The Cold War (3 page)

Most of the books that lined the front room of his redbrick house in Georgetown were biographies and treatises on nineteenth-century British statesmen— Melbourne, Palmerston, Disraeli, Salisbury—and Acheson was steeped in their thinking and history. At the end of World War II, he had been prepared to concede Great Britain its traditional sphere of influence in Iran and to let Britain contest Russia there, as it had a century before in the so-called Great Game of Asia. But now he perceived how weak Britain actually was, and he recognized its consequent reliance on America to back it up in the Middle East.

Even while the United States had been following a policy of trying to cooperate with the Soviet Union on a whole range of issues, Acheson was determined to demonstrate America's commitment to Turkey. Unlike northern Iran and Eastern Europe, which Soviet troops occupied as a result of World War II, the Straits were a strategic point that had been free of Russian control. If Moscow intended to seize them, the truly expansionist nature of Soviet foreign policy would be revealed.

The opportunity to take a stand presented itself a bit ghoulishly, in the per-son—more precisely, the body—of Mehmet Munir Ertegun, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, who had died in Washington during World War II. Traditionally, chiefs of mission who died in service were returned by warship. Acheson decided that he would return Ertegun's body to Istanbul on the battleship
Missouri.
Although the direct Soviet threat to Turkey was on the ground, the majesty of the
Missouri,
with its 16-inch guns, its enormous bulk, and its especially strong armor, made it a perfect symbol of U.S. resolve.

Despite the arrival of the battleship at Istanbul in early April, the Soviets kept their pressure on the Turks; nonetheless, the presence of the
Missouri
as an emblem of American protection allowed the Turks more freedom to reject Soviet demands. The Dardanelles was, as Acheson saw it, the “stopper in the neck of the bottle,” and if Great Britain was too weak to take action, America must be prepared to step in.

Two days after the Soviet memo of August 7 demanding that the Turks allow
the Russians to share in the defense of the Straits, the Yugoslavs, under Stalin's then ally Marshal Tito, forced down an unarmed U.S. Army transport plane. Acheson, impatient to take action, began meeting with high-level officials from the State, War, and Navy departments, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to decide what to do. In Acheson's mind, the worst policy would be one of bluff. The Russians must be certain that America would support Ankara if Turkey were attacked.

The risks of bluffing were also uppermost in the thinking of Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. Forrestal, a workaholic former Wall Street banker, was obsessed with the Communist threat to the point of paranoia. His obsession with the Red menace eventually forced him to resign as secretary of defense in 1949. Not long after that, he committed suicide by jumping out of a window at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

When Forrestal dispatched the
Missouri
to the Straits in March, he wanted the Eighth Fleet, the striking arm of the Atlantic Fleet, to accompany it and then to remain in the Mediterranean for maneuvers as a first step toward establishing a permanent naval presence there. At the time, he told Winston Churchill that Truman had refused to send such a task force to accompany the
Missouri,
and Churchill responded that “a gesture of power not fully implemented was almost less effective than no gesture at all.” Now Forrestal was determined to send all the ships needed to confront the Russians at the mouth of the Black Sea. Throughout the sweltering Washington summer, high-level discussions between the departments of State, War, and Navy would produce one of the toughest policy recommendations yet offered to Harry Truman.

Flanked by Forrestal and top Pentagon brass, Acheson presented the report on August 15 to the president and awaited his reaction. “In our opinion,” the report read, “the primary objective of the Soviet Union is to obtain control of Turkey…. If the Soviet Union succeeds in obtaining control of Turkey, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prevent the Soviet Union from obtaining control over Greece and over the whole Near and Middle East.”

Should this happen, the report went on, Moscow would be in a much stronger position to threaten India and China. “The only thing which will deter the Russians will be the conviction that the United States is prepared, if necessary, to meet aggression with force of arms.”

The report concluded, “In our opinion therefore the time has come when
we must decide that we shall resist with all means at our disposal any Soviet aggression and in particular, because the case of Turkey would be so clear, any Soviet aggression against Turkey.”

