Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain

The early years of the cold war were marked by America's so-called containment strategy, which meant, in short, keeping Communism penned within its existing borders. Former New York Times reporter Peter Grose, however, suggests that this was merely window-dressing. In Operation Rollback, he writes:

Even as containment was being scorned as appeasement and timidity in the first months of 1948, a high-level staff within the State Department was devising a remarkable initiative to confront communism aggressively through clandestine action. The secret program would start with innocuous propaganda and persuasion, then proceed directly into sabotage, subversion, and paramilitary engagement.

This book is a history of that effort, kept under wraps until recently, says Grose, because both sides had a motive to avoid the publicity: the Soviets didn't want to acknowledge resistance movements inside their client states, and the Americans refused to admit their failure. Grose writes that the rollback was never revealed to Congress and that public monies didn't even pay for it; funding came from a secret account maintained by the Treasury Department and linked to Marshall Plan repayments. Operation Rollback is a groundbreaking work of cold-war history, and an engaging one to read. --John J. Miller