Abstract
With the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s Western governments and intelligence services recognized the need to establish and support civilian organizations to engage in the “battle of ideas” with the Soviet bloc.1 Communist front organizations and infiltration in the realms of international labor, student and youth movements, women’s groups, and journalism were threatening to dictate the ideological discourse and political affiliation across these fields of activity.2 Responding to this situation in 1948, George Kennan, then head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, had promoted the initiation of “political warfare,” both overt and covert, across a whole range of activities from economic policy and strategic political alliances to “black” propaganda and underground resistance movements.3 Later the same year, sanctioned by NSC directives 4, 4A, and 10/2, the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was created to coordinate all manner of covert activities aimed at undermining support for communism abroad.4 These foundations soon produced results. In May 1949, the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE) was set up by U.S. business elites to mobilize support for undermining Soviet control in the East, mainly by means of broadcasts via Radio Free Europe.5 In June 1950, this was followed by the arrival of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), a body designed to organize, in the name of freedom of thought, support for anticommunism (and antineutralism) among the (predominantly) European intelligentsia.6
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Notes
On the significance of this development, see Scott Lucas, “Mobilizing Culture: The State-Private Network and the CIA in the Early Cold War,” in Dale Carter, ed., War and Cold War in American Foreign Policy, 1942–1962 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 83–107.
On the Soviet position in 1945–1946, see D. Nadzhafov, “The Beginning of the Cold War between East and West: The Aggravation of Ideological Confrontation,” Cold War History 4 (2004): 140–174.
“The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” May 4, 1948, Policy Planning Staff [George Kennan]. FRUS, 1945–1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington DC: Department of State), 668–672. Political warfare was a term originated by the British during World War II. A useful definition: “A form of conflict between states in which each protagonist seeks to impose its will on its opponent by methods other than the use of armed force. For practical purposes, the principal weapon of political warfare may be described as the combined operation of diplomacy and propaganda.” “The Strategy of Political Warfare,” n.d., quoted in W.E.D. “Changing Concepts,” in W. Daugherty and M. Janowitz, eds, A Psychological Warfare Casebook (Baltimore: Operations Research Office, 1960), 16.
See Arch Puddington, Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003).
Sig Mickelson, America’s Other Voice: The Story of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (New York: Praeger, 1983).
See Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy (New York: Free Press, 1989).
Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid The Piper? (London: Granta, 1999).
See Richard Aldrich, “Putting Culture in the Cold War: The Cultural Relations Department and British Covert Information Warfare,” in G. Scott-Smith and H. Krabbendam, eds, The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 109–133.
Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left, and the Cold War (London, Frank Cass, 2003), 262–296.
On Paix et Liberté, see P. Regnier, La Propagande Anticommuniste de Paix et Liberté, France, 1950–1956, PhD dissertation, Université Libre, Brussels, 1987; Jean Delmas and Jean Kessler, eds, Renseignement et Propagande pendant la Guerre Froide, 19471953 (Brussels: Complexe, 1999); B. Ludwig, “Le Comité Européen et International Paix et Liberté,” Bulletin de l’Instituut Pierre Renouvin 20 (Autumn 2004): 13–33.
Jean Delmas and Jean Kessler, eds, Renseignement et Propagande pendant la Guerre Froide, 1947–1953 (Brussels: Complexe, 1999).
B. Ludwig, “Le Comité Européen et International Paix et Liberté,” Bulletin de l’Instituut Pierre Renouvin 20 (Autumn 2004): 13–33.
Paul Koedijk, “Van ‘Vrede en Vrijheid’ tot ‘Volk en Verdediging,’” in B. Schoenmaker and J. Janssen, eds, In De Schaduw Van De Muur: Maatschappij en Krijgsmacht rond 1960 (The Hague: Sdu, 1997), 69.
Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 94–122.
See Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
Gregory Mitrovich, Underming the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Ken Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
Nikita Khrushchev, “Peaceful Coexistence,” in Norman Graebner, ed., The Cold War: A Conflict of Ideology and Power (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1976), 126–128.
B. W. Cook, The Declassified Eisenhower (New York: Penguin, 1984), 149–183.
Louis Einthoven, Tegen De Stroom In (Apeldoorn: Semper Agendo, 1974), 232–233.
Brian Crozier, Free Agent (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 30–33.
C. C. van den Heuvel, “Hoofdlijnen van een Internationaal Instituut,” October 12, 1959, CC (no file number).
On the West German research establishment and how it studied the East during the Cold War, see Corinna Unger, Ostforschung in Westdeutschland: Die Erforschung des europäischen Ostens und die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1945–1975 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007).
See Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance: Global Protest and Student Unrest in West Germany and the US, 1962–1972 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3.
The full title of the colloquium where Beuker spoke was “The Role of Students in the Struggle for National Independence and for Solving the Political, Economic, and Social Problems of the Colonial and Underdeveloped Nations.” For the text of Beuker’s statement, see the report of the Bonn-based Büro für Politische Studien, Frieden und Freundschaft? Weltjugendfestspiele, Funktion und Wirkung (Bonn: Walter Lütz, 1963), 159.
Cees van den Heuvel, “International Aspects of the Radical Student Movement and Relations with Communism,” The New Left (The Hague: Interdoc, 1968), 50.
Karel van Wolferen, Student Revolutionaries of the 1960s (The Hague: Interdoc, 1970).
See Giles Scott-Smith, “Interdoc, Peaceful Coexistence, and Positive AntiCommunism: West European Cooperation in Psychological Warfare 1963–1972,” Cold War History 7 (Spring 2007): 19–43.
Interdoc: Dutch-German Cooperation in Psychological Warfare, 1963–72, in B. de Graaf, B. de Jong, and W. Platje, eds, Battleground Western Europe: Intelligence Operations in Germany and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2007), 169–192.
See Martin Klimke, “A Growing Problem for US Foreign Policy: The West German Student Movement and the Western Alliance,” in Belinda Davis, Martin Klimke, Carla MacDougall, and Wilfried Mausbach, eds, Changing the World, Changing the Self: Political Protest and Collective Identities in 1960s-1970s West Germany and the United States (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 105–131.
See Kimmo Rentola, “The 1968 Movements in the Cold War: A Case Study,” paper given at the conference New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness, Queens University, Ontario, June 13–16, 2007.
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© 2012 Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Martin Klimke, Joachim Scharloth, and Laura Wong
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Scott-Smith, G. (2012). Psychological Warfare for the West: Interdoc, the West European Intelligence Services, and the International Student Movements of the 1960s. In: Fahlenbrach, K., Klimke, M., Scharloth, J., Wong, L. (eds) The Establishment Responds. Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119833_9
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