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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
Benjamin Tromly*
Affiliation:
University of Puget Sound – History, Tacoma, Washington, 98416-0001, United States
*
btromly@pugetsound.edu
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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.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 44 - 59
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

In 1951 operatives of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations (OSO) in Germany reached an agreement to pursue covert operations against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) with the leaders of a group of anti-communist Russian exiles, the Narodno-trudovoi soiuz (rossiiskikh solidaristov), in English the National Labor Alliance (of Russian Solidarists), or NTS. The basis for their agreement was ‘Petia-8’, a proposal submitted by the NTS designed to ‘prepare the ground for revolution’ in the USSR by infiltrating agents from abroad across Soviet borders, distributing propaganda to Soviet troops stationed in Germany and Austria and developing anti-Soviet radio broadcasting. The CIA agreed to support ‘Petia-8’ without major modifications, apart from lowering the NTS’s proposed budget.Footnote 1

The CIA’s support of the NTS was one component of the United States’s plan to subvert Soviet communism, a multi-pronged project in which émigrés from communist countries played crucial roles. If the anti-Soviet passions of the early Cold War provided the context for the secret negotiations in Germany, the two parties were nevertheless strange bedfellows. The newly established intelligence apparatus of the democratic superpower was establishing ties with a group of far-right exiles that had collaborated with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Even more perplexing were the power dynamics involved in the 1951 negotiations. The NTS was a small group; in 1951, it included a mere 643 members strewn across Europe, North and South America and Australia.Footnote 2 Yet the CIA took the NTS seriously as a political actor and negotiating partner, as shown by the CIA’s willingness to endorse the NTS’s prescriptions for collaboration (‘Petia-8’). In fact, the NTS leaders drove a hard bargain with the Americans. The CIA initially sought to focus its collaboration with NTS on traditional espionage activities, but the Alliance’s leaders refused, declaring that they were ‘not agents collecting military intelligence for a foreign power, but members of a political organisation whose job was to speed the day of revolution’.Footnote 3 As a compromise, the two sides agreed that NTS agents sent across Soviet borders by the CIA would be tasked with gathering ‘operational intelligence’ but not with pursuing specific military or political targets.

This article examines the path by which a group of far-right Russian exiles became clients of the CIA. What was the NTS and how did it rise from marginality and even disrepute to become an instrument of US policy in fighting the Cold War? The wider context of the furtive negotiations in Germany was the adoption of liberation as a goal of US and British foreign policies in the late 1940s. After the first Berlin crisis governments in Washington and London became convinced that the USSR was bent on spreading communism to areas of Western control. In addition to measures to contain communism, the Western allies went on the offensive by launching a series of covert operations, sometimes joint US–UK enterprises, designed to subvert satellite countries (particularly Albania and Yugoslavia) and various parts of the USSR (including the Baltic Republics, Transcaucasia and Ukraine).Footnote 4 National Security Council (NSC) Directive 10/2, adopted in June 1948, authorised the US government to undertake ‘preventive direct action’ against the Soviet Bloc, ‘including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures’, as well as ‘assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups’.Footnote 5 The British government undertook comparable covert operations aimed at liberating communist lands, although Churchill’s conservatives, who returned to power in 1951, scaled down these endeavours.Footnote 6 For both countries, the populations of Soviet and East European citizens displaced by the war and residing outside the Soviet sphere of influence made up the crucial human material for these operations. As the famous Soviet spy Kim Philby commented, ‘both CIA and SIS were up to their ears in émigré politics’ during the formative phase of the Cold War.Footnote 7

The emergence of CIA–NTS cooperation suggests the limits of scholarly understanding of the CIA’s foray into émigré politics during the early Cold War.Footnote 8 Generally speaking, scholars working on US covert operations have tended to focus on policy making in Washington rather than on recruitment of foreign assets in the field, an approach that has yielded crucial insights into the strategic and bureaucratic confusion surrounding liberation as a foreign policy goal. Less understood are the particular ways in which intelligence operatives interacted with the varied anti-communist movements in Europe they chose to support.Footnote 9 Insofar as scholars of the CIA touch on the agency’s interactions with émigré assets, they often stress opportunism on the US side. As Christopher Simpson has argued, émigrés were cheap currency in the Cold War, funded by the CIA ‘only insofar as it served short-term American intelligence-gathering objectives, no more’.Footnote 10 Only recently have scholars with training in the national histories involved turned to the exile communities that entered the orbit of the CIA in the post-war years.Footnote 11 In the case of the NTS itself, recent scholarship has discussed the outcomes of CIA–émigré activities from the standpoint of intelligence history, leaving largely obscure the historical processes which brought Russian exiles into the front lines of the Cold War in Europe.Footnote 12

This article presents a new view of US émigré engagements in the Cold War by depicting them as a product of complex historical trajectories and political relationships. The ‘Solidarists’, as the NTS members were called following their ideology of ‘National Labor Solidarism’, played a role in determining the form of their collaboration with US intelligence agencies. Utilising recently declassified US government documents as well as previously untapped émigré sources, the piece draws a picture of the Solidarists as highly capable and often unscrupulous political operators who aggressively pursued contact with US centres of power in the first post-war half decade.Footnote 13 In particular, the NTS drew on a set of deceptive political practises derived from two decades of anti-Soviet struggle in the Russian emigration, first in interwar Europe and then under German auspices during the Second World War. When CIA operatives began to look for anti-communist clients, the NTS was well positioned to make the case that it was an effective organisation capable of influencing the Soviet population, while also presenting itself as carrying ideological commitments and past affiliations that were acceptable to Western public opinion. The NTS’s rise to relevance in the late 1940s, the conclusion will argue, speaks to the fluidity of political relationships in early post-war Europe.

