation NTS, no author indicated, 19 Feb. 1968, 4 in Zentralarchiv des Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic-Central Archive, BStU-ZA), MfS AFO 1187, 000084. On the detention and interrogation of N. F. Shits by British field police in 1946, see NARA, RG 319, IRR, XE065662, Sheets, Nikolai, obtained through FOIA request.

37 The creation of this camp followed a dramatic evacuation to the West from Thuringia when the territory was handed over to the Soviets in a planned territorial revision. A work on the camp by a former resident and NTS member is Tribukh, S. V., Menkhegof—lager’ russkikh DiPi, 1945–1949 (US: n.p., 1986)Google Scholar, Hoover Institution Library and Archives (HILA), Constantin W. Boldyreff Papers (henceforth Boldyreff Papers), box 3.

38 Prianishnikov, Novopokolentsy, 226.

39 Like many Soviet wartime exiles, Ostrovskii took on a new surname (Romanov) in order to avoid repatriation to the USSR. See B. V. Prianishnikov, ‘O revoliutsionnoi deiatel’nosti Natsional’no-trudovogo soiuza’, New York, 1957, 33, HILA, Boris V. Prianishnikov papers, box 5, fol. 13.

40 Memorandum re. Repatriation of Russians, M. F. Iuriev, A. V. Lampe, General Daniloff, General Meandrov and C. W. Boldyreff to General Dwight Eisenhower, Commander in Chief, Allied Expeditionary Force, 16 June 1945, Boldyreff Papers, box 7. The list of signees includes at least two prominent military collaborators (white general A. V. von Lampe and Vlasovite M. A. Meandrov).

41 Boldyrev’s file at the Hoover Institution contains his CIC and FBI files. Major Philip Steers, Jr., QMC, contacts with Russian Liaison Officers, Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Investigation, George N. Liske to Kassel CIC Subdistrict, 29 Sept. 1945, Boldyreff Papers, box 7. Steers had been ‘instructed in person on the 17 July 1945 (sic) by General Woods, of General Eisenhower’s Staff, to permit the Russian Liason (sic) officers to visit only certain parts’ of Mönchehof. Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Seymour Milbert, Sp. Agent, 1 Aug. 1945, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.

42 Tribukh, Menkhegof, 38.

43 Balelis, Tomas, ‘Living in the DP Camp: Lithuanian Refugees in the West, 1944–1954’, in Peter Gatrell and Nick Baron, eds., Warlands: Population Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet-East European Borderlands, 1945–50 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2547CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Tribukh, Menkhegof, 24–33. For the building of community life among DPs as a whole, see Wyman, Mark, DP: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Philadelphia & London: Associated University Press, 1988), 106130Google Scholar.

45 Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, CIC Special Agents Robert H. Swezey and William K. Russell, 5 May 1948, 1, 6, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.

46 See Holian, Anna, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 120152CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kochavi, Arieh J., Post-Holocaust Politics: Britain, the United States & Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

47 Biulleten’ P. P., 1, 4 Mar. 1948, Paris, 5, in Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen, 01-098 Tarasova, kor. 5.

48 Ibid.

49 Richelson, Jeffrey, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 215217Google Scholar.

50 Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism, 134–6.

51 Gull’s Operational Possibilities, 19 July 1946, 2–3, Larionoff, vol. 1.

52 Front Saint to Saint, AMZON, 12 Aug. 1946, Larionoff, vol. 1. On the impact of interwar cases of Soviet penetration of émigré organisations, see Wraga, ‘Russian Emigration after Thirty Years’ Exile’, 26.

53 SC, FBM to SC, AMZON, 22 Jan. 1947, Larionoff, vol. 1.

54 Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, 2–3.

55 See collated information from CIC document marked ‘Internal Review Slip’ on Boldyrev, 22 Aug. 1946, Boldyreff Papers, box 7. The NTS has never explained adequately the anomaly of a construction firm in occupied Soviet territory and Nazi Germany headed by a Russian émigré. Years later, Boldyrev claimed that he had taken over the firm from white émigré A. I. Ermolov, who benefitted from a friendship with ‘a young German captain’, perhaps Hans Guderian. See Boldyrev’s response to Blowback by Christopher Simpson, n. d., Boldyreff Papers, box 7.

