Rigged

Secret funding is perhaps the oldest form of covert electoral interference. It enables political campaigns to better target, turn out, and manipulate the masses. In March 1919, Lenin laid the groundwork for such operations at a pivotal conference in Moscow. The summit attracted delegates from more than two dozen countries, who together established the Communist International (Comintern), a transnational organization charged with uniting the Communist Parties of the world—and fomenting revolution abroad. “Particularly for the majority of the western European countries, spreading of the soviet system is a most important task,” Lenin told his guests. “America is the country that is most ripe … for a real socialist revolution,” said Boris Reinstein, the only American citizen present.6 The attendees, despite their limited means, had set their sights on a historic end: toppling the international system.

“The purpose of the [Communist] International is shown to be to propagate revolution and communism throughout the world,” warned a front-page New York Times article in 1920. That year, as the Red Army marched westward, the Comintern’s Second Congress attracted over two hundred representatives from thirty-seven countries.7 Lenin seemed poised to change the world.

The Comintern’s mission was publicly known, but its finances were shrouded in mystery. We now know that its Department of International Communication covertly distributed directions, propaganda, and money to foreign Communist Parties. The Soviet government provided the funds. In return, Lenin expected obedience. “Any person taking money” from the Comintern, Lenin said, “is warned that he is obliged to implement absolutely scrupulously all instructions of the [Executive Committee of the Communist International].”8 Beginning in the spring of 1919, the Comintern financed various Communist groups, including in the United States, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, Holland, and Britain.9

But a global Communist revolution was not, in fact, imminent. The Comintern’s early operations coincided with an ongoing war between Polish and Soviet soldiers. In August 1920, the Red Army lost at Warsaw, preventing Lenin’s forces from advancing across Europe. The Treaty of Riga instead forced the Soviet Union to establish itself as a state with defined borders. Western democracies, meanwhile, had not abandoned their political model for Lenin’s. Now seeking to deter foreign interference in its affairs, Soviet intelligence spread disinformation exaggerating the strength of its military.10 With this deception campaign under way, Lenin died in January 1924, not knowing where his Communist experiment would lead.

Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, initially forbade foreign Communist Parties to ally with social democrats. This strategy proved self-defeating. In parliamentary democracies, politicians often obtain power through coalition building. By insisting on ideological purity, Stalin inadvertently empowered his rivals by isolating his friends. In Germany’s July 1932 and March 1933 elections, for example, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists succeeded at the ballot box in part because Germany’s Communist Party would not stand with the Social Democrats.11

After Hitler’s rise, the Comintern shifted its strategy: It began supporting electoral alliances against fascists. At its Seventh Congress in 1935, the Comintern endorsed so-called popular front coalitions of antifascist parties. Some successes followed. In Spain, the Communist Party, whose Comintern representative had written Moscow requesting its “promised sum … for the [1936] electoral campaign,” joined a Popular Front coalition, which prevailed at the polls in February of that year.12 In France, where the Comintern was funding as much as one fourth of the Communist Party’s budget, a Popular Front that included the Communist, Socialist, and Radical Parties also won in 1936. Outlawed Communist groups received covert assistance, too, as the Comintern smuggled funds into fascist Italy and Germany.13

Still, the Comintern struggled. None of its foreign Communist Parties, with the exception of China’s, had more than thirty thousand or so members.14 In the interwar period, the specter of Russian interference thus mattered more as an idea than as an actual mechanism for change. “The call of the Comintern,” writes the historian Odd Arne Westad, “was heard throughout a world that was tired of war and colonial oppression.” The Soviet Union was founded on the premise of catalyzing global revolution; the Comintern sought to execute this mission. As foreign governments searched for signs of its meddling, prudence gave way to paranoia. In the United States, the first Red Scare unfolded from 1919 to 1920.15 A few years later, a similar crisis enveloped the United Kingdom.

