Cold War Exiles and the CIA by Tromly Benjamin;

Author:Tromly, Benjamin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

The Cia Operational Front

7

From Revolution to Provocation

The NTS and CIA Covert Operations

In December 1950, V. M. Baidalakov delivered a report to the Council of the National Labor Alliance (NTS) in Germany. He offered his fellow exiles a glowing account of the progress of the NTS’s fight against communism on Soviet soil. The influence of the NTS in the USSR was growing, he explained; after being exposed to its message through radio or print propaganda, Soviet citizens were spontaneously affiliating themselves (“samopriemom”) to the organization. Meanwhile, the NTS was creating a network of more structured cells in the USSR that he called the “Carcass,” which would carry out propaganda operations and eventually act as a “detonator” for an uprising against the Soviet regime.1

Baidalakov’s claims about the existence of underground NTS cells in the USSR became a leitmotif in the years that followed, when the organization he headed carried out covert operations for the CIA and British MI6. Yet the NTS leader’s account of the organization’s exploits in the homeland was strikingly misleading. Contrary to Baidalakov’s claims, in the early 1950s the organization had virtually no presence in the USSR and only a limited ability to operate in East Germany.2 Baidalakov’s boasting belonged to an NTS tradition of using posturing and misinformation about its capabilities as a strategy for building its reputation in exile and for gaining hard-won subsidies from foreign intelligence services.

The gap between assertion and reality is crucial for understanding the NTS’s activities on the covert operational front during the early Cold War. The infusion of CIA money and operational abilities did not help the NTS construct the underground network on Soviet soil that Baidalakov heralded. In particular, the “Carcass,” which was in fact a codename for a CIA operation that infiltrated the Alliance’s agents into the USSR, resulted in complete failure as successive waves of air-dropped agents were seized by Soviet security services. Making matters worse, the NTS plunged into internal disarray, as the Solidarists divided along generational and ideological lines amid widespread fears of internal betrayal.

The distance between the claims and achievements of the NTS had a paradoxical outcome. The CIA responded to the disappointing results of its NTS operations by rethinking its use of the Russian organization as an instrument of psychological warfare. Paradoxically, the new CIA strategy embraced the kind of bluffing and boasting in which the NTS leaders such as Baidalakov customarily engaged. In the new arrangement, the CIA attempted to boost the reputation of the NTS and its supposed revolutionary exploits as a means of putting the Soviet government on the defensive and provoking it into costly reactions. In the situation that resulted, the NTS came to play a role in the Cold War as a myth, an image of a powerful anti-Soviet Russian organization that bore little resemblance to reality.

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