and you'd be wrong again
politico.com
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, American authorities realized that their insight into their former allies in the Soviet Union was severely restricted.
This dearth of information stemmed from two primary, related reasons. The first was the lack of any kind of structured intelligence apparatus in the U.S., remedied by the formation of the CIA in 1947. But the second was even more concerning: the lack of contacts inside the Soviet Union, especially in the regions pushing back against Moscow’s rule. And it was that latter issue that only became more salient as the Kremlin began seizing and strangling conquered countries and annexing regions in Europe, including a chunk of Ukraine previously outside Moscow’s grip.
In Washington, the newly formed CIA floated a potential solution. American agents would scour displaced-persons camps across Europe in search of exiles they could train and then secretly smuggle back into the Soviet Union. They would use them to both gather intelligence and link up with other anti-Soviet movements. But some CIA higher-ups wondered why they should stop there. What if the U.S. could also arm these returned figures, and potentially fracture the Soviet Union?
The plan had a couple of things going for it. As one of the few scholarly examinations of the operation detailed, “At the time, Soviet air defenses were terribly unorganized, allowing U.S. planes to violate their airspace with near total impunity.” Moreover, as American handlers saw it, these trainees were hardly landing in a vacuum. If anything, they were effectively jumping into a wildfire: a warzone pitting Ukrainian nationalists against the Soviet authorities trying to hold on to Moscow’s colonial empire. And those Ukrainian nationalists appeared to be winning. For the first time in decades, Ukrainian independence appeared within reach, a message the Americans were happy to reinforce. “The Ukrainian organization offers unusual opportunities for penetration of the USSR, and assisting in the development of underground movements behind the Iron Curtain,” one declassified CIA document from the time reads. And if they could succeed, “ultimately an operational base may be established in… Ukraine.” |