Four days before Britain’s 1924 election, the Daily Mail published a letter that Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, had allegedly sent the British Communist Party (which the Comintern had been covertly funding for years).16 Taken at face value, the letter constituted direct interference in the affairs of another nation. It instructed Communist Party officials to “strain every nerve in the struggle for the ratification” of a treaty between the Soviet government and that of Ramsay MacDonald, the first-ever Labour Party prime minister, and to “stir up the masses of the British proletariat.” The Daily Mail ran the headline “Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters … and Mr. MacDonald Would Lend Russia Our Money!”17

When covert interference is uncovered, the beneficiary is put on the defensive, regardless of whether he solicited the help. Because Zinoviev favored Labour, the right swiftly labeled MacDonald an instrument of Moscow and linked his party with foreign influence. MacDonald was left to fight for his political life. “All I say is this: So far as I know, the letter might have originated anywhere,” he said two days before the election. “How can I, a simple-minded, honest person who puts two and two together, avoid the suspicion—I will not say the conclusion—that the whole thing is a political plot?”18

MacDonald was right: Historians now consider the Zinoviev letter a forgery. To this day, it is a mystery who wrote it. But none of this was clear in 1924, so when the Conservative Party won the election, Labour attributed its defeat to the Comintern’s apparent interference in British politics (although scholars like A. J. P. Taylor are certain that Labour would have lost anyway).19 Regardless of whether the letter swung the election, it certainly divided voters. MacDonald’s opponents had cast Labour as sympathetic to Moscow, and the party’s supporters felt unfairly attacked as such. The mere appearance of covert interference had polarized a nation. Almost a century later, the legacy of the letter lingers. “This document—which may never have existed in the form of an original letter and was almost certainly not written by Zinoviev—has haunted politics, especially Labour politics, in the United Kingdom ever since,” writes Gill Bennett, the former chief historian of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.20

Foreign democracies assumed the Comintern had powers that it did not. By overtly calling for world revolution, the organization had developed an outsized reputation. The Comintern could not catapult Communists into power globally, but it could sow discord within democracies. A single letter had thrown British politics into upheaval. The Comintern’s perceived influence, though, came at a cost: It isolated Moscow on the international stage. Elected leaders distrusted the Comintern and, therefore, Stalin.

As Hitler strengthened Germany, Moscow needed allies. The Comintern, however, had alienated democracies like the United Kingdom and the United States. Lenin’s creation had become Stalin’s liability. “It would therefore be in the interest of Russia itself to dissolve the Comintern and to prove, by scrupulous abstention from interference abroad, that it can be treated on an equal footing with those democratic powers whose ideals it professes to share,” urged Franz Borkenau, an Austrian political theorist, in 1939.21

Stalin chose a different path. That August, he entered into a nonaggression pact with Germany. The German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army then invaded, divided, and annexed Poland. The United Kingdom and France responded by declaring war on Germany. World War II had begun, but the treaty that kicked it off did not last. In June 1941, Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. Fascism once again became the enemy of Communism. Stalin, now allied with democracies, provided the Comintern with fewer and fewer resources “for rendering assistance to foreign parties.”22

Stalin finally abolished the Comintern in 1943, as a gesture of goodwill toward Washington. “The dissolution of the Communist International is proper,” Stalin told Reuters, “because … it exposes the lie of the Hitlerites to the effect that Moscow allegedly intends to intervene in the life of other nations.”23 There was, of course, no lie to expose. The Soviet Union had interfered in foreign elections and would continue to do so. The Comintern’s fatal flaw was not its covert activities but its public mission, which had disturbed Moscow’s wartime allies and made its existence untenable.

The outcome of World War II left Stalin with means of which Lenin had only dreamed. During the interwar period, the Soviet Union had controlled its own territory, and the Comintern had funded foreign Communist Parties, but those parties were, for the most part, unpopular, illegal, or both. Moscow’s ability to shape other countries was limited. The results of the war changed what was possible. Four great powers—Nazi Germany, the Empire of Japan, the United Kingdom, and France—were either destroyed or severely weakened, creating a power vacuum for the Soviet Union and the United States to fill.