The Political Calamity of Russian Exiles

The postwar NTS must be understood in the context of the politics of Russian emigration. As comparative literature points out, exile politics belong to the realm of international affairs, as their very rationale involves the projection of power across borders. More specifically, exiles always operate within a triangular relationship involving states and societies in both their host countries and their countries of origin. Lacking money or rooted political constituencies, exiled politicians are forced to seek the support of holders of power in their lands of sojourn in order to pursue a change of regime in their homelands – a state of affairs that exposes them to disparate and often disruptive cross-currents.Footnote 14

Twentieth-century Russian émigré communities provide a stark example of the exile’s dependence on foreign interests as well as the dilemmas that follow from it. The wave of humanity that fled the October Revolution in Russia faced almost insurmountable hurdles to political action: statelessness, impoverishment, frequent isolation within the societies they inhabited and, especially from the 1930s, an almost total severance of contact with life in the USSR. The exiles were also badly divided internally, as the increasingly unlikely prospect of return to the homeland opened the door to ‘the pressure of old issues, abrasive personalities, and new movements’.Footnote 15 Making matters worse, Russian exiles were targeted by the Soviet state, which sought to discredit and demoralise them through elaborate measures of harassment and provocation.Footnote 16 All these pressures meant that interwar Russian émigré politics was a brutal and often tragic affair, marked by an inability to fight back against the hated Soviet regime, internecine conflict and dependence on foreign interests.Footnote 17

The NTS navigated the treacherous conditions of Russian émigré politics aggressively. At the root of the NTS’s staying power and influence – at least, relative to other émigré groups – was its ideological fervency. The founders of the NTS, established as the National Alliance of the New Generation in Belgrade in 1931, belonged to the younger cohorts of the White emigration, the conservative forces driven from Russia after their losses on the battlefields of the Russian Civil War. The early Solidarists envisioned their movement as a forward-looking reaction to what they saw as the weakness and archaism of their White elders.Footnote 18 The young Russians’ search for a muscular political ideology fit to counter Bolshevism led them to embrace the politics of the ascendant European radical right. The NTS’s anti-Semitism and its quasi-imperial nationalism placed the movement firmly in the context of the rightist movements of late imperial Russia.Footnote 19 In contrast, the NTS’s ideology of ‘national labor solidarism’ drew on several ideological components of Italian fascism and German national socialism: national revolution, the transcendence of class divisions through corporatist institutions, a cult of action and the forging of a new elite tasked with moving the masses through history.Footnote 20 The NTS also adopted much of the distinctive political style of European fascism, as seen by its focus on mass mobilisation, organisational hierarchy, symbols and songs.Footnote 21

If radical politics placed the NTS on the map, so too did the fact that its functionaries became adept practitioners of interwar émigré politics. In large part due to the hostile international situation – many countries were wary of hosting, let alone backing, anti-Soviet groups – the NTS was unable to earn sustained foreign backing in the interwar period, at least outside of its headquarters in conservative Yugoslavia. Nevertheless, the NTS entered the murky world of intelligence agencies and interwar international intrigue with energy and resourcefulness. In the 1930s the Alliance gained backing from Poland, Japan and Romania for various operations designed to penetrate the Soviet borders with propaganda and agents. The results were disappointing. Most of the émigrés funneled across Soviet borders did not return alive, and the NTS’s subversive activities had no noticeable effect on the USSR – that is, apart from lending substance and credence to Stalin’s claims that hidden enemies threatened the Soviet state.Footnote 22 Nevertheless, the motivation and cohesion of the Solidarists was impressive, at least in comparison to other Russian exile groups.

The NTS’s émigré activities gained newfound importance with the Axis invasion of the USSR. Documents from the German Foreign Office suggest that the NTS tried to court Nazi Germany unsuccessfully in the late 1930s; the Gestapo commented that it did not object to the content of the NTS’s newspaper but thought the Solidarists a ‘meaningless Russian émigré organisation’.Footnote 23 However, in 1941 the Nazis’ need for Russian-speaking personnel during Operation Barbarossa caused parts of the Hitler state to actively cultivate the NTS. Acting with the support of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium), V. M. Despotuli, the pro-Nazi editor of Berlin’s sole Russian newspaper, invited the NTS to relocate its headquarters from Belgrade to Berlin.Footnote 24 With the defeat of the Soviet Union seeming almost certain in 1941, NTS leaders – with a few exceptions – cast their lot with Nazi Germany and, in a later West German judgment, ‘pursued an unmistakably fascist course’.Footnote 25 Several NTS activists took up employment in bureaucracies active on the Eastern front, including Alfred Rosenberg’s above-mentioned ministry, the Abwehr (military intelligence), the Anti-Comintern agency in the Propaganda Ministry, the SS sabotage agency Unternehmen Zeppelin, and local police organs in occupied Soviet areas.Footnote 26 In these varying institutional settings, NTS activists spread Nazi propaganda to Soviet collaborators and prisoners of war, contributed to anti-partisan warfare and, in some cases, participated in the mass killing of the Holocaust.Footnote 27

