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The 1960s: Spies and Spying

March 27, 2018 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

The 1960s begin with attention centered on the U-2 spy incident. You can read all about that here.

1961 is also busy. President Eisenhower leaves office with a memorable speech, and JFK takes office. One of his first actions was the disastrous Bay of Pigs. You can read about these events here.

1962

Oct. 16, 1962 – Oct. 28, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis begins. It ends nearly a  month later when President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev agree that the Soviet missiles and troops than have been sitting in Cuba would be withdrawn.

1963

May 1, 1963: Cuban Premier Fidel Castro pays his first visit to Moscow.  He attends the annual May Day parade, and stands on the reviewing stand on top of Lenin’s Tomb at the side of Khrushchev. The latest Russian missiles are presented at the parade.

June 8, 1963: Washington and Moscow agree to implement a hot line between the two seats of government, to be used only in emergency situations to prevent “accidental war” or “war by miscalculation.” The hot line becomes a staple in such films as Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove.

July 25, 1963: A limited test ban treaty is initialed in Moscow by the US, England, and the USSR.

November 22, 1963:  JFK is assassinated during a motorcade in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald, a self-employed and, possibly, self-employed operative for the USSR and Cuba, is arrested for the crime, but is himself assassinated by Dallas club owner Jack Ruby before he can be properly interrogated.

December 2, 1963: On behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission, President Lyndon Johnson presents a $50,000 check, along with a gold medal and a citation, to J. Robert Oppenheimer. He earlier had been classified a security risk by the AEC because of his ties to Communist organizations, and banned from further work for them.

December 16, 1963: The US Court of Appeals reverses the year-old conviction of the Communist Party for failure to register under the provisions of the Internal Security Act. In essence, the court agreed with the officers of the CPUSA who complained that registering was by definition an act of self-incrimination, since the CPUSA had been defined as “a criminal conspiracy.”

1964

March 1964: Playboy ppublishes its pictorial, Girls of Russia and the Iron Curtain, signaling (according to one reader’s letter, published a few months later) a major thaw in the Cold War.

October 15, 1964: While on holiday near the Black Sea, Khrushchev learns that he is out of a job. The Presidium has decreed that Leonid Brezhnev (as first secretary) and Alexis Kosygin (as premier) will succeed him. It is the end of an era.

November 3, 1964: China detonates its first atomic bomb.

1965-66 Television Season 50th Anniversary Tribute: I Spy

 

1967

1968

August 20-21, 1968: Czechoslovakia, now under the liberal guidance of Alexander Dubcek, is invaded by Russian forces.

1969

January 27, 1969: Baghdad Radio invites citizens to Liberation Square  to watch the hangings of 14 alleged spies. 500,000 people reportedly attended, dancing and celebrating.. Nine of the fourteen hanged were Jews.

August 26, 1969:Three more Jews were executed in Baghdad.

Photograph by Jaume Escotet (Flickr)

Filed Under: Spy

Read About Cold War Spies for Free Online

June 6, 2017 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

Many sites offer free Cold War Spy Books for download. Here are a few in no particular order:

Spy Wise offers a previously unpublished revision of O.F. Snelling’s 1964 best-seller then known as James Bond: A Report. It’s in PDF format and is called “James Bond Under the Microscope.”

http://spywise.net/wbf/microscope.pdf

Download the free e-book by Kristian C. Gustafson titled CIA Machinations in Chile in 1970: Reexamining the Record. Gustafson is a frequent contributor to the CIA’s official periodical, Studies in Intelligence.

http://manybooks.net/titles/gustafsonkother06cia_machinations.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-57-no.-1-a/index.html

Also from Many Books, Troika by Hersch O. Zitt. According to Many Books: “A coalition of intelligence officers from the US, Russia, and Israel work to reveal and defeat a complex web of deception spun by a group of nuclear terrorists — all while protecting Operation TROIKA from rival agencies.”

http://manybooks.net/titles/zitthother07troika.html

 

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1961

April 25, 2016 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

January 20, 1961: President-elect John F. Kennedy is inaugurated. President Eisenhower’s departing speech centers on the growing danger of the US military-industrial complex.