56 Zhukov and Kovtun, ‘Boris Khol’mston-Smyslovskii i NTS’, 325; Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, 8.

57 See Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Seymour Gilbert, Special Agent of the 75th CIC Department, 2–3 Aug. 1948, 7, Boldyreff Papers, box 7.

58 Ibid.

59 On the professionalisation of post-war international relief workers, see Cohen, Gerard Daniel, In War’s Wake: Europe’s Displaced Persons in the Postwar Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5878CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gemie, Sharif, Humbert, Laure and Reid, Fiona, Outcast Europe: Refugees and Relief Workers in an Era of Total War, 1936–48 (London: Continuum, 2012), 198Google Scholar.

60 Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, Su: Constantin Boldyreff, 7.

61 Ibid. Andrew Janco argues that screenings removed NTS members for their role in hiding Soviet DPs from repatriation. Janco, Andrew, Soviet ‘Displaced Persons’ in Europe, 1941–1951, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2012, 231234Google Scholar. The screening of DPs is discussed in Cohen, In War’s Wake, 35–57.

62 “V srede soiuza’ in Tsirkuliar Ispol’nitel’nogo Biuro Soveta (‘Dorogoi drug’ ot 18 ianvaria 1948 g’), Sbornik reshenii soveta NTS, 1946–1957 (Frankfurt / Main: Izdanie soveta soiuza, 1985), at http://ntsrs.ru/content/sbornik-resheniy-soveta-nts-1946-57 (last visited 14 July 2013)Google Scholar.

63 Memorandum, CIC special agents William K. Russell and Robert H. Sweeney, CIC Region III (Sub-Region Kassel), 7 Jan. 1948, 2, Boldyreff Papers, box 7; Janco, Soviet ‘Displaced Persons’, 227.

64 Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov, ‘“Stiller als Wasser, Tiefer als Gras”: Zur Migrationgeschichte der Russischen Displaced Persons in Deutschland Nach Dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Arbeitspapiere und Materialien–Universität Bremen, 68, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa an der Universität Bremen, 2005, 42.

65 For an expression of the post-war NTS party line on the Second World War, see Artemov, Aleksandr, ‘NTS i osvoboditel’noe dvizhenie vremen voiny’, Posev, 3 (1999), at http://www.posev.ru/files/nts-about/ne7006.htm (last visited 15 Aug. 2014)Google Scholar.

66 See the sixteenth chapter of ‘Skhema natsional’no-trudovogo stroia 1942’, at www.ntsrs.ru/content/programmnye-dokumenty.nts (last visited 24 Apr. 2013). Post-war efforts of NTS members to attribute this demand for the deportation of Russian Jews to Nazi pressure seem unconvincing given the numerous anti-Semitic references found in pre-war Alliance writings. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration, 139–40, 157–67.

67 For one example of how the Solidarists constructed the right and left as external and equidistant entities, see Kolin, ‘Strategiia Solidarizma’, 25.

68 Post-war suppression of memory is discussed in Tony Judt, ‘The Past is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe’, in Deák et al. The Politics of Retribution in Europe, 293–324.

69 Kulyk, Volodymyr, ‘Ukrainian Displaced Persons in Germany and Austria after the Second World War’, in Reiner Ohliger, Karen Schönwälder and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos, eds., European Encounters: Migrants, Migration, and European Societies since 1945 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 226Google Scholar.

70 Extract from Russian Reactionaries, Hq 3rd USA Ac/S G-2, 5 July 1946, NARA, RG 319, IRR, D246511, Victor Baidalokov, obtained through FOIA request. On Redlikh and Kaminskii, see Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration, 190–1.

71 Protokoly s’ezda Soveta NTS v dekabre 1950 goda, 19, Baydalakoff Collection, box 1, fol. 1.

72 Protokol zakliuchitel’nogo poslevoegennogo zasedaniia 16.1.1949, 2, Baydalakoff Collection, box 1, fol. 1.

73 Ibid.

74 National Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, Washington, 18 June 1948, document 292, FRUS, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d292 (last visited 2 Jan. 2017).

