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The story of how Kennan and Thayer developed their attitudes toward revitalization of the Vlasov Army and similar organizations of former Nazi collaborators is worth examining as an illustration of a broader shift in opinion that was under way in American national security circles as the cold war deepened. Kennan, Thayer, and a number of other latter-day U.S. experts on Soviet affairs had first encountered one another at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the mid-1930s. The outpost where the young men worked was, as Kennan put it later, “in many respects a pioneer enterprise—a wholly new type of American [diplomatic] mission—the model and the precursor of a great many missions of a later day.” Following more than a century of relative isolationism in American foreign policy, the U.S. center in Moscow was “the first to cope seriously … with the problems of security—of protection of codes and files and the privacy of intra-office discussion—in a hostile environment,” according to the diplomat.
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The intelligence work of the Moscow staff was much more sophisticated than that under way at other U.S. embassies of the prewar period. The Russian embassy staff (particularly Kennan and his colleague Charles Bohlen) developed a technique that was then new for the Americans and that later became the intelligence analysis backbone of the wartime OSS and still later of the CIA. Unlike more traditional consular reports of foreign trade regulations, court intrigues, and similar diplomatic chitchat, this new approach included the systematic collection of published materials concerning a given country, then the supplementing of those data with information gleaned from secret sources and espionage, and finally the interpretation of the lot by researchers with extensive backgrounds in the subject area. This method has more in common with good scholarship or journalism than it does with James Bond types of
affairs, though there was room for those, too. By late 1936, according to Kennan, use of these techniques had made the U.S. Embassy one of the best informed and most highly respected diplomatic missions in Moscow. There was only one rival when it came to collection of information on the USSR. That contender was the embassy of Nazi Germany, whose inside knowledge of Soviet affairs was, as Kennan puts it, “at all times excellent.”
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Kennan, Thayer, Bohlen, and a number of the other U.S. diplomatic personnel in Moscow established enduring friendships with several top German diplomats during this period, including senior Konsul Gustav Hilger, Military Attache Ernst Köstring, and Second Secretary Hans Heinrich Herwarth. Such men were at the core of Germany's diplomatic expertise on the USSR, and they shared both professional and personal interests with their American colleagues.
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These bonds survived the war. Thayer, as it turned out, in 1945 became chief of the OSS in Austria. There he rediscovered Herwarth—who, it will be recalled, had served as a senior political officer of the Wehrmacht's
Osttruppen
(eastern troops) program for recruiting collaborators during the conflict—when Herwarth turned himself in after Germany's formal surrender.

Their 1945 reunion was warm and mutually profitable. Thayer regarded Herwarth as “an old friend who happened to be a captain in the German Army,” as he put it later, and used the power of his OSS office to intervene on the German's behalf. Thayer considered Herwarth to be an anti-Nazi and an excellent source of information on Soviet affairs. Thayer remembered from his embassy days, for example, that Herwarth had in 1939 leaked secret information to the Americans concerning the Hitler-Stalin Pact. He knew that Herwarth had been a friend of Claus von Stauffenberg (who had organized the July 20, 1944, attempted assassination of Hitler) and that Herwarth, like a number of other German political warfare experts, had been critical of Hitler's policies in the East prior to the war.

Thayer also knew that Herwarth had been involved in the defector troops' antipartisan warfare in Yugoslavia in 1944, for he has admitted this himself, and it was his responsibility as OSS chief in Austria to know that those campaigns had been marked by thousands of mass executions of civilian hostages, looting of villages, and other crimes. Even so, Thayer quickly arranged for Herwarth to be demobilized from the Wehrmacht, kept out of U.S. POW camps,
and freed from American custody without even the cursory investigation of wartime activities given to noncommisioned officers.