The Solidarists sought to utilise their positions under the Nazis to political advantage. Most of the NTS members assembled in Germany hoped that Hitler, pressed by ‘the very logic of events’ on the Eastern front after Stalingrad, would embrace a new policy recognising Russian national interests.Footnote 28 In the meantime, the NTS activists sought to advance the organisation’s influence through their institutional footholds, particularly as propagandists in POW camps and as administrators or spies on occupied Soviet territory.Footnote 29 As the only Russian political group that was tolerated, or perhaps even informally sanctioned, by the Germans, the NTS won considerable influence among the masses of Russians who had arrived in the Third Reich as prisoners of war, forced workers or collaborators of various kinds, while also establishing temporary and scattered footholds in occupied Soviet territories.Footnote 30 While the topic is poorly studied, it is clear that some Soviet citizens displaced by the war were drawn to the NTS’s stridently nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology, while many surely joined the organisation as a means of escaping the deadly conditions of German POW camps.Footnote 31

The NTS’s pro-German position, however, became untenable toward the end of the war, when Russians on both sides of the front reacted to the success of the Red Army by rallying to the Soviet cause. In an effort to maintain influence, the NTS issued propaganda that stressed its independence from German agendas but ran afoul of their German patrons in the process. The Gestapo arrested over one hundred Alliance members in 1944, even as other Solidarists remained at large and participated in the collaborationist Russian liberation movement of A. A. Vlasov.Footnote 32 Against the wider backdrop of the Hitler state’s ruthless exploitation of its many collaborators, the NTS’s political failure and near destruction by the Nazis was hardly surprising.Footnote 33 More impressive was what had preceded it. The NTS had expanded its influence by siding with a state in conflict with the USSR and had done so by working behind a façade of loyal service. No less importantly, the Russian exiles had witnessed how, in conditions of world war, this duplicitous strategy had enabled them to make contact with co-nationals from their long estranged homeland.

The Fight for Survival in Germany

The immediate post-war situation formed a stark contrast to the Solidarists’ heady agendas of the wartime years. Most of the Solidarists escaped the advance of the Red Army by fleeing West, settling in Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the US and British administered zones of Germany and Austria. Once there the Russians still faced an immediate threat from the Soviet state, which demanded that the Western allies extradite the NTS leaders as traitors and war criminals and sought to secure the repatriation of the mass of Soviet citizens displaced by the war, as mandated under the terms of the Yalta Agreements.Footnote 34 Nor did the NTS seem well-situated to earn the favour of Germany’s new American or British occupiers. The organisation had never had much of a presence in the United States or the United Kingdom, and many of the Solidarists held a decidedly negative view of the ‘Anglo-Americans’ – a product, no doubt, of the White emigration’s longstanding bitterness over its lot in Europe as well as the Alliance’s fascist influenced disdain for liberal democracy.Footnote 35 More immediately, in the chaos of 1945–6 a few NTS leaders were taken into custody and underwent interrogation by US and British security forces before being released – a move that placed the émigré organisation in the sights of military occupation authorities.Footnote 36

The NTS activists confronted the difficult terrain of occupied Germany with skill and even creativity, drawing on the political practises they had developed in the past years. From the outset the NTS’s contact person with the Americans was Konstantin Vasil’evich Boldyrev, a charismatic White émigré who had learned fluent English while working at a British firm in Yugoslavia before the war. By courting military government (the Office of Military Government, United States or OMGUS) officials, Boldyrev secured permission to establish a DP camp at Mönchehof near Kessel, where NTS members settled en masse.Footnote 37 Mönchehof quickly came under the protection of the local US military administrators, who were impressed by the orderly, hardworking and conservative Russians who had fled communism.