February 14, 1961: Jim Webb  is appointed by JFK to take over NASA. He vows to push America ahead of Russia in the Space Race.

April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin, son of a Russian farmer, becomes the first man to orbit the earth. He returns safely to earth after  making a single orbit.

April 17-21, 1961: The Bay of Pigs fiasco — an ill advised, poorly planned, and ineptly executed attempt to invade Cuba using CIA trained Cuban expatriates — embarrasses the US.

May 5, 1961: Navy Commander Alan Shepard becomes the first American to  leave Earth’s atmosphere when his Mercury capsule makes a 300 mile flight into space. Although this flight doesn’t achieve orbit, he still gets a Wall Street ticker tape parade.

August 1961: The East Germans erect the Berlin Wall — 28 miles of concrete, steel, and machine-gun nests — to impede the exodus of its citizens to the Western sector of the city. East Germans had been emigrating at the rate of over 100,000 per year since 1959. Over the next 28 years, 5,000 East Berliners escape.

October 1961: Stalin’s body is removed from its resting place next to  Lenin’s in Red Square and reinterred in an obscure gravesite.

October 30, 1961: At 8:33 AM, the Russians secretly detonate a 58 megaton bomb over the Novaya Zemlya area. Its explosive force is 3,867 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1960 AND THE U-2 INCIDENT

October 15, 2015 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

February 1960: The US Olympic hockey team upsets the Russian team, the defending medal winners from 1956, in Sun Valley, California.

May 1, 1960: The Soviets shoot down the U-2 reconaissance plane piloted by US pilot Gary Powers over the Urals. The embarrassed US first tries to pass off the plane as “weather observation.” But, caught red-handed, Powers admits he was taking pictures of Soviet airfields.

May 18, 1960: Khrushchev confronts Ike at the Paris peace talks about the U-2 fiasco. He demands an apology. Ike is infuriated and refuses. The next day Khrushchev leaves the talks, but not before giving a 21/2 hour press conference full of vitriol and outrage. The Cold War is back in deep freeze.

The U-2 Incident

The U-2 incident dominated the news in 1960. To many, Khruschev overreacted. According to Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshkov in their book, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Krushchev, Khrushev knew, early on, that the U-2 incident might ruin the upcoming summit in Paris. He set out to lay “a kind of trap for the White House, and he “did it with relish.”

The trap, of course, was to make the US lie about the flight, and then present evidence of American espionage to the world, including the pilot, Gary Powers, who survived the crash.

Despite this plan, Khruschev viewed the American President Dwight Eisenhower as a “sober and peaceful man.” He had trouble believing that Ike would plan a U-2 flight deep into Soviet territory on May Day. In fact, Khruschev thought the US was inferior to the US in technology.

Actually, the U-2, a high-altitude spy plane, designed by Lockheed and operated by the CIA, had carried out many missions since 1956, obtaining many Soviet military secrets. The worst insult for Khruschev was a U-2 flight on April 9, 1960, on the eve of his birthday and 21 days before the May Day mission. The plane photographed the Soviets’ three most strategic installations: the nuclear test site in Semipalatinsk; the anti-ballistic missiles complex at Sary Shagan; and a space complex at Tyura-Tam.

Soviet air defenses tried, but failed, to bring the plane down. Khruschev was furious! But the success of Soviet technology on May 1 gave Khruschev a chance to teach the arrogant Americans a lesson and humiliate them on the eve of the summit.

On June 6, the Soviet Secretariat approved a plan

to make use of this newly complex situation and to carry out . . . measures targeted at further discrediting CIA activity and compromising its leader, Allen Dulles.

An array of resources — psychological warfare, defamation, and complex intelligence operations — were directed to this goal. All took place after Khrushev sabotaged the Paris meeting. As for Ike, the president took personal responsibility for the reconnaissance flights but refused to discontinue them. After Eisenhower’s acknowledgement, Khruschev was unable to continue dealing with him because he wanted to avoid a public loss of face.