“None of us had as yet any inkling of what really hapened on the Russian front since June 22, 1941 [when the Germans invaded],” Thayer explained later. “There were a lot of questions that he [Herwarth] could answer, and from my experience with him before the war I was sure those answers would not be only reliable but expert.”
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“For about nine weeks I remained with Charlie,” Herwarth writes. “He asked me to write down my experiences in the war with the Soviet Union, and especially to describe the activities of the
Freiwilliganverbande
[the Germans' collaborationist troops in the East]. Every day, I went with Charlie [to] his office, which was in the old monastery of St. Peter.… In late summer I was assigned to the American historical research group [at Camp King].…”
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Thayer credits Herwarth, more than anyone else, for educating him about German political warfare efforts in the East and about the anti-Communist potential of the collaborationist troops that had served under German command. With Thayer's help, Herwarth emerged as one of the first, and certainly one of the most influential, German advocates of resurrecting the Vlasov Army and similar collaborators for use against the USSR. Herwarth was uniquely qualified for the task. In addition to having served as Kostring's political officer, he had also represented the Wehrmacht at the official founding of the Komitet Osvobozhdeniia Narodov Rossii (KONR), the political arm of the Vlasov Army that had been created under Nazi auspices.

Herwarth's value to the OSS at the time of his work for Thayer lay in his ability to identify useful Germans with expertise on the USSR and Eastern Europe. Among the first such experts to be plucked out of the squalid U.S. POW camps in Germany were Gustav Hilger; Herwarth's commandant, Köstring; and many of the surviving members of the German Embassy's prewar staff in Moscow. Some, like Köstring and Herwarth, were immediately put to work writing intelligence reports for the Americans on what they knew about the Red Army and the Germans' use of collaborators. Others, like Hilger, received the full VIP treatment, complete with secret trips to the United States for debriefing at the special army facility for senior German POWs at Fort Hunt, Virginia.
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Through these channels and others like them Kennan, Thayer,
and other American specialists on Soviet affairs learned of the details of German political warfare in the East. The Americans' later acts strongly suggest that they also accepted the basic features of Herwarth's version of what had taken place there: that the eastern troops were idealistic volunteers who had been motivated by a desire to overthrow Stalin's dictatorship; that they had not been involved in—and indeed had not even heard of—Nazi war crimes until the conflict was over; and that the collaborators were really pro-Western and prodemocracy at heart.

George Kennan's perspective on Nazi war crimes is relevant here because it bears on the question of how closely he was willing to look at the wartime careers of those in the Vlasov Army and similar groups during his service as a senior U.S. national security strategist. He has written that he viewed the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal with “horror,” not because of the evidence of Nazi criminality presented there but rather because the trial and judgment of the Nazis themselves may have impeded improving U.S.German relations in the wake of the war.

As Kennan saw it, a thorough purging of Nazis and even of war criminals from postwar German governments was undesirable for several reasons. He summed up his views on this topic in a wartime memo prepared for the European Advisory Commission in London, whose job it was to hammer out joint U.S.-British policies for relations with Germany after the war. First, he argued, “it is impracticable,” because the Allies could never cooperate efficiently enough to do the job. “Second … whether we like it or not,” the diplomat wrote, “nine tenths of what is strong, able and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind” for purging from the German government—namely, those who had been “more than nominal members of the Nazi Party.” Rather than remove the “present ruling class of Germany,” as he put it, it would be better to “hold it [that class] strictly to its task and teach it the lessons we wish it to learn.”
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The actions of the Nazis and their collaborators reflected the “customs of warfare which have prevailed generally in Eastern Europe and Asia for centuries in the past,” Kennan wrote to Ambassador John G. Winant at that time, “they are not the peculiar property of the Germans.… If others wish, in the face of this situation, to pursue the illumination of those sinister recesses in which the brutalities of this war find their record, they may do so,” he concluded. But “the degree of relative guilt which such inquiries may
bring to light is something of which I, as an American, prefer to remain ignorant.”
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By 1947, then, a bold perspective on how to wage the cold war had begun to take shape in the minds of Kennan, Thayer (who by that time had been appointed director of the Voice of America), and most other national security strategists in Washington. As Thayer sums it up, this theory held that Hitler's wartime offensive in the East had failed primarily because of his failure to follow the advice of political warfare experts such as Herwarth. The German experience, however, had “proved” that the population of the USSR was eager for life without Stalin and that millions of people in the Soviet Union and its satellites could be rallied against communism through new promises of democracy, religious freedom, and an end to police state rule.

