Customer Reviews

Operation Splinter Factor

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This book tells about a secret operation that "succeeded", but was a failure in the end, after many deaths and the destruction of many lives. The author pieced together this story from a variety of sources; he had been a diplomatic correspondent and foreign editor.

Th Potsdam Treaty carved up the world just like the Versailles Treaty after an earlier war. But unlike the latter, a new Cold War began (p.19). America shed its traditional isolationism and began its long march towards a New World Order - to replace and surpass the now declining British Empire.

The death and destruction in Eastern Europe fixated their leader's minds on security from another war. Their leaders were composed of two dissimilar type: those who spent years in underground activities (Tito), and those beholden to Moscow. It also included adventurers who joined the winning side, those with experience from the pre-war regimes, and some double agents.

Jan Masaryk said that Czechoslovakia's votes with Poland and Yugoslavia had not harmed the United States but benefitted Czechoslovakia by preventing Soviet interference there (p.26). But the Soviets demanded political support in return for noninterference in internal affairs, and America demanded political support in exchange for aid. Can a servant serve two masters?

Page 30 makes two mistakes in talking about disbanding the OSS by Truman, and a decoding organization by Stimson. The former was due to bureaucratic struggles within government, the latter to drop a high-cost unofficial group. You can be sure the regular agencies continued with this work!

Page 37 tells of the activities of "Michael Sullivan", the head of a British relief agency who set up a spy network in Poland. Prisoners were extracted, incidents of sabotage and terrorism were created, rumors of shortages created runs on shops, rural riots were created by rumors of collectivization. In 1945 agents incited anti-semitic riots in Kielce and Krakow. The purpose of all this was to create a revolution; it failed. But he recruited the deputy director of Department Ten (Jozef Swiatlo), whose function was to police the policemen of the police state; it had unlimited powers.

The devil in all these details was Allen Welsh Dulles, grandson and nephew of Secretaries of State, senior partner of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and head of the OSS mission in Berne during World War II. From 1946 to 1948 Allen Dulles ran private intelligence operations in Eastern Europe, using funds from companies and the wealthy (page 53 does not list their special interests). Like his brother John he was involved with a number of religious and charitable institutions which were used to cover and conceal their secret activities.

Dulles chose to use Noel Field as a pawn to taint national Communists as US spies, ensuring their destruction by Stalin. Dulles would use Swiatlo to help incriminate many with planted evidence (p.99). Evidence would show that Field recruited Communists as American agents, that others were followers of Tito or Trotsky. Stalin checked out these stories with their double agent in Washington - it was verified. But their double agent was a triple agent! Recruited in the 1930s, he was being saved for an event like this (p.101). To complete the deception, Dulles "leaked" the news that the CIA had agents in the Communist governments of Eastern Europe. The result was widespread investigations, purges, imprisonment, and executions. Years later the victims would be "posthumously rehabilitated".

Didn't DeTocqueville once say that a regime is likely to be overthrown once it begins to liberalize its rule?

"The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" was a fictional story based upon this real incident. They made it appear that an important Eastern government official was a spy for the West in order to get him purged, and his rival promoted; but the rival was the real spy!