The NTS exploited the support offered by OMGUS for its own political gain, employing a deceptive strategy vis-à-vis their patrons that was a direct throwback to the Alliance’s wartime activities. While convincing the Americans that they were refraining from political activity – which was technically illegal in DP camps – Mönchehof’s administration quickly set about rebuilding the NTS at the camp. Boldyrev and the other NTS leaders located and reassembled Alliance leaders strewn across the different zones of Germany and Austria, bypassing the ubiquitous checkpoints in a German medical truck with ‘Typhus’ written on the sides.Footnote 38 The NTS leaders also used their Mönchehof fiefdom to initiate publication of the newspaper The Sowing (Posev), which passed through military censorship in 1947. Under its savvy and controlling editor Evgenii Romanovich Ostrovskii-Romanov, a wartime émigré who had worked in Russian-language propaganda in Berlin during the war, Posev became the most widely published Russian-language newspaper in post-war Germany as well as a crucial source of funds for the post-war NTS.Footnote 39

Boldyrev also used his US ties to shield Russian DPs, and most of all those under his authority at Mönchehof, from mandatory repatriation to the USSR. Along with other exile leaders, Boldyrev sent a memorandum to Dwight D. Eisenhower, then military governor of the US occupation zone, which drew a tragic picture of the fate that awaited the DPs in the USSR.Footnote 40 His efforts bore fruit: when Soviet repatriation officers visited Mönchehof, a US army representative was there to confront them. Major Philip Steers refused to hand over the camp’s inhabitants, ignoring the Soviet officers’ threats to report the incident to Moscow or even to resort to force.Footnote 41 When the camp passed to the jurisdiction of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), Steers instructed the organisation’s staff at the camp to not be ‘too exacting’ about the registration of the DPs – aware, no doubt, that the Russians were doctoring their paperwork by claiming to have been citizens of the interwar Polish or the Baltic states, which brought exemption from mandatory repatriation.Footnote 42 Boldyrev had saved the Russians from a vindictive homeland, in the process expanding the influence of the NTS among the Russian DPs.

The NTS also utilised its control of Mönchehof to enlarge its base of power in the displaced Russian population. A common theme of scholarship on DPs is the apathy and demoralisation that dominated everyday life in the camps, a product of the unclear futures faced by uprooted populations, harsh camp conditions, dependence on international relief agencies and the hostile attitude of the surrounding German society.Footnote 43 In contrast, Boldyrev established Mönchehof as a ‘working camp’ that contracted labour to US military units, an arrangement that provided a degree of material comfort and a sense of purpose to the DPs. Like some other DP camps, Mönchehof also housed a rich communal and cultural life, featuring an Orthodox Church and a Russian-language school and theatre.Footnote 44 At the same time, Mönchehof placed its residents firmly in the orbit of the NTS. Boldyrev ran the camp as ‘a kind of dictator’, American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) investigators reported. DPs quickly ‘found out that they live better by becoming members of the organisation’, while opponents of the NTS might find themselves expelled from the camp or barred from admission in the first place.Footnote 45 The combination of privilege and pressure toward DPs at Mönchehof amounted to a calculated strategy for creating a post-war political cadre for the NTS.

The NTS’s activities were part of a wider political mobilisation among DPs in Europe. The DP populations in Germany of Baltic peoples, Jews, Ukrainians and Poles, all greater in size than that of the Russians, gave rise to highly active anti-communist (or, in the case of the Jews, Zionist) organisations.Footnote 46 What was distinctive to the NTS was its use of elaborate political strategies, such as courting US military men and using Mönchehof as a false front for its political activities. These machinations constituted a redeployment of political practises deriving from the Russian emigration and from collaboration during the Second World War.

Ideological Facelifts and Usable Pasts

The NTS’s leadership viewed its regrouping at Mönchehof as the first step in a much more ambitious enterprise. As during the Second World War, the Solidarists saw the courting of a great power patron as a means to pursue revolution in Russia. Instructions from the NTS office in Paris to rank-and-file Solidarists in 1948 provide a clear view of the organisation’s agenda. The NTS leaders defined their immediate goal as securing the trust of Germany’s Western occupiers, which would allow them to operate openly and expand their activities to other Western countries, including the United States. Rising West–East tensions in Europe, the Solidarists predicted, would aid their efforts at legitimisation.Footnote 47

While seeking to secure recognition as an active political force in exile, NTS leadership planned – and, perhaps, hoped – for a hot war in Europe between the USSR and its recent allies. Such a new conflagration, much like the last one, would allow the NTS to pursue a direct ‘military-political struggle’ against Soviet power. As the same 1948 document reasoned, the outbreak of hostilities would bring the quick takeover of the European continent by Soviet troops, after which the Solidarists would create a revolutionary underground. Located at the ‘meeting point of two warring worlds’, the instruction explained, the wartime NTS would be well-positioned to become an ‘ally’ of the Anglo-American powers – and, ultimately, to emerge as a central player in the reconstitution of Russian statehood should war end in a Soviet loss or revolution in Russia.Footnote 48 Clearly, the NTS viewed the Cold War through the prism of their Second World War project of transforming war and occupation into a Solidarist led national revolution.

As is often true with émigrés, schemes for a speedy return to the homeland proved far-fetched – and not just because the envisioned war in Europe never broke out. As its leadership understood, the NTS’s political fate depended on establishing relationships with US and British intelligence agencies, which alone possessed the technical and financial means to undertake operations against Soviet power. In the immediate aftermath of the war, however, the US intelligence establishment had limited interest in Russian émigrés. The already mentioned CIC, a counterintelligence agency, gathered information on the NTS and other Russian exile groups in Germany, in part in order to locate Soviet espionage agents presumed to be located in their midst. However, for several years after the war the US foreign intelligence apparatus was largely inactive among the exiles.

