Europe - Diplomatic Relations with the U.S., Communism - General & Miscellaneous, 20th Century American History - Relations - General & Miscellaneous, International Relations - General & Miscellaneous, 20th Century American History - World War II, Post-Wo
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Overview
Fascinating . . . well-documented . . . thought-provoking and entertaining” (Publishers Weekly), Operation Rollback is a tale of intrigue and espionage that reveals how and why suspicions on both sides drove the world into the Cold War. In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union started secretly mobilizing forces against each other, building intricate intelligence networks of spies and digging in for the postwar era. America’s secret action plan, known as Rollback, was an audacious strategy of espionage, subversion, and sabotage. Concealed for four decades by all involved, the dangerous episodes of the Rollback campaign have only now come to light.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
As WWII came to a close, the Soviet Union and the United States--uneasy allies in the agonizing struggle to defeat Hitler--began maneuvering their intelligence agencies against one another into what would eventually become the dangerously polarized Cold War. Grose (Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles, 1994) is a former New York Times foreign correspondent, the former executive editor of Foreign Affairs and now a Kennedy School of Government fellow at Harvard. He tells a fascinating and well-documented tale of intrigue and double-dealing during this heady period of covert policy making and secret actions. He reveals that it was none other than legendary Sovietologist George Kennan who helped orchestrate American strategy, advocating containment of the Soviet Union with one hand, and secretly working against his own official policy with the other--culminating in a secret plot to throw the Communists out of Eastern Europe. Kennan's plan, Operation Rollback, aimed to subvert the Soviet empire by stirring up resistance in its satellite countries. Grose, using newly declassified material from both the U.S. and former U.S.S.R., takes us through the intricate machinations of Rollback and its architects, presenting a hitherto untold tale of a project that was kept secret even from the CIA, and includes enough revelations throughout to sustain the tension. He writes, for example, that Rollback's planners circumvented Congress entirely and funded the operation with unaudited U.S. Treasury and Marshall Plan dollars, and that Soviet authorities were tipped off about the operation by such spies as the British Kim Philby. Students of American politics will be surprised to learn that a prominent figure from 1960s' antiwar activism, William Sloan Coffin, trained undercover saboteurs for Rollback missions. Thorough, thought-provoking and entertaining, this is a work that casts considerable light on a topic that has long lingered in the shadows. Photos not seen by PW. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Arch Puddington
In Operation Rollback, a history of this unusually aggressive anti-Soviet campaign, Peter Grose has written one of the more intelligent accounts of America's early Cold War policies, A former correspondent and a biographer of Allen Dulles, Grose refrains from over-dramatizing an interesting, but certainly not pivotal, chapter in the East-West conflict. His fair-mindedness stands in sharp contrast to the demonization of America's Cold war planners found in earlier Cold War studies.—Weekly Standard
Chace
Grose, the biographer of Allen Dulles, the director of central intelligence under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, tells the riveting story of brave, patriotic and staunchly anti-Communist Americans and refugees in their struggle against the Soviet leviathan. He is fair-minded and sympathetic to the intentions of these courageous men and women.—The New York Times
Book Details
Published
September 20, 2000
Publisher
Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
Pages
320
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780395516065