The president did not hesitate. “We might as well find out,” Truman responded, “whether the Russians are bent on world conquest now as in five or ten years.” He was prepared to pursue the policy to the end.

At this point, according to Acheson, General Eisenhower, then army chief of staff, leaned over and asked him in a whisper if it was clear to the president that the course they were recommending could lead to war. Before Acheson could reply, the president asked whether the general had something to say. Acheson repeated Eisenhower's question.

As Acheson tells it, Truman took from his desk drawer a large map of the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean and asked those present to gather around him. Unfolding the map, Truman gave a short lecture on the historical background and current strategic importance of the region. It was vital to protect the Straits from any Soviet incursion; otherwise, he said, echoing the re-port's conclusion, Soviet troops would soon be used to control all of Turkey, and in the natural course of events, Greece and the Near East would fall under Soviet domination.

When he finished, he turned to Eisenhower in good humor and asked if he was satisfied now that the situation was understood. Eisenhower joined the others in general laughter and said that he was.

Four days later, Acheson reacted to the Soviet proposal. He rejected any notion that the U.S.S.R. should share responsibility with Turkey for the defense of the Straits. The Montreux Convention could be revised, but the United States considered the Turkish Straits a matter of concern to its own strategic interests. Turkish sovereignty remained inviolate. Acheson did not have to spell out the administration's willingness to risk war.

The Cold War started on August 19, 1946.

Confronted by American resolve—symbolized by the naval task force in the eastern Mediterranean, headed by the
Roosevelt
and the
Missouri
—the Russians backed down. A month later, their tone on the Dardanelles was much softer. And after Stalin's death in 1953, the question of even revising the Montreux Convention was abandoned.

A week after Acheson had sent his reply to Moscow,
New York Times
reporter James Reston noted a shift in Acheson's thinking. While the undersecretary
had previously held out for a “liberal policy” toward the Soviet Union, “when the facts seemed to merit a change—as he seems to think they now do in the case of the Soviet Union—he switched with the facts.”

Three years later, as secretary of state, Acheson was dining with President Truman in his private railway car on the way back to Washington from the dedication of the new United Nations Building in New York. Acheson's wife mentioned Central Asia, and that got Truman started. The waiters cleared away the dishes, and the president began to lecture on the history of Central Asia, the various emperors, the military campaigns, the migrations of populations. Toward the end of his exposition, Mrs. Acheson said, “This is amazing. I wouldn't have been surprised that you would know all about the Civil War, but this part of the world, I've never known anyone who knew anything about it.”

The president laughed and then told her why: “Well, my eyesight isn't any good. I was never any good playing games where you have to see what you're doing at a distance. I couldn't hit a ball if it hit me in the nose, so I spent my time reading. I guess I read nearly every book in the library. I got interested in this part of the world, and ever since I've read everything about it I could find.”

But, as Acheson commented, what Truman discussed that late afternoon was not simply a collection of unconnected events but the reasons why these migrations took place, and the pressures that were pushing them. His depth of understanding about the region was worthy of a scholar.

For Truman, as for Acheson, the Turkish crisis meant that the Soviets would not be content with a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Instead, they were engaged in a policy of renewed expansion. Especially in the Mediterranean and the Near East, where the Russians had traditionally sought territory and access to the sea, and where the British had stood fast against them, the Americans must now be prepared to draw the line. With the Truman administration's willingness to risk a hot war over the control of the Dardanelles, the Cold War had actually begun.

Four years later, the American Mediterranean task force that had been established at the end of 1946 was designated the Sixth Fleet. With this action, the navy's emphasis on the Pacific, which had been the central priority in naval thinking since the 1930s, came to an end. Henceforth, American naval strategy, built around the revived nineteenth-century practice of stationing American warships in friendly ports, was focused on the containment of the Soviet Union—the ultimately successful foreign policy objective of the United States for the next forty-five years.