In his memoirs, Khruschev  recalled his fear that the Soviet Union would be humiliated.

If the Soviet leadership would allow the United States to ‘spit in [their] faces,’ that would be tantamount to acceptance of American arrogance. That, in turn, ‘would have highly damaged our authority in the eyes of world public opinion, especially our friends, Communist parties, and those countries that struggle for independence.

This may have been the first time that Khruschev made clear his determination that the Americans would not be allowed to “spit in the face” of the Soviet military-industrial complex any longer.

Khruschev made up his mind about the summit at the last minute. When he arrived at the airport, the official instructions of the Soviet delegation were still to make a serious attempt to negotiate with Western powers on Germany, disarmament, and other issues. Suddenly he told the Presidium members who had come to see him off that he believed the old instructions should be scrapped. Any negotiations with Eisenhower would begin only when Ike apologized for the flights. That was not going to happen.

Photograph by David Merrett

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1959

September 3, 2014 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe


January 2, 1959: Fidel Castro and his rebel forces, having overthrown Batista’s corrupt but US friendly regime, take control of Cuba.

July 1959: Vice President Richard Nixon flies into Moscow and spends the night at Premier Khruschev’s dacha. The next day they engage in their impromptu “kitchen debate” at the US National Exhibition in Moscow.

September 1959: A major Cold War thaw is indicated by the debut of the animated television series Rocky and His Friends, an ABC afternoon broadcast which brings the first broad lampoons of Soviet spies — Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale — to the youth of America.

September 14, 1959: The Russians successfully hit the Sea of Tranquillity on the moon with an 858 pound missile.

September 15, 1959: Khrushchev visits Eisenhower in Washington, and, in a puckish mood, tells CIA Director Allen Dulles, “I believe we get the same reports — probably from the same people.” Dulles is not amused. The premier then proceeds to Los Angeles where he visits Hollywood. His visit to Disneyland, though, is cancelled because of security concerns. San Francisco, Des Moines (where Khrushchev eats his first hotdog), and the presidential retreat at Camp David complete the premier’s tour. It all seems to signal a thaw in the Cold War.

 

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1957

1958

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1958

April 4, 2014 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

spy 1958

 

[This post draws directly from Tim Wiener’s compelling book Legacy of Ashes, published by Doubleday in 2007. It is highly recommended. Many thanks to Tim for allowing the use of his material.]

If you’ll remember, on September 25, 1957, President Eisenhower orders the CIA to overthrow Indonesia. He sets out 3 missions:

  1. to provide “arms and other military aid” to “anti-Sukarno military commanders” throughout Indonesia.
  2. to “strengthen the determination, will, and cohesion” of the rebel army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi.
  3. to support and “stimulate into action, singly or in unison, non- and anti-Communist elements” among political parties on the main island of Java.

U-2 planes fly over the archipelago and plot the delivery of arms and ammunition to the rebels by sea and air. It takes 3 months to plan the operation. US operatives make contact with a handful of Indonesian rebels on Sumatra and another contingent of commandos seeking power on the island of Sulawesi, northeast of Java. The Pentagon puts together a package of machine guns, carbines, rifles, rocket launchers, mortars, hand grenades, and ammunition sufficient for 8,000 soldiers. Plans are made to supply the rebels on both Sumatra and Sulawesi by both sea and air.

January 8, 1958: The first arms shipment leaves Subic Bay in the Philippines on the USS Thomaston, bound for Sumatra. The arms arrive the following week in the northern Sumatran port of Padang. There is no pretense of secrecy.

January 31, 1958: The US successfully launches its first satellite, the Explorer.

February 10, 1958: The Indonesian rebels broadcast a challenge to Sukarno from a newly established CIA radio station in Padang. They demand a new government and the outlawing of communism within 5 days. Hearing nothing from Sukarno, they announce a revolutionary government. Their foreign minister is Colonel Maludin Simbolin, an English speaking Christian handpicked and paid by the CIA. Meanwhile, the CIA prepares new weapons shipments from the Philippines and waits for the first signs of a nationwide popular uprising against Sukarno.