The refusal of US intelligence agencies to undertake anti-Soviet work with the NTS or other Russian émigré groups had several sources. A downsizing of the US intelligence establishment at war’s end limited the scope of operations in Germany.Footnote 49 More fundamental were foreign policy considerations: colluding with the sworn enemies of the Soviet state would poison the already badly deteriorating relations between the two erstwhile allies.Footnote 50 Just as important was the Americans’ low opinion of the Russian emigration and its value for intelligence gathering. In 1946 a Munich-stationed agent of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the predecessor of the CIA, proposed to infiltrate an undercover agent into the NTS in the hopes of exploiting the exiles’ planned operations across the Iron Curtain. (In question was an evidently stillborn plan to penetrate Soviet Ukraine via Czechoslovakia).Footnote 51 But headquarters rejected the idea. Any security breaches would make it difficult for US intelligence to disassociate itself from the NTS’s radical political agenda, Washington warned. The SSU also assumed that the Soviet agents had penetrated the NTS to some extent and even exercised ‘a certain amount of control’ over it.Footnote 52 In any case, the SSU leadership added, ‘so-called White Russian operations’ had proven ‘almost completely valueless’ in the past.Footnote 53

Without support from intelligence agencies, the NTS remained exposed in Germany. In particular its strident anti-communism and recent record of collaboration proved distinct liabilities. Threats to the émigrés came from the Soviet state most of all, but also from OMGUS and from international relief bodies administering the DP populations in Germany and elsewhere. In 1946 OMGUS arrested Boldyrev and his assistant Irina Vergun, who were charged with carrying out anti-Soviet activity and having collaborated with the SS during the war.Footnote 54 Both charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence, even though both were probably true. CIC investigators discovered that Boldyrev had headed a construction firm called Erbauer, which operated first in occupied Minsk and then, after the German retreat, took up work under SS supervision at the infamous V2 rocket factory in Niedersachswerfen in Thuringia.Footnote 55 Some DPs interviewed by CIC agents claimed that Boldyrev had actively collaborated with Himmler’s police force, while Boldyrev and his subordinates countered that Erbauer’s ties to its employers were purely economic in nature. While CIC officials were unable to determine the precise nature of the Russians’ relationship to the SS, they nevertheless remained suspicious of Boldyrev and the NTS, which had ‘flourished under the Nazis’, a CIC agent noted in 1948. Recent scholarship identifies Erbauer as cover for the espionage outfit ‘Ingvar’, formed in 1944 under by the SD Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS).Footnote 56

The US investigation ultimately came to nothing, in no small part due to intervention by Boldyrev’s protectors in OMGUS. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cameron, whom one CIC agent thought ‘deeply biased’ in Boldyrev’s favor, offered testimony that cleared the latter’s name.Footnote 57 CIC investigators also suspected that the NTS applied pressure on DPs in Mönchehof to dissuade them from divulging information about Boldyrev’s wartime activities.Footnote 58 Clearly, Boldyrev’s exoneration demonstrated the effectiveness of his personal diplomacy and, more broadly, of the NTS’s survival strategies at Mönchehof.

Having fended off US military law, the NTS next faced a challenge from international relief organisations, namely the UNRRA and its successor, the International Relief Organisation (IRO). The NTS’s modus operandi of manipulation and deception was better suited to US military personnel – powerful men concerned with maintaining order – than it was to international relief workers, civilians of far-flung national origins who had a more professionalised and technocratic connection to life in the DP camps.Footnote 59 A protracted conflict emerged between the local UNRRA chapter and the secretive and fiercely independent NTS enterprise at Mönchehof. According to a CIC officer, the core issue was the émigrés’ position that the ‘UNRRA should do nothing in the camp except furnish the materials needed for the operation’.Footnote 60 In early 1947 many other NTS leaders were stripped of DP status during a UNRRA screening as ‘collaborators with the Germans’ – a verdict that, while true enough, was surely connected to the turf wars at Mönchehof.Footnote 61

The NTS managed to survive the eviction of its leaders from Mönchehof, and actually retained power through its remaining cadres in the camp. Nevertheless, renewed questioning over the organisation’s record during the war demonstrated the limits of the NTS’s aggressive political tactics in Germany. Until the late 1940s the NTS saw its future in the US and Britain, ‘the centres of world politics’ where the prospects for an organisation opposing the Soviet state seemed brightest.Footnote 62 The NTS undertook a characteristically crafty manoeuvre with the goal of moving its cadres out of Europe in the late 1940s. Somehow Boldyrev secured a position as IRO representative for North Africa, which he used to arrange for the exit of hundreds of DPs from Mönchehof and environs to Morocco as contract labourers – an effort that ended in scandal when it turned out that some 160 purported engineers arriving in Morocco were in fact untrained NTS activists.Footnote 63 While the scheme failed, it showed the eagerness of the émigrés to flee Europe. In fact, the NTS only reconciled itself to the need to maintain its headquarters and cadres in Germany after the Berlin crisis, when the entry of CIA and MI6 into Russian émigré affairs created new opportunities for anti-Soviet work.

