• Anarcho-Bolshevik
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    101 year ago

    By the summer of 1948 Truman and [George] Marshall had delegated personal responsibility for political oversight of all peacetime clandestine operations to George Kennan, according to a later Senate investigation of U.S. foreign intelligence activities. […] Key members of Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff—officially a somewhat egg-headed institution dedicated to planning U.S. strategy for ten or twenty years in the future—were detailed to help him with this task. […]

    A new stage in the American effort to use ex-Nazis began. The early “tactical” or short-term utilization of former Fascists and collaborators—techniques somewhat akin to the exploitation of prisoners of war by intelligence agents—gradually came to an end. American agencies and policymakers replaced the tactical approach with a deeper “strategic” appreciation of the usefulness that émigré groups might have in large-scale clandestine operations against the USSR. The U.S. government increasingly accepted the exiles’ organizations as legitimate and began to pour substantial amounts of money into them—at least $5 million in 1948 alone, and probably considerably more.

    (From Christopher Simpson’s Blowback.)

    The United States would provide Spain with the “opportunity […] to develop its resources and play a normal part in the revival of world commerce and industry.” The final outcome was to be a friendly relationship with Spain “in the event of international conflict.” The proposals were approved by [George] Marshall and Truman in January 1948.

    […]

    Although President Truman was never fully comfortable about dealing with Franco and the British and the French strongly objected, the State Department and the military, particularly Generals Marshall and Omar Bradley, were adamant about obtaining air and naval bases in Spain.

    (David F. Schmitz’s Thank God They’re on Our Side.)

    In return for lowering barriers to US exports, Washington financed a massive programme of financial credits to war-torn countries. ‘The United States could not passively sanction the employment of capital raised within the United States for ends contrary to our major policies or interests’, said the State Department’s Herbert Feis in 1944. ‘Capital is a form of power.’ The post-war program of Marshall Plan loans and grants to countries made this explicit. ‘Benefits under [the Marshall Plan] will come to an abrupt end in any country that votes Communism to power’, said General George Marshall, President Truman’s secretary of state and the aid program’s namesake.

    (Chris Bambery’s The Second World War. Emphasis added in all cases.)