February 21, 1958:  The Indonesian air force demolishes the revolutionaries’ radio stations in Central Sumatra. The Indonesian navy blockades rebel positions along the coast. The CIA’s Indonesian agents and their American advisers retreat into the jungle.

The CIA seems not to know (or care) that some of the most powerful commanders in the Indonesian army have trained in the US and refer to themselves as “the sons of Eisenhower.” The army, led by anticommunists, is at war with the CIA.

March 1, 1958: Khrushchev is named Soviet premier.

March 9, 1958: John Foster Dulles makes a public statement openly calling for a revolt against “Communist depotism” under Sukarno. General Nasution, Sukarno’s army chief, responds by assembling forces off the northern coast of Sumatra.

The new US ambassador to Indonesia, Howard Jones, cables Foster Dulles that General Nasution is a reliable anticommunist and the rebels have no chance of victory. The message is ignored.

General Nasution’s chief of operations , Colonel Ahmed Yani, is one of the “sons of Eisenhower” and a friend of Major George Benson, the American military attache in Jakarta. The colonel is preparing a major military offensive against the rebels and asks Major Benson for maps. The major, unaware of the CIA’s covert operation, gladly supplies them.

CIA flights carry 5 tons of weapons and ammunition and bundles of cash for the rebels on Sumatra.  The flights are detected by General Nasution’s patrols moments after they enter Indonesian air space. Nasution’s paratroopers pick up every one of the crates that the CIA’s pilots drop.

On Sulawesi, the CIA’s war also is a disaster.

April 19, 1958: The CIA’s pilots begin bombing and strafing Indonesia’s outer islands in contravention of Eisenhower’s orders. The president wants to keep the operation deniable. He orders that no Americans can be involved “in any operations partaking of a military character in Indonesia.” Dulles disobeys him. The pilots are described in a written CIA briefing for the White House and the president as “dissident planes” — Indonesian planes flown by Indonesians, not American aircraft flown by agency personnel.

April 27, 1958:  For the next 3 weeks, CIA pilots hit civilian and military targets in the villages and harbors of northwestern Indonesia. Hundreds of civilians die. Dulles says the bombings “stirred great anger ” among the Indonesian people. It is charged that American pilots had been at the controls. The charges are true, but the Eisenhower and his secretary of state deny them.

End of April, 1958: Sukarno’s soldiers destroy the rebels on Sumatra. The CIA flees Sumatra.

The American Embassy  and Admiral Felix Stump, commander of American forces in the Pacific, alert Washington that the CIA’s operation is a failure. Moreover, the failure of secrecy involved violates the agency’s charter and the president’s direct orders.

May 19, 1958: Allen Dulles sends a flash cable to his officers in Indonesia, the Phillipines, Taiwan, and Singapore telling them to stand down, cut off money, shut down the arms pipeline, burn the evidence, and retreat.

May 21, 1958: The agency tells the White House that the Indonesian army is suppressing communism and that Sukarno is speaking and acting in ways that are favorable to the United States. They announce that it is the CIA’s former friends who are threatening American interests.

Sukarno knows that the CIA tried to overthrow his government, his army knew it, and the political establishment of Indonesia knew it. The ultimate effect was to strengthen communism.

June 1958: Frank Wisner returns from Indonesia and his last operation as chief of the clandestine service. He is diagnosed with “psychotic mania.”

The president is wondering if the CIA  knows what it is doing. He asks Allen Dulles: “Allen, are you trying to scare me into starting a war?”

June 23, 1958: At a deputies’ meeting, Dulles says he is “at a loss as to what component of the Agency he can turn to when he desires specific information on the USSR.”

December 16, 1958: Eisenhower receives a report from his intelligence board of consultants advising him to overhaul the CIA. Its members fear that the agency is “incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as of its own operations.” Led by former defense secretary Robert Lovett, they plead with the president to take covert operations out of Allen Dulles’s hands.

Dulles fends off efforts to change the CIA. He promises the president that Wisner’s replacement will fix the missions and organization of the clandestine service.