The NTS’s conflict with the UNRRA underscored the Alliance’s need to solidify and validate its place in the West. Accordingly, the post-war NTS undertook a massive public relations campaign designed to obscure its collaborationist and semi-fascist past. According to a new NTS historical myth, the Alliance had been a ‘Third Force’ that had fought against both the USSR and Nazi Germany for the duration of the war.Footnote 64 The NTS pointed to the arrest of some of its members by the Gestapo as incontrovertible evidence of the Alliance’s anti-German wartime position. To the extent that NTS had collaborated with German power structures, NTS members claimed, it was only with anti-Hitler military professionals who opposed the brutality of Nazi racial warfare in the East and were sympathetic to the Russian national cause.Footnote 65 If this line had a kernel of truth – some of the NTS’s protectors were indeed anti-Nazi military leaders – it nevertheless obscured the breadth and depth of Solidarist collaboration with the Hitler state.

Complementing the Alliance’s new presentation of the past was its simultaneous ideological transformation. Soon after the war ended, the NTS sought to redefine its doctrines in such a way that the organisation might be allowed to operate in an occupied Germany, and more broadly a post-war West, that was dominated by US-style liberal democracy. Starting with its 1946 programme, the NTS began purging its doctrinal statements of fascistic and anti-liberal terminology (plans for ‘national dictatorship’ and condemnation of ‘the comedy of parliamentary elections’) and anti-Semitism (the demand that Jews either leave Russia without capital or settle in a ‘territory specially designated for them’).Footnote 66 According to the post-war party line, Solidarism was – and always had been – a moderate doctrine that opposed totalitarianism in both its fascist and Marxist variants.Footnote 67

The NTS’s post-war political facelift – both its obfuscation of wartime collaboration and its instrumental adoption of democratic slogans – was hardly out of place in post-war Europe in general or among displaced populations in particular.Footnote 68 For instance, the dominant Ukrainian party in the DP milieu, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists-Bandera Faction, underwent a similar transformation from integral nationalism and intermittent collaboration with the Nazis to a post-war embrace of democratic language – an ‘opportunistic adjustment to the conditions of the Western occupation’, its Ukrainian émigré opponents alleged.Footnote 69 It is nevertheless striking how deliberately the NTS sought to transform its image to fit prevailing political realities in the post-war West. As early as 1946 the CIC reported on the holding of a ‘press conference’ at Mönchehof at which R. N. Redlikh, who had been an NTS liaison to the brutal SS Division of B. V. Kaminskii during the war, delivered a talk on the need to ‘destroy the Soviet form of government and install liberal democracy’ (emphasis added).Footnote 70 And while the NTS conveyed a democratic image to the outside world, a different language dominated in its closed-door discussions and internal publications, where ‘parliamentarianism’ and ‘liberal democracy’ remained pejorative terms.Footnote 71

The calculated nature of the Alliance’s ideological revision was particularly clear with regard to the NTS’s anti-Semitism, as a 1949 discussion at the NTS Council made clear. G. S. Okolovich, the head of NTS secret operations, defended the organisation’s traditional anti-Semitism on the grounds that ‘the Jews have not defined their relationship to Bolshevism’.Footnote 72 However, his colleague Redlikh justified the Alliance’s post-war position of avoiding anti-Semitic statements by arguing that the dominant role of the United States in world anti-communism required a retreat on the ‘Jewish question’. Ironically, Redlikh resorted to anti-Semitic stereotypes in justifying the new party line. ‘International Jewry’ controlled ‘the Russian question’ in US politics, he claimed; crossing these forces could only harm the Alliance’s prospects.Footnote 73 Clearly, the NTS’s post-war ideological development was yet another manifestation of its tactics of using mimicry and misinformation for political gain.

Revolutionary Simulation

The tensions brought about by the first Berlin crisis and then the Korean War transformed the prospects of anti-Soviet organisations in the West virtually overnight. The adoption of the above-mentioned NSC 10/2 authorised covert operations on a wide scale, setting the stage later in 1948 for the creation and rapid expansion of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a covert operations and psychological warfare directorate within the newly created CIA.Footnote 74 From the outset, displaced persons from the Soviet Bloc appeared as valuable and even indispensable assets for these operations. George F. Kennan, who was an architect of the OPC while serving in a leadership position in the State Department, lionised displaced persons from the East as unparalleled sources of information on the Soviet order and also as promising recruits for espionage and covert operations against their homeland.Footnote 75 In the following years the CIA extended support to many anti-Soviet exile groups. Its goal was to create ‘disaffection’ among the Soviet population, which would sap Soviet strength and buck further Soviet expansionism in ‘a cold-war situation’, while also presenting ‘a fruitful field for exploitation’ in case a future hot war broke out.Footnote 76 Just as the NTS leadership had anticipated, the growing tension between West and East created a new opening for its brand of anti-communism.

