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Our counterstrategy

Logically we have no true alternative but to acknowledge the reality of the cold war and proceed to turn Moscow's favorite weapons against world_communism. We have only a choice between fighting the cold war with maximum concentration of energy, or waiting supinely until we are overwhelmed. political counterstrategy has to be as massive, as intensive, as flexible as the enemy's.

Our

We must meet the cold war challenge in our own household and in the rest of the world, and carry the contest behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. We must seek out and exploit the weak spots in the enemy's armor, just as the Kremlin has been doing to us these 30-odd years. We must make our truth as effective and more productive than Moscow's lie.

Our political strategy and tactics should be in terms of a major enterprise, on a scale for victory, with all the inherent risks and costs. We cannot fight this fight with our left hand, on the margin of our energies. We have to bring to it resources, personnel and determination to match the enemy's. This is a case where, as in a military conflict, insufficient force may be as fatal as none at all. If obliged to make tactical retreats, moreover, we must not bemuse ourselves that they are enduring solutions. To do so would be to disarm ourselves and open ourselves to new and bigger blows. This is a principle of particular importance during intervals when negotiations with Moscow or Peking are being discussed or are in progress.

The question, in truth, is no longer whether we should engage in the cold war. The Soviet drive is forcing us to take countermeasures in any case. The question, rather, is whether we should undertake it with a clearheaded determination to use all means deemed essential, by governments and private groups-to win the contest.

Our countermeasures and methods must be novel, unconventional, daring and flexible. They must, moreover, be released from the inhibitions of peacetime, since it is peace only in outer forms.

Almost against our will, in point of fact, we have launched more and more cold war activities. But they have been piecemeal, on a inadequate scale and often without the all-important continuity of action. Worst of all, they have not been geared for total victory, being treated as extras, as harassment operations, while hoping against hope that there will be no outbreak of war or that there will be a miraculous outbreak of genuine peace.

Our current posture shares the weakness inherent in all defensive strategy. The hope of a real compromise is a dangerous self-delusion. It assumes that Soviet Russia is a conventional country interested in stabilizing the world, when in fact it is the powerhouse of a dynamic world movement which thrives on instability and chaos.

Our duty and our best chance for salvation, in the final analysis, is to prosecute the cold war-to the point of victory. To survive in freedom we must win. The enemy is vulnerable

The free world, under the impact of Moscow's cold war victories, has tended to fix attention on Soviet strengths while overlooking or discounting Soviet weaknesses.

The Communists expertly exploit all our internal tensions, injustices and discontents. Yet within the Soviet empire the tensions are incomparably greater, the injustices and discontents more vast. Our opportunity, which we have failed to use so far, is to exploit these in order to undermine the Kremlin, exacerbate its domestic problems, weaken its sense of destiny.

The nature of a malady can be deduced from the medicine applied. In its fourth decade of absolute power, the Soviet regime is obliged to devote a major portion of its energies, manpower, and resources to keep its own subjects and captive countries under control, through ever larger doses of terror. There we have the proof that the Communists have failed to "sell" their system to their victims.

Even a ruthless police-state does not maintain gigantic secret-police forces, special internal security armies, colossal networks of forced-labor colonies just for the fun of it. These are measures of self-defense against actual or potential internal oppositions. After all discounts are made for wishful thinking and error, ample evidence remains that in the Soviet sphere the West has millions of allies, tens of millions of potential allies.

Whether the potential can be turned into actuality, whether the will to resist can be kept alive and inflamed to explosive intensity, depend in the

first place on the policies of the non-Soviet world. Our potential fifth columns are greater by millions than the enemy's. But they have yet to be given cohesion, direction, and the inner motive power of hope and expectation of victory.

No one knows whether, let alone when, the internal Soviet stresses can reach. a climax in insurrectionary breaks. It would be frivolous to count on such a climax. But we have everything to gain by promoting a spirit of mutiny, to keep the Kremlin off balance, to deepen existing rifts, to sharpen economic and empire problems for them.

For the purposes of our cold war strategy it suffices that the potential for uprisings exists. Soviet economic conditions are bad, particularly in the domain of food production. Nations which used to be exporters of bread (Hungary, Poland, Russia itself) now lack bread for themselves. As Secretary of Agriculture Benson said recently: "Failure of the Soviet system to provide for the basic needs of its own people could be one of the most important historical facts of our time."