End of 1958: Abbot Smith, one of the CIA’s best analysts, wrote:

We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1957

1959

Photograph: US Embassy

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1957

March 13, 2014 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

President Sukarno

January 1957: A follow-up report by the president’s intelligence board says that the CIA’s operations were conducted “on an autonomous and freewheeling basis in highly critical areas involving the conduct of foreign relations . . . . In some quarters that leads to situations which are almost unbelievable.”

April 1957: The CIA revives their plan for “a military coup d’etat” in Syria.

April 9, 1957: Fidel Castro chooses the 10th anniversary of the Bogota riots to launch his revolt against President Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. He sets up base in the Sierra Maestra mountains with an army of 82 men.

May 1957: Alger Hiss‘s book,  In the Court of Public Opinion, is published to generally scathing reviews.

May 2, 1957: Joseph McCarthy dies at the age of 47 from  liver failure. He is buried 5 days later in his hometown of Appleton, Wisconsin.

June 2, 1957: First Secretary Nikita Khruschev makes his first appearance on US television, taking questions from American correspondents with the help of an interpreter. At one point he remarks:

Your grandchildren in America will live under socialism. And please do not be afraid of that.

June 20, 1957: A 5-member UN special committee unanimously votes to indict the Soviet Union for its brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising eight months earlier. The UN General Assembly votes on September 14 to condemn the USSR on the same grounds.

June 29, 1957: Khruschev ousts party leaders and former Stalin deputies Malenkov, Molokov, and Kaganovich from the Kremlin, citing their illegal activites in support of Stalin during the purges of the 1930s. In effect, this gives Khruschev sole control of the Communist Party, inspiring him to comment:

We had some bad sheep in a good flock [but] we took them by the tail and threw them out.

One was sent to Outer Mongolia, one to a hydroelectric plant thousands of miles from Moscow, and one to a cement plant somewhere beyond the Urals.

July 8, 1957: George Ziatovsky, once of the OSS, is indicted with his wife Jane on charges of spying for the Soviet Union.

July 18, 1957: Playwright Arthur Miller is fined $500 for contempt of Congress. He refused to answer questions before a House Committee in 1956 involving Communist writers he had worked with a decade earlier.

August 1, 1957: At a meeting of the National Security Council, Allen Dulles says Indonesia’s Sukarno has “gone past the point of no return” and “would henceforth play the communist game.” John Foster Dulles throws his full weight behind a coup.

August 7, 1957: Soviet Counter-Intelligence Colonel Rudolph Abel is arrested in Brooklyn, where he has resided since 1948 under an alias. He’s indicted as a Soviet spy for conspiring to obtain and transmit national defense information to Moscow. The highest-ranking Soviet spy ever caught in the US, Abel  is convicted on October 25 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

August 26, 1957: Russia announces it has successfully tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile or ICBM, temporarily gaining the edge in “the missile race.”  The first two ICBM tests by the US in 1957 are failures.

September 1957: At a White House meeting, President Eisenhower says he wants to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism. ” We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” he says. In response, John Foster Dulles proposes a “secret task force,” under whose auspices the CIA would deliver American guns, money, and intelligence to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, King Hussein of Jordan, President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, and President Nuri Said of Iraq.

September 13, 1957: A committee led by officers of the CIA and the Pentagon urges the US to supply covert military and economic aid to army officers seeking power in Indonesia. But it also raises questions about the consequences of such action.

September 21, 1957: Air Force Captain George French is sentenced to life imprisonment for offering to sell secrets about atomic weapons in jet bombers to the USSR. His method is to drop a letter with his price ($27,500) onto the grounds of the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. Unfortunately for French, an FBI agent intercepts the letter before it can be read by the Russians.

September 25, 1957: President Eisenhower orders the CIA to overthrow Indonesia. He sets out 3 missions:

  1. to provide “arms and other military aid” to “anti-Sukarno military commanders” throughout Indonesia.
  2. to “strengthen the determination, will, and cohesion” of the rebel army officers on the islands of Sumatra and Sulawesi.
  3. to support and “stimulate into action, singly or in unison, non- and anti-Communist elements” among political parties on the main island of Java.

