HIST 175 Cold War Soviet Spy

Cold War Soviet Spy

Shannon Dowd

HST175

August 22, 2016

Roger Daene

Cold War Soviet Spy

18 Cedar Street

East Weymouth, Ma

02189

18, August, 1950

Special Agent Anastasia Putin

Embassy of the Soviet Union

40-50 Boulevard Lannes

75116 Paris, France

Dear Special Agent Anastasia Putin,

The United States is filled with so many different policies, events, and practices. During my stay here in America, I have learned so much about their country and their policies.“When Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945, ending World War II, Americans celebrated wildly but also looked ahead in uneasiness. What would the postwar era bring? Many feared a return to conditions of the Great Depression as the war-induced economic boom ended. In fact, the postwar economy soared, producing a level of material abundance unequaled in American history. Millions of citizens acquired new homes in the suburbs; purchased new cars, appliances, and television sets; and spent freely on leisure-dine activities. The economic boom affected all aspects of the American experience in these years. Politically, the twenty-year reign of the Democratic Party–the party of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal–ended in 1952 as voters gave the Republicans control of Congress and elected the war hero Dwight Eisenhower as president. The return of prosperity had a profound social and cultural impact as well. Some spoke of postwar America as a “consumer culture”–a culture in which the production, marketing, and acquisition of the material symbols of the good life became the central reality shaping society and its values. Conservative social values prevailed as a newly affluent but uneasy middle class resisted real or imagined threats to the status quo.” (“The Postwar Period through the 1950s,” 1993).

Here is a list of some examples of the Cold War events, policies, and practices that I have discovered:

Marshall Plan– the Marshall Plan is an attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of other states. Europeans could not buy U.S. products unless they received dollars from the United States. In order to counteract the lure of Communism and to supply dollars into the poverty-stricken European economies, U.S. officials initiatedanexpansive European aid program. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall announced that the plan is focused against “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos”. Truman urged Congress to back the proposed Marshall Plan with a $27 billion appropriation.

Warsaw Pact- According to “History.com” (2016), “The Soviet Union and seven of its European satellites sign a treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact, a mutual defense organization that put the Soviets in command of the armed forces of the member states. The Warsaw Pact, so named because the treaty was signed in Warsaw, included the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria as members. The treaty called on the member states to come to the defense of any member attacked by an outside force and it set up a unified military command under Marshal Ivan S. Konev of the Soviet Union. The introduction to the treaty establishing the Warsaw Pact indicated the reason for its existence. This revolved around “Western Germany, which is being remilitarized, and her inclusion in the North Atlantic bloc, which increases the danger of a new war and creates a threat to the national security of peace-loving states.” This passage referred to the decision by the United States and the other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on May 9, 1955 to make West Germany a member of NATO and allow that nation to remilitarize. The Soviets obviously saw this as a direct threat and responded with the Warsaw Pact.” (The Warsaw Pact is formed).

The Office of Strategic Services– “the Office of Strategic Services is an agency of the U.S. federal government (1942–45) formed for the purpose of obtaining information about and sabotaging the military efforts of enemy nations during World War II. It was headed by William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan (1883–1959). With some 12,000 staff members, the OSS collected and analyzed information on areas of the world in which U.S. military forces were operating. It used agents inside Nazi-occupied Europe, including Berlin, carried out counterpropaganda and disinformation activities, produced analytical reports for policy makers, and staged special operations (e.g., sabotage and demolition) behind enemy lines to support guerrillas and resistance fighters. Many of its functions were later assumed by the Central Intelligence Agency.” (“Office of Strategic Services (OSS).” 2016).

Central Intelligence Agency-According to The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (2012),the Central Intelligence Agency is the independent executive bureau of the U.S. government established by the National Security Act of 1947, replacing the Office of Strategic Services. The CIA is the first U.S. espionage and covert operations agency. “The CIA was given special powers under the Central Intelligence Act: The CIA director may spend agency funds without accounting for them; the size of its staff is secret; and employees, exempt from civil service procedures, may be hired, investigated, or dismissed as the CIA sees fit” (“Central Intelligence Agency,” 2012).

NATO- According to Encyclopedia Britannica (2016),North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a military alliance established by the North Atlantic Treaty (also known as the Washington Treaty) on April 4, 1949. NATO sought to create a counterweight to Soviet armies stationed in central and Eastern Europe after World War II. “NATO’s primary purpose was to unify and strengthen the Western Allies’ military response to a possible invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies.In the early 1950s NATO relied partly on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation from the United States to counter the Warsaw Pact’s much larger ground forces. Beginning in 1957, this policy was supplemented by the deployment of American nuclear weapons in western European bases. NATO later adopted a “flexible response” strategy, which the United States interpreted to mean that a war in Europe did not have to escalate to an all-out nuclear exchange. Under this strategy, many Allied forces were equipped with American battlefield and theatre nuclear weapons under a dual-control (or “dual-key”) system, which allowed both the country hosting the weapons and the United States to veto their use. Britain retained control of its strategic nuclear arsenal but brought it within NATO’s planning structures; France’s nuclear forces remained completely autonomous.

A conventional and nuclear stalemate between the two sides continued through the construction of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s, détente in the 1970s, and the resurgence of Cold War tensions in the 1980s after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1980. After 1985, however, far-reaching economic and political reforms introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev fundamentally altered the status quo. In July 1989 Gorbachev announced that Moscow would no longer prop up communist governments in central and Eastern Europe and thereby signaled his tacit acceptance of their replacement by freely elected (and noncommunist) administrations. Moscow’s abandonment of control over central and eastern Europe meant the dissipation of much of the military threat that the Warsaw Pact had formerly posed to western Europe, a fact that led some to question the need to retain NATO as a military organization—especially after the Warsaw Pact’s dissolution in 1991. The reunification of Germany in October 1990 and its retention of NATO membership created both a need and an opportunity for NATO to be transformed into a more “political” alliance devoted to maintaining international stability in Europe.” (“North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),” 2016).

As you can see, the United States is putting in all efforts to stop Communism from spreading across the world. We need to do something, and quickly. At the rate the United States is going, they might actually have a chance at stopping us. As soon as you get this letter, you must inform all agents and devise a plan in order keep Communism strong and ready for any and all attacks against us.

Sincerely,

Special Agent Shannon Dowd

References:

Central Intelligence Agency. (2012). In the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/history/central-intelligence-agency.html

History.com. (2016). Retrieved from http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-warsaw-pact-is-formed

Moss, G. D., & Thomas, E. A. (2013). Moving On: The American People Since 1945 (5th ed.). Retrieved from The University of Phoenix eBook Collection Database.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). (2016). In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/North-Atlantic-Treaty-Organization

Office of Strategic Services (OSS). (2016). In Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Office-of-Strategic-Services

The Postwar Period through the 1950s. (1993). In Encyclopedia of American Social History. Retrieved from http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/uhic/ReferenceDetailsPage/DocumentToolsPortletWindow?displayGroupName=Reference&u=oldt1017&u=oldt1017&jsid=347c2091a080fbd71aebaad95d411063&p=UHIC%3AWHIC&action=2&catId=&documentId=GALE%7CBT2313026907&zid=dbaf8355e54c396b9af1f64d3a9cea8c