75 On Kennan’s role in reevaluating the Russian emigration, see Grose, Operation Rollback, 1–8, 87–99. Although details are sparse, it seems likely that the British began to back the NTS’s operations in 1949, in part by funding German nets to aid propaganda distribution in the Eastern zone and helping it establish the ‘Hamburg Committee for Aid to Russian Refugees’ which sought to encourage Soviet personnel to defect to the West. Narrative Summary of AIS Relationship with NTS, n.d., 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.

76 CIA (OSO & OPC)/State Department Talks with SIS/Foreign Office: VI. Russian Emigre Groups, 24 Apr. 1951, 1–2, NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-19, 230/86/25/02, box 13, vol. 20, AERODYNAMIC: OPERATIONS.

77 Project Outline, 4.

78 The confusing formulation was followed with the more baffling comment that the economic program of the NTS was ‘exactly like the Communist Party program today’, a clear sign of the limits of agency knowledge on the exiles. NTS (National Labor Union), 9.

79 On US ideology and liberation policy, see Heuser, ‘“Covert Actions within British and American Concepts of Containment’, 67–8; Foglesong, David S., ‘Roots of “Liberation”: American Images of the Future of Russia in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’, The International History Review, 21, 1 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 See Breitman, Richard and Goda, Norman J. W., Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 2010), 7883Google Scholar.

81 Cited in Albanese, ‘“It Takes a Russian to Beat a Russian”’, 785.

82 CIA (OSO & OPC)/State Department Talks, 2.

83 AEROSOL/Implementation of Project CARCASS, Chiefs of Foreign Divisions S and M to Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, 21 Aug. 1951, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1. See also an account by Ryszard Wraga, a close observer of the exiles with many NTS contacts. NTS, report (evidently for French intelligence), 11 Oct. 1951, HILA, Ryszard Wraga Papers, box 4, fol. 6.

84 Memorandum for the Officer in Charge, 52.

85 Cf. Iz direktivy NKVD SSSR no. 136, 308–12.

86 NTS (National Labor Union), 11.

87 Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, Su: Interview of White Russian Leaders, 25 Apr. 1948, NARA, RG 319, Entry 134A (Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers - Impersonal Files), 22348387, 270/84/20/02, box 68 (henceforth Vlassow Group), fol. 1.

88 Romanov, Evgenii, V bor’be za Rossiiu: vospominaniia (Moscow: Golos, 1999), 106Google Scholar. NTS’s activities in East Germany are examined in Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus, 524–36.

89 NTS (National Labor Union), 12.

90 Protokol utrennogo zasedaniia, 12-go ianvaria 1949 g., Baydalakoff, box 1, fol. 1.

91 Stöver, Die Befreiung vom Kommunismus, 523–4.

92 Project Outline, 4, 28 Aug. 1950, NARA, RG 263, Entry ZZ-19 (Subject Files, Second Release), 230/86/26/01, box 58, QKDROOP; Otchetnyi doklad Predsedatelia Soiuza, 12.

93 In espionage argot, an ‘illegal’ agent is one operating without official cover. Discussions with Mr. Angleton and [ ] regarding NTS, a report sent to Chief, FDS, 14 Sept. 1950, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.

94 Memorandum from SR/West to Chief, SR Division, 7 Jan. 1952, 1, AESAURUS, vol. 1, pt. 1.

95 Recommendations on Utilization of the Russian Emigration, 26 Apr. 1950, 4, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty: Cold War History Project e-Dossier, 32, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive (henceforth Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty), at http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/104/radio-free-europe-and-radio-liberty (last visited 9 Sept. 2017).

96 Grose, Operation Rollback, 179–87.

97 See Wilford, Hugh, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and the scholarship gathered in Laville, Helen and Wilford, Hugh eds., The US Government, Citizen Groups and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar.

98 Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (NY: Penguin Books, 2006)Google Scholar. See also Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: A.A. Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1999), 182249Google Scholar.