U-2 planes fly over the archipelago and plot the delivery of arms and ammunition to the rebels by sea and air. It takes 3 months to plan the operation.

October 4, 1957: Sputnik — short for “fellow traveler of the earth” — is launched by the Soviet Union, becoming the first satellite to orbit the earth and sending America into a state of shock.

November 3, 1957: The 2nd Sputnik, much larger, is successfully launched. It carries a dog named Laika, who survives part of the adventure.

November 7, 1957: The annual Moscow Military Parade, held on the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, disappoints observers. No ICBM or tactical atomic weapon is included in the parade of new weapons.

December 6, 1957:  The first US attempt to put a satellite into space ends in disaster when the Vanguard rocket explodes on its launching pad at Cape Canaveral. The terms “Flopnik” and “Kaputnik”  appeared in papers around the world the next day.

December 17, 1957: The first successful ICBM is launched in the US.


For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1956

1958

Photograph by Edi Lucas

Filed Under: Spy

COLD WAR SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1956

March 6, 2014 by Lisa Reynolds Wolfe

1956 Hungarian Revolution

February 25, 1956: Khruschev gives a closed-door, four hour speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. The speech (later known as the Stalin speech) repudiates the actions taken by Stalin over the past 30 years. Khruschev describes Stalin as “a supreme egotist and sadist, capable of sacrificing everything and anybody for the sake of his own power and glory.” Shocking Communists the world over, Khruschev decries the “cult of personality” that Stalin fashioned, the murders he carried out, his “persecution mania,” and his abuse of those he considered to be “enemies of the people.” Thousands of Stalin’s political prisoners in gulags all over the USSR have their sentences committed. The era of de-Stalinization begins.

March 1956: The CIA picks up rumors about the February speech. Allen Dulles desperately wants a copy of the speech. (You can read the speech here.) The CIA relies heavily on foreign intelligence sources to come up with the text. Of course, the CIA is more than willing to pay.

April 1956: Israel’s spies deliver the text to James Angleton, the CIA’s one-man liaison with the Jewish state. This channel produces much of the agency’s intelligence on the Arab world, depending on Israel to explain most events in the Middle East. The Israeli perspective colors American perceptions for decades.

April 17, 1956: The Cominform is dissolved.

May 1956: George Kennan determines that the text in the CIA’s copy of the February speech is genuine, spurring debate within the agency. Some want to keep the speech a secret. Others want to use it to sow discord among the world’s communist parties. According to Ray Cline,  Angleton thought that by tweaking the speech with propaganda

he could have used it to such advantage that he would have discombobulated the Russians and their security services and perhaps used some of these emigre groups that we still at that time hoped to activate, and liberate the Ukraine or something.

Most of all, the CIA wants to lure Soviet spies in order to salvage a long-running, but ineffective operation called Red Cap. (For more on Red Cap, see SPYING YEAR BY YEAR: 1952.)

June 1956: An inspector general’s report declares that the Soviet division of the CIA’s clandestine service — run by Harvard grad Dana Durand — is dysfunctional. (The report is declassified in 2004).  The report states that the Soviet division could not produce “an authoritative statement of its mission and functions” much less grasp what was going on within the Soviet Union. The report contains a list of the CIA’s 20 “controlled agents” in Russia in 1956. None of them are in a position to have any idea what makes the Kremlin tick.

Early June 1956: Dulles decides to leak the text of Khruschev’s speech. For months afterwards, the speech is beamed behind the Iron Curtain by Radio Free Europe, the CIA’s $100 million media machine.

June 28, 1956: Although the CIA’s best analysts had concluded that no popular uprising was likely in Eastern Europe during the 1950s, after the speech was broadcast, Polish workers began to rise up against their communist rulers. The Polish struggle leads the National Security Council to search for cracks in Soviet control.

John Foster Dulles wins presidential approval for new efforts to promote “spontaneous manifestations of discontent” in dominated nations.