Washington’s turn to the exiles provided the context for the political rehabilitation of the NTS in occupied Germany that had previously proved elusive. CIA and especially OPC officials were eager to fight the Cold War, extremely well-financed and also largely ignorant of the DP political scene in Germany. Not surprisingly, they proved far more willing to accept the NTS’s depictions of its own history and ideology than the CIC and the UNRRA had been. In 1950 an OPC report conveyed the NTS’s ‘Third Force’ rendition of its war record uncritically, going so far as to report that ‘apparently NTS had some success in organising several anti-Soviet and anti-German partisan groups’.Footnote 77 A report from the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, which had responsibility for espionage operations, took a more sceptical view of the NTS’s purported democratic transformation, attributing the Russian organisation’s adoption of a program ‘more acceptable to the world in general’ to the influence of ‘US occupation forces and other countries (sic)’.Footnote 78 Nevertheless, the CIA decided to offer large-scale support to the Russian organisation in 1951 following receipt of the Solidarists’ above-mentioned blueprint for revolution, ‘Petia-8’.

The CIA’s lack of concern regarding the NTS’s political coloration requires explaining. Scholars have stressed the role of US ideas and ‘missionary spirit’ in liberation policy, which expressed the goal of remaking the world according to US democracy and capitalism.Footnote 79 Not surprisingly, then, the US did pay some attention to the ideological commitments of their émigré assets, as disagreements with the British over patronage of Ukrainian groups showed.Footnote 80 Some CIA agents in Germany found the Solidarists’ wartime activities distasteful; at a secret training camp for NTS cadres, the organisation’s case officer rebuked the Russians with the comment that ‘reading “Mein Kampf” alone should have been enough to dissuade the Solidarists from seeking an amicable agreement with Nazism’.Footnote 81 Nevertheless, the context of the early Cold War meant that the CIA was more concerned with a potential asset’s perceived potential to contribute to espionage and covert operations than it was with its ideology or wartime past. The agency’s priorities found expression during 1951 talks between representatives of the CIA, MI6 and US and UK diplomats on coordinating the two services’ expanding welter of covert operations. ‘Viewed objectively’, an unidentified CIA official opined, ‘not one of the émigré groups could be unequivocally labelled democratic’. Therefore, while trying to ‘moderate the expression of . . . political views’ by the NTS and other rightist groups, one should also take a ‘bluntly realistic approach’ toward them.Footnote 82 Obviously, the speaker took ‘realism’ to mean a willingness to overlook the fascist-influenced past and ideology of the NTS and other émigré groups.

On the face of things the CIA’s modus operandi of valuing operational expediency over principle in its marshalling of European intelligence assets would not seem to work in the NTS’s favour. As CIA documents show, in the 1950s the NTS possessed a limited capacity to operate in Eastern Germany but had virtually no presence in the Soviet Union.Footnote 83 To obscure the NTS’s lack of accomplishments in the revolutionary struggle, the Alliance made false claims to US and other intelligence services about its ability to penetrate the Iron Curtain. NTS activist Nikolai Shits-Siz claimed to CIC officials that ‘if any country will back our ideology, the NTS can raise 10,000 men within 30 days to work for it’.Footnote 84 Moreover, the NTS claimed that it had left operatives behind in West Russia when it was reconquered by the Red Army, dangling before the US spies the prospect that it possessed operative agent networks on Soviet soil. In fact, the Soviet secret police had effectively rolled up remaining NTS operatives.Footnote 85 When CIA officials questioned Romanov about how NTS headquarters in Germany communicated with its agents in the USSR, the émigré offered a creative answer. While admitting that the NTS lacked a courier system to communicate with the Solidarist underground in Russia, Romanov explained that one was not needed: ‘the aims of the members were so intense that in any event demanding action or decision, one member could be sure of the actions of other members without establishing liaison’.Footnote 86

Such obfuscations, however craftily conveyed, did not mislead intelligence officers who were, after all, trained in exposing them. For this reason the NTS also sought to obscure the gap between its boasts and its actual abilities by undertaking anti-Soviet activities in occupied Germany. Already in 1946 the NTS claimed to operate a rudimentary intelligence service that gathered information from ‘occasional agents in the Soviet occupied zone, German black market dealers from the Soviet zone, German P[O]W repatriates, and liaison with Yugoslav and Ukrainian elements in Germany which have their individual sources of information’.Footnote 87 If an intelligence operation based on such haphazard sources probably produced little of interest to the Americans, it nevertheless drove home the message that the Solidarists were organised and eager to act. Also designed to make an impression on US spies were NTS propaganda operations in East Germany. The NTS’s distribution of anti-Soviet leaflets and literature in the Soviet zones of Germany and Austria were small-scale undertakings.Footnote 88 The crude distribution methods the Solidarists employed – stowing copies of Posev or leaflets in Soviet military trains, mailing them directly to military units, handing them to Soviet military personnel attending Orthodox church services in West Berlin and ‘assigning elderly, inconspicuous Germans to carry and distribute copies’ – meant that very little of the subversive paper ever reached its target.Footnote 89 If these shoestring propaganda activities did little to challenge the communist enemy, they served the ancillary goal of winning US patronage. As V. D. Poremskii commented while describing the NTS’s German activities to his fellow Solidarists, ‘the path to Washington lies through the occupied zone’.Footnote 90