HARRIS GREENE

On a local level, as opposed to a geopolitical one, the Cold War had an even earlier start. In Austria, for example, tensions between the former allies flared almost from the moment World War II ended. With help from the local populace in early April 1945, the Soviets had overrun Vienna: The city would subsequently be divided into four occupation zones—American, British, French, and Russian—as was the entire country. Vienna, like Berlin, was deep in the Soviet zone. Austria would remain occupied for the next ten years; it was not until 1955, when the treaty making the entire country neutral went into effect, that the last foreign troops left.

Austria hardly resounded with the sound of music in those first years of peace. Much of the country, especially those areas that the Russians had shouldered through, had been savaged by war. People lived squalid lives on the edge. Former concentration-camp inmates and refugees from Eastern Europe—displaced persons, or simply DPs—roamed the landscape; as late as the mid-1950s, thousands still lived in camps. Former POWs searched for wives and families who had themselves become displaced in the final convulsions of 1945. Desperately poor people, hungry and jobless, were willing to do anything to survive. Only black marketers and spies seemed to thrive: Intrigue became a profession in a world unnaturally filled with unexplained kidnappings, disappearances, and murders. A movie such as
The Third Man,
set in Vienna in 1947, seemed less fiction than documentary.

Once the occupation armies arrived, they immediately put their intelligence organizations to work. Local Nazis had to be corralled. But another concern came to dominate: What was the other side up to? Already
the Iron Curtain was descending. In Salzburg, Mozart's birthplace, the operations chief of the U.S. Army's 430th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) was a man named Harris Greene. For him, the Cold War would begin on January 20, 1946. The story he related fifty years later may have had the flavor of a Keystone Kops misadventure, but it was a gambit in a game that was becoming increasingly hazardous and at times deadly.

The late HARRIS GREENE served with the CIC in postwar Italy and Austria and worked for the CIA from 1949 until his retirement in 1980. In the years that followed, he turned to—what else?—spy novels, publishing six.

T
HERE ARE DIFFERING OPINIONS
on when the Cold War began. But I contend that it began, at least on a small scale, in occupied Austria. I can even cite the exact date: January 20, 1946, barely six months after the end of World War II. I was there, serving as operations chief for the U.S. Army's 430th Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Detachment in Salzburg.

The key player in the historic drama that unfolded that Sunday was Richard Kauder, alias “Klatt,” a pudgy, forty-year-old Viennese with a weakness for women. Kauder was born Jewish but converted to Roman Catholicism to avoid the arrows and slings of Austrian anti-Semitism. A journalist, he had been recruited late in 1937 by the Abwehr, the military intelligence arm of the German armed forces, to run a small but important network of Russian spies.

When war between Russia and Germany came in June 1941, Kauder's agents at first supplied valuable information from Moscow. Kauder's network dissolved, however, after it passed on “bad” intelligence that helped set up a military disaster for the Germans in the great tank battle of Kursk in July 1943. After Kursk, the Germans never again seized the initiative against the Soviets, and they retreated until Berlin and the end of the war.

Kauder's military intelligence unit retreated with the rest of the German army, and when the hostilities were over, he ended up in the American zone of Austria. He fell into the hands of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the temporary American counterintelligence organization in Salzburg, which tried without success to debrief him.

One day in January 1946, the otherwise uncooperative Kauder came to his SSU contact officer and asked for protection. He said he believed he was being closely followed. SSU came to us at the 430th CIC Detachment and asked us to watch over Kauder.

Because of the heavy demands on our arrest and internment of German Nazis, SS, and Gestapo, we could spare only Special Agent George Milovanovich, from Ohio. George, who died in the 1950s, was a real linguist, speaking English, Russian, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Czech, and Slovak. He was well over six feet tall but knew nothing about war or violence. He was hopeless at rounding up Nazis and was thus selected for “minding” Kauder. We gave him a submachine gun without an ammunition clip and told him to arrest anyone who wanted to seize Kauder.