Allen Dulles promises to bolster a Radio Free Europe program that floats balloons over the Iron Curtain, carrying leaflets and “Freedom Medals.”

July 26 1956: Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser challenges the legacy of colonialism by nationalizing the Suez Canal Company, the corporation created by the British and French to run the Middle East’s man-made maritime trade route.

 October 22, 1956: Frank Wisner travels to Europe to visit the CIA’s biggest stations.  His first order of business is to meet with Sir Patrick Dean, a senior British intelligence officer. They are to discuss plans to topple the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, but Dean is a no show. He’s in France putting the finishing touches on a coordinated military attack on Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. The aim is to destroy Nasser’s government and take the Suez Canal back by force. The CIA knows nothing about this.

October 23, 1956: Students take to the streets of Budapest. By November 4, the rebellion is crushed. During the 2 weeks of the Hungarian uprising, the CIA knows no more than what it reads in the newspapers. (For more details see the BBC News Timeline.)

October 24, 1956: A crowd gathers at the Parliament in Budapest led by student demonstrators rising up against the communist government. The security police confront a second crowd at the government radio station. Some of the students are armed, and shots break out. The security police open fire and the protesters fight back. At the Budapest City Park, a third crowd tears a statue of Stalin from its pedestal. Red Army troops enter Budapest in retaliation. At Kossuth Square, crossfire erupts, and at least 100 people die.

October 26, 1956: Although Dulles has been informed by sources that something may be up regarding Egypt, he is disbelieving.  At a National Security Council meeting, he informs President Eisenhower that reports of a joint UK-French-Israeli military plan are absurd. That suits Ike just fine since he is obsessed with Hungary.

October 28, 1956: Frank Wisner flies to Paris and meets with Bill Griffith, the senior policy adviser at Radio Free Europe’s Munich headquarters. Beginning that evening, Radio Free Europe urges the citizens of Hungary to sabotage railroads, blow up tanks, and fight the Soviets.

November 1, 1956: At a National Security Council meeting, Dulles briefs Eisenhower on the situation in Budapest. He says:

What occurred there was a miracle . . . . Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80% of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.

Dulles is wrong. The rebels have no guns to speak of and the Hungarian army has not switched sides. The Soviets are sending more than 200,000 troops and some 2,500 tanks and armored vehicles.

On the morning of the Soviet invasion, Radio Free Europe’s Bulgarian announcer told his listeners that “the pressure upon the government of the U.S. to send military help to the freedom fighters will become irresistable.”  But that was not the case.

November 4, 1956: The Soviet onslaught begins. In 4 days, the partisans of Budapest are crushed. Tens of thousands are killed and thousands more are taken to Siberian prison camps. Hungarian refugees begin besieging the American embassy in Vienna, begging America to do something.

November 7, 1956: Eisenhower is reelected. The president wakes up the next morning to a false report from Allen Dulles that the Soviets are ready to send 250,000 troops to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal from the British and French. Also, Ike’s unhappy about the CIA’s inability to report on the actual Soviet attack in Hungary.

November 11, 1956: The Soviets claim victory over the Hungarian freedom fighters.

December 20, 1956: President Eisenhower receives a formal report of a secret investigation into the clandestine service of the CIA. If it were to become public, it would destroy the agency. The top secret report has never been declassified. Its key findings appear in a 1961 record created by the intelligence board.

For his next 4 years in office, President Eisenhower tries to change the way the CIA is run, but he is unable to find a suitable replacement for Allen Dulles.  Dulles won’t accept oversight, instead leading the agency into new battles across Asia and the Middle East.

For more Cold War Spying Year By Year go to:

1955

1957

Filed Under: Spy

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8 Apr

How the Atomic Age influenced pop culture. It was about more than the Ka-Boom! https://bit.ly/3t0CJjO @coldwarstudies #ColdWar #nuclearwar #nukes #nuclearweapons #atombomb

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AvatarCold War Studies@coldwarstudies·
9 Apr

Perspective from India: Most Dangerous Spy Agencies In The World http://www.newspatrolling.com/most-dangerous-spy-agencies-in-the-world/

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