The Soviet peasants, still the overwhelming majority of the Kremlin-held populations, are everywhere bitter and restive. The Politburo knows that it cannot count implicitly upon the loyalty and allegiance of its subjects. At the same time it has failed utterly to assimilate the captive countries, so that it has no allies but only sullen colonial puppets.

In the last war the U.S.S.R. fought on two fronts-against the foreign invaders and against its own people. There is reason to believe that Hitler's psychological blunders, in insulting and alienating the Russian peoples, helped save the Stalin regime from destruction by its own subjects. In the present cold war, too, the U.S.S.R. must maintain its fight against the Soviet citizenry, and at the same time deal with seething dissidence in the subjected countries. The basic conditions for successful cold war counterstrategy thus exist. Guidelines for political offensive

Our guiding objectives in an all-out political offensive are fairly obvious. They must include the following:

1. To keep alive throughout the Soviet Empire the spirit of resistance and the hope of eventual freedom and sovereignty. If we allow that hope to expire, the Kremlin will have perpetuated its dominion over its victims.

2. To break the awful sense of isolation in which the internal enemies of the Kremlin live-by making them aware that, like the revolutionists in tsarist times, they have devoted friends and powerful allies beyond their frontiers. 3. To sharpen by every device we can develop the fear of their own people that is already chronic in the Kremlin. The less certain the Soviets are of the allegiance of their people, the more they will hesitate to provoke adventures involving the risks of a major showdown.

4. To provide moral and material aid, including trained leadership, to oppositions, undergrounds, resistance movements in satellite nations and China and Russia proper.

5. To make maximum use of the fugitives from the Soviet sphere, millions in the aggregate, now living in free parts of the world.

6. To appeal to the simple personal yearnings of those under the Communist yoke: release from police terror, ownership of small farms and homes, free trade unions to defend their rights at the job, the right to worship as they please, the right to change residence and to travel, and so forth.

7. To shatter the "wave of the future" aura around communism, displacing the assumption that "communism is inevitable" with a deepening certainty that "the end of communism is inevitable."

8. To inspire millions in the free countries with a feeling of moral dedication to the enlargement of the area of freedom, based on repugnance to slave labor, coerced atheism, purges and the rest of the Soviet horrors.

This inventory of objectives is necessarily sketchy and incomplete. it indicates the indispensable direction of the cold war effort.

IV. THE MESSAGE OF FREEDOM

But

We must be quite certain of our destination before we can begin to figure out means of transportation. There is little point in discussing the how of it until a firm decision for an all-out political-psychological counteroffensive is reached. In hot war, you need a weapon and means of delivering it to the target. The same is true in cold war. The weapon is the message; after it has been worked

out, we can develop the facilities for delivering it to the world at large and to the Communist-captive nations in particular.

The essence of that message (and its formulation is the critical first step) is that America has decided, irrevocably, to win the cold war; that its ultimate aim is, in concert with all peoples, to cancel out the destructive power of Sovietbased communism.

Once that decision is made, some of the means for implementing it will become self-evident; others will be explored and developed under the impetus of the clear-cut goal. Agreement on the problem must come before agreement on the solution.

"To be effective," as one student of the problem has put it, "our decision must be as sharp edged and uncompromising as the Kremlin's; it must be spelled out as unequivocally as the Communists have done in the works of Lenin and Stalin and the official programs of the Comintern and Cominform."

Adjustment of our thinking in accord with such a decision to win the cold war demands clarity on at least the following points:

1. The struggle by means short of general war is not a preliminary bout but the decisive contest, in which the loser may not have a second chance.

2. It must therefore be carried on with the same focused effort, the same resolute spirit, the same willingness to accept costs and casualties, that a hot war would involve.

3. In order to establish credence and inspire confidence, our conduct must be consistent. Our philosophy of freedom must embrace the whole of mankind; it must not stop short at the frontiers of the Soviet sphere. Only this can give our side a moral grandeur, a revolutionary elan, a crusading spirit not only equal to but superior to the other side's.

4. We must learn to regard the Soviet countries as enemy-occupied territory, with the lifting of the occupation as the overall purpose of freedom-loving men everywhere. This applies not only to areas captured since the war, but includes Russia itself. Any other policy would turn what should be an anti-Communist alliance into an anti-Russian alliance, forcing the Russians (as Hitler forced them during the war) to rally around the regime they hate.