Not all the clandestine containment programs were aimed at the USSR and its satellites. Some of the most important early applications of these tactics began in Western Europe. The Italian elections of early 1948 marked another important milestone in the development of U.S. covert operations and in high-level U.S. support for use of former Nazi collaborators. Two developments of far-reaching importance for these programs took place during this election campaign. First, U.S. security agencies successfully tested a series of propaganda and political manipulation techniques that were later to come into widespread use around the world, including inside the United States itself. Secondly, the CIA established much deeper and broader ties with the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church in Rome than had previously been the case. This not only had a powerful impact on the Italian political scene but also—as is discussed in a later chapter—laid the foundation for the agency's relationship with Intermarium, an influential Catholic lay organization made up primarily of Eastern European exiles that operated under the protection of the Vatican. At least a half dozen senior leaders of Intermarium and its member groups can be readily identified as Nazi collaborators. Some were fugitive war criminals. However, Intermarium was later to emerge as one of the mainstays of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (later renamed Radio Liberty), and scores of other CIA-sponsored clandestine operations during the next two decades.

The Italian Communist party was favored to score heavily in the 1948 elections, and many analysts said that the party might democratically
win control of the country's government. This prospect created such alarm in Washington that George Kennan—by then the foremost long-range strategist for the U.S. government—went so far as to advocate direct U.S. military occupation of the Foggia oil fields if the voting results went wrong from the point of view of the United States.
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Washington's apprehension was shared—indeed, was enthusiastically fueled—by the Holy See. The church's hierarchy, which was already under severe economic and political pressure in Eastern Europe, feared a Communist takeover of the very heart of its institution, or at least of its worldly resources. The prospect of a Communist electoral victory in Italy coming close on the heels of Communist gains in Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland was viewed by many of the hierarchy as the most profound material crisis the church had seen in centuries. Prochurch Italian officials were “positively desperate and almost immobilized by the fear which hangs over them,” Bishop James Griffiths, an American emissary to the Vatican, wrote at the time. They were afraid, the bishop said, of a “disastrous failure at the polls which will put Italy behind the Iron Curtain.”
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The election campaign became a major test of containment and of its accompanying clandestine political warfare strategy. Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Colby, and a team of other top-ranked U.S. intelligence officials put together a crash program of propaganda, sabotage, and secret funding of Christian Democratic candidates designed to frustrate the Italian Communist party's ambitions. The CIA was a young organization in those days and was primarily limited (until June 1948) to simple information gathering and analysis. Therefore, much of this campaign was handled on an ad hoc basis out of the offices of Allen and John Foster Dulles at the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm in New York. Kennan watched events unfold from his vantage point at State Department headquarters in Washington, while Thayer kept up a steady cannonade of pro-West and anti-Communist broadcasts over the Voice of America.

Working in close coordination with the Vatican and with prominent Americans of Italian or Catholic heritage, the CIA found that its effort in Italy succeeded well beyond its expectations. On a public level the United States dumped $350 million in announced civil and military aid into the country during this campaign alone. Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, and a score of other
prominent Americans were enlisted to make radio broadcasts to Italy warning against the Communist electoral menace.
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A CIA-financed media blitz showered Italian newspapers with articles and photographs expressing American munificence and Communist atrocities, both real and manufactured. The archbishops of Milan and Palermo announced that anyone who voted for the Communist party's candidates was prohibited from receiving absolution or confession. Eugene Cardinal Tisserant went further. Communists “may not have a Christian burial or be buried in holy grounds,” he pronounced.