The NTS’s strategy of combining carefully disseminated mistruths with symbolic deeds bore fruit. To be sure, the CIA did not accept uncritically the NTS’s claims made in the foreign-language press about the existence of a ‘dozens’ of secret cells of Solidarists in the USSR, scrawling the NTS trident symbol on ‘walls and fences’ to communicate with one another.Footnote 91 However, CIA officials were evidently willing to overlook the NTS’s public dissimulation in the hope that the organisation possessed at least some capacity to act against the Soviets. An early OPC evaluation described the NTS as a ‘tightly integrated anti-communist organisation commanding strict allegiance of its 1200 members’ – notably, a statement that exaggerated the outfit’s membership by almost a factor of two.Footnote 92 And despite its disingenuousness and chequered reputation, the Alliance seemed to be able to mobilise its members for what very few Soviet exiles would risk undertaking: ‘illegal’ agent missions to the USSR.Footnote 93 The NTS’s potential to produce agents was ‘very good’, and as many as one hundred agents might be recruited in a year, an unidentified American intelligence official who was consulted by OSO officials in Germany asserted.Footnote 94 At the very least, the NTS had proved to the Americans that it was ‘the best organised and the most active in anti-Communist work of all the Russian émigré organisations’, as a 1950 OPC memorandum opined.Footnote 95

Why did CIA operatives develop such an inflated estimate of the NTS’s abilities in the areas of both espionage and political warfare? The CIA’s sanguine evaluation of the NTS showed how eager, or perhaps desperate, the agency was to establish intelligence assets in the USSR during the early Cold War. However, there is every reason to believe that the NTS’s longstanding efforts to prove its own political effectiveness and active connection to the estranged homeland tipped the scales in its favour – especially given the CIA’s apparently poor level of knowledge on the exiles.Footnote 96 As in the rewriting of its past and present political commitments for external consumption, the NTS proved adept at crafting its own image in the West – in this case, by creating the myth of its prowess as a revolutionary organisation.

Conclusion

During the bloodshed of 1944 and 1945 the NTS narrowly avoided destruction, first at the hands of the Nazis and then the Soviets, only to find itself under siege in occupied Germany. Six years later the émigré organisation had become an instrument of the CIA and MI6 in the Cold War. In the process, the exile operatives effected an unlikely transformation from a group of far-right collaborators to Western-backed spies, revolutionaries and even politicians with international reputations. While the breakdown of relations between the superpowers and the CIA’s courting of exiles was the essential framework for explaining this development, the NTS was also a crucial actor in the story. Starting soon after the war, the NTS activists employed an effective set of political strategies toward intelligence agencies and other holders of power in the West, drawing on the Solidarists’ experiences of fighting Soviet communism in the interwar years as well as under the aegis of the Nazis during the Second World War. In the post-war years they befriended US military officials while operating behind their backs, spread disinformation about their past and ideology to gain political respectability, propagated the fiction of their political influence in the homeland and, eventually, drove hard bargains with the CIA.

Two conclusions emerge from examining the trajectory of the post-war NTS, one relating to US intelligence practises and another to the post-war period more broadly. The post-war activities of the NTS underscore that émigré operations during the Cold War were multi-directional encounters. As a rich literature has uncovered, the CIA’s ‘false front’ operations during the Cold War took unpredictable political directions, as the agency struggled to exert control over the disparate anti-communist organisations it funded.Footnote 97 In a somewhat similar fashion, the CIA’s émigré-based covert operations in Europe involved the merging of superpower agendas with the political interests of organisations such as the NTS and, by extension, those of the émigré communities in which the latter were rooted. The émigrés’ ideas, memories, cultures and – especially important in the case of the NTS – political practises were meaningful variables in their encounters with the new and relatively inexperienced US intelligence establishment.

In a wider sense, the post-war metamorphosis of the NTS reflected the specific time and place of occupied Germany and, more broadly, of post-war Europe. Historians have bracketed off the first five post-war years in Europe as a distinct sub-period marked by crisis and upheaval, a time that pointed backward to the war as much as forward to the Cold War bipolarity and cross-continental economic expansion of the following decades. As Tony Judt stressed, the early post-war conjuncture was marked by the destruction and moral collapse of the war years, the massive displacement of peoples aimed at matching demography to post-war borders, a short burst of post-war political justice and the end of wartime political idealism.Footnote 98 This was a climate in which the NTS – skilled in the art of collaboration, armed with deceptive political techniques and willing to improvise in the face of geopolitical developments – was well-suited to operate. In this sense the political relevance of a marginal group of exiles and former Axis collaborators underscores the disarray of first post-war years in Europe and the political possibilities it enabled.

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

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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.

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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.

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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), 25–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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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), 120–152CrossRefGoogle 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.

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48 Ibid.

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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), 58–78CrossRefGoogle 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, 231–234Google 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), 78–83Google 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), 182–249Google Scholar.