5. The fact that the challenge is global must be kept clearly in view. Red guerrillas in Burma, Communists in France or the United States, the Huks in the Philippines, Red agents in Central America-these are as much "the enemy" as the Kremlin itself.

6. We must realize that world communism is not a tool in the hands of RussiaRussia is a tool in the hands of world communism. Repeatedly Moscow has sacrificed national interests in deference to world revolutionary needs. This provides opportunities for appeals to Russian patriotism.

7. Though the Soviets want a nuclear war no more than we do, they accept the risk of it in pushing their political offense. We, too, cannot avoid risks. (It might become necessary, Mr. Dulles said recently, "to forgo peace in order to secure the blessings of liberty.") The greatest risk of all, for us, is to do less than is needed to win the cold war. At worst that would mean defeat by default; and at best, a situation so menacing to the survival of freedom that a hot war may become inevitable.

Our present lead in the possession of nuclear weapons and the ability to use them may be matched by the Communists in the next few years. This is the view expressed by competent statesmen, scientists, and military experts. If and when nuclear parity is reached, the enemy's fanatics (and there may be a powerful madman-a Hitler-among them) might be tempted to use them against us by throwing a sneak punch. Since our policy is not to throw the first nuclear punch but only to retaliate if it is thrown against us, we may find as more horrorweapons are unfolded, that to yield to the enemy the initiative of the first offensive punch, is tantamount to national suicide. All this further emphasizes the vital need for winning the cold war and preventing a hot war.

1. Organization

V. TOWARD COLD WAR VICTORY

An organizational framework for fighting the cold war already exists. It needs to be adjusted and strengthened in line with the expanded scale and intensity of operations.

A Strategy Board for Political Defense, the cold war equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the military side, is suggested. It should function directly under the President, with Cabinet status for its head. Top representatives of the

State Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Information Agency, should sit on this Board. Liaison on a continuous basis should be maintained with all other agencies which can play a role in the overall effort.

There will be various operations which the Board would undertake in its own name, with its own facilities. But its primary function should not be operational. It should be to plan, initiate, finance, advise, coordinate and check on operations by other groups and agencies, whether already in existence or created by the Board for specific undertakings.

One cannot, however, be too specific at this point about the organizational forms. John Foster Dulles wrote in 1948:

"We need an organization to contest the Communist Party at the level where it is working and winning its victories. We ought to have an organization dedicated to the task of nonmilitary defense, just as the present Secretary of Defense heads up the organization of military defense. The new department of nonmilitary defense should have an adequate personnel and ample funds." 2. Financing

On the matter of funds, likewise, one cannot at this stage offer specific estimates. But let us recall that appropriations over the past 4 years for our military defense averaged approximately $45 billion annually. In contrast, it is significant to note that for the fiscal year 1955 the total appropriation for the U.S. Information Agency was $79 million, of which $17 million is available for the worldwide activities of the Voice of America.

As a working hypothesis it is suggested that a specific and more realistic ratio between military and nonmilitary appropriations be worked out: say an amount equivalent to 5 or 71⁄2 percent of military defense appropriations to be granted to the Strategy Board for Political Defense-this, of course, without reducing the military budget and not counting foreign military aid and point 4 types of expenditure.

I am convinced that if the American people and their Congress are made fully aware of the menace we face, of the urgent need for meeting it, and the possibility of doing so by means short of war, they will respond willingly as they have always done in times of national crisis. They will realize that no investment to win the cold war is exorbitant when measured against the stakes involved, and against the costs of the bombing war we seek to head off.

3. Implementing the counteroffensive

We must go from defense to attack in meeting the political, ideological, subversive challenge. The implementation of the attack would devolve upon specialists and technicians. In gearing to fight a hot war, we call in military strategists and tacticians. Likewise, we must have specialists to fight a cold

war.

This implies, in the first place, the mobilization of hard, knowledgeable antiCommunists who understand the issues and for whom it is not merely a job but a dedication. The specialist in communications is important; but the message to be communicated is even more important.

