Unseen Cold War history

COVERT ACTION IN THE COLD WAR
By Patrick Pacalo, PhD
Author of Cold Warfare: A Compact History

Covert Action (CA) was a staple item in the locker of foreign policy options during the Cold War. Where did it all begin? We know the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had many operations on-going during World War II. These and other covert activities are well documented in both private and US government histories. The richest government source on covert action is in the archives of declassified CIA documents available through Freedom of Information Act Request (FOIA) to the agency. Some day these documents will likely find a home in the National Archives which will make access less problematic in the future. For private histories we can see details in, among the many sources, the late former CIA Director William Colby's Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. Colby was an OSS "Jedberg" operative fighting the Nazis in occupied France during the run up to D-Day in WWII.

Was this the beginning of US sponsored covert action, which was so critical to fighting the Cold War? After all the Cold War began during the winding down of WWII -- or so many contend. It would have been easy to keep the covert capability that worked so well against the Japanese and Germans as a force to be reckoned with in the Cold War conflict after WWII. Well, the OSS was torn apart after the war and then rebuilt as the CIA -- both by Harry S. Truman.

From there we could look into the future to Iran, Guatemala, and Cuba. All of these had been targets of US CA activities in the 1950s and 1960s. Well, WWII was first in that case. What is perhaps the best known of CA efforts? One could argue that the Iran-Contra affair fits that bill. In the 1980s USMC Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, working in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House, ran a huge operation spanning continents. His effort to keep the communist grip off of Nicaragua and the rest of Central America, which he states was fully approved by Ronald Reagan, brought CA well into the lime light. Looking at this we can see the vast amount of information available to the public in places like the National Security Archive located on the campus of George Washington University in DC. In that archive one can even find the one page military resume that got North his National Security Council staff job. Clearly WWII came before this, however spectacular the results.

CA is as American as apple pie. We have documented it well before the Cold War, well before WWII; in fact the trail goes back to before we were a nation, to the Revolutionary War. The start of the Cold War could possibly be fixed to 1848 with the publication of The Communist Manifesto. It could be fixed to a later date, the start of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. When the need arose for CA against the Soviets, it was pulled off the shelf and used as an effective implement. Overt action, CA, military force, and ideology became intertwined in the events we call the Cold War. This entanglement of on-going and overlapping events is Cold Warfare defined.

An excerpt from Cold Warfare: a Compact History, pp. 14-16:
From its earliest beginnings as a nation, during the war for independence, America was involved in sponsoring covert action; including paramilitary action by privateers…The entire scope of the effort involved a network of agents supervised by the Committee on Secret Correspondence of the Continental Congress. The initial success of the effort brought six million dollars in secret aid from France in July 1775, a full year prior to the Declaration of Independence.

In April 1776, the secret committee was empowered to arm and man vessels in France for attacks on British shipping. This was America's first covert paramilitary action campaign. The privateers were to capture British prizes and bring them to French ports. It was hoped that the missions operating from French ports would lead to war between Britain and France. The ships also had some Frenchmen in their crews as a further provocation against Britain. There was even the bold suggestion of raids on the British cities of Glasgow and Liverpool in Franklin's correspondence on the matter.

The privateers were successful in that they increased the tension level between France and Britain. The French acted to stop the raids by holding the American ships in port and taking the French members of their crews to prison. The feelings of glee over the friction between the two European powers, which the American rebels experienced, were expressed in one of Washington's letters in November of 1777, which states in part:

"We have an account, indeed, which seems to gain credit, that (Captain) Weeks, with a squadron of ships fitted out of French ports, under continental colors, had taken fifty-three homeward bound West Indiamen (chiefly from Jamaica) in the English Channel; and war is expected every moment between France and Britain. God send it."

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