The main weakness of our efforts to date to talk to the masses—and even more so to the elite groups (Army, intelligentsia, etc.)—in the Soviet camp is that we have not always been consistent in what we had to say to them. Our message has been vague and subject to change without notice. As long as we regard Communist rule as permanent, we can have no strong psychological bridges to those who are under its yoke. The only free-world goal that is relevant to them is one that envisages their eventual emancipation.

With the formulation of a message, we will at last have something to say that interests them, not only us, and can devote ourselves to perfecting the means of delivering the message.

Before essaying a breakdown of cold war methods and techniques, we should recognize that many of them are already being used, and often effectively. Nothing now underway needs to be abandoned. The problem is one of attaining the requisite magnitude, financing, coordination, and continuity-all geared to the long-range objectives of the undertaking. The expanded offensive with nonmilitary weapons must be imbued with a new awareness of the great goal and a robust will to reach it.

No outline such as follows can be more than indicative. Operations are necessarily related to current developments and opportunities opened up by events.

In all categories the arena of action is the whole globe. Our cold war targets are not only behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, but in every nation, the United States included. In the battle for the minds of men, we must reach the Soviet peoples, our allies, and the uncommitted peoples.

The agencies involved will be both official and private. The objectives must aim to achieve dramatic victories as swiftly as possible, as a token of the changed state of affairs. While the Kremlin has suffered some setbacks and defeats, its record in the cold war has been strikingly one of success piled on success. This trend must be reversed, to hearten our friends, dismay the enemy, and confirm the fact that Communist power is a transient and declining phenomenon.

4. Propaganda

If the weapon is our message, one of its basic elements is propaganda. It is the most familiar element, but we should not underestimate its inherent difficulties. Hot war is destructive: the killing of people, the annihilation of material things. Cold war must be constructive: it must build views, attitudes, loyalties, hopes, ideals, and readiness for sacrifice. In the final checkup it calls for greater skills to affect minds than to destroy bodies.

Propaganda, for maximum effect, must not be an end in itself. It is a preparation for action. Words that are not backed up by deeds, that do not generate deeds, lose their impact. The test is whether they build the morale of friends and undermine the morale of foes.

No means of communication should be ignored: the spoken word and the written word; radio and television; films; balloons and missiles to distribute leaflets; secret printing and mimeographing presses on Soviet-controlled soil; scrawls on walls to give isolated friends a sense of community.

5. Communist targets

The Communist sphere must be ringed with both fixed and mobile broadcasting facilities of a massiveness to overcome jamming. The Voice of America will acquire larger audiences and more concentrated impact under the new approach. Its name, it is suggested, should be expanded to "Voice of America-for Freedom and Peace." This slogan added to the name will, through constant repetition, impress the truth upon receptive ears.

Besides the official voice, we have other voices, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation. There are other popular democratic voices that should make themselves heard-those of our free labor movement, American war veterans, the churches, youth, and women's organizations.

Already there is a minor flow of printed matter across the Iron Curtain, especially aimed at the Red occupation forces. The volume and effectiveness of this effort can be enormously enlarged. Magazines and newspapers which outwardly look like standard Communist matter, but actually are filled with anti-Communist propaganda, have brought results.

A greater hunger for spiritual comfort, for religion, is reported from Soviet Russia and its satellites. Programs of a spiritual and religious character are indicated. They should preach faith in the divine, abhorrence of Communist godlessness, resistance to atheism. But, in addition, they can offer practical advice to the spiritually stranded-for instance, how to observe religious occasions where there are no ordained ministers or priests to officiate.

The enslaved peoples do not have to be sold the idea of freedom; they are already sold on it. The propaganda should, wherever possible, get down to specifics. It should expose the weaknesses, failures, follies, hypocrisies, and internal tensions of the Red masters; provide proof of the existence of friends and allies both at home and abroad; offer guidance on types of resistance open even to the individual. It should appeal to universal emotions, to love of family, of country, of God, of humanity.

6. Free-world targets

The fighting front is everywhere. The program of the U.S. Information Agency should be reappraised with a view to improvement and expansion. "The Voice of America-for Freedom and Peace" has tasks to perform in many nations of the free world second in importance only to those in the unfree world.

Merely to point up the inadequacy of our present effort, consider Finland, a country on the very edge of the Red empire and under the most concentrated Soviet propaganda barrage. Soviet broadcasts beamed to Finland total over 43 hours weekly. A television station is now being built in Soviet Estonia which

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