As the Red Army marched toward Berlin, its forces occupied the countries of Eastern Europe, which became a testing ground for electoral interference. After the war, most of these states held elections, but Moscow manipulated them so intensively that they hardly qualified as competitive. Whereas the power of the Comintern was its reputation, the power of these postwar operations was their scope, scale, and ambition. In East Germany, the Soviets directed the campaign of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), a coalition of Communists and Social Democrats. “All of the SED’s decisions,” a Soviet official said at the time, “must be agreed upon by the leadership of the Soviet Military Administration.” Moscow bolstered the SED’s electoral prospects through a variety of tactics, such as enabling its leaders to print more than a million leaflets and posters. But in October 1946, the SED still underperformed relative to Moscow’s expectations, so more aggressive forms of interference—arrests, intimidation, and threats—followed. In December 1947, the Soviets forced the resignation of Jakob Kaiser, the head of the rival Christian Democrats. He then went into exile in West Berlin.24

A similar story unfolded elsewhere as a mix of covert and overt tactics determined the outcomes of supposedly free elections. In Poland, ahead of the January 1947 election, opposition leaders were arrested, Communist officials falsely alleged that a rival candidate had died, and soldiers monitored polling places as voting unfolded. The Soviet-supported “democratic bloc” achieved an overwhelming victory, in part because ballots were falsified in its favor.25 Meanwhile, in Hungary, Mátyás Rákosi, the Communist leader, used so-called salami tactics to slice off his opposition. In February 1947, Soviet soldiers arrested Béla Kovács, the secretary general of the popular Smallholders Party, whose colleagues then went into exile. For the election that summer, hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the rolls; many thousands more were too intimidated to turn out. On Election Day, special brigades traveled from district to district, some riding in Soviet vehicles, visibly stuffing ballot boxes. The Communist Party triumphed and, as in Poland and East Germany, consolidated control.26 More than four decades would pass until these countries again held contested elections.

The brazenness of these electoral operations was extraordinary. The Red Army’s physical presence enabled their most aggressive components, such as Béla Kovács’s arrest. But other tactics, like manipulating voter rolls, altering vote counts, and disseminating propaganda, have since remained central to Moscow’s approach to covert electoral interference.

American policy makers worried that the Red Army would push farther, past Berlin and into Western Europe. Stalin did little to assuage such concerns. In October 1947, just four years after dissolving the Comintern, he established another international body with the express purpose of uniting foreign Communist Parties. The Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), as it was called, was scathing in its rhetoric. In one communiqué, the organization denounced Americans as “imperialist warmongers” working toward the “forcible establishment of Anglo-American world domination, the enslavement of foreign countries and peoples, the destruction of democracy and the unleashing of a new war.”27

In practice, the Cominform was more bark than bite. It rarely met, and it lacked the resources, mandate, or infrastructure to support foreign political parties. While Lenin’s Comintern had been outward facing, aiming to catalyze world revolution, Stalin’s Cominform faced inward; its purpose was to help solidify his sphere of influence across Eastern Europe.28 Moscow would henceforth use its main intelligence service, renamed the KGB, rather than an international institution to interfere in elections overseas.29

From America’s perspective, the fall of Eastern Europe prompted alarm. Stalin’s plans were unknown; seemingly nothing was off-limits. “The idea was to eventually advance the Soviet system across the world,” said Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general.30 Having mostly sat on the sidelines after World War I, Washington had to decide whether, and how, to lead abroad after World War II.

Chapter 2

THE CIA IN ITALY

President Harry Truman’s administration responded to the Soviet threat with a strategy of containment: structuring its foreign policy around preventing the further spread of Communism.1 Some of the initiatives that followed were well-known, from massive aid programs to a sustained military presence in Western Europe. Others were meant to be hidden. In 1947, Truman authorized the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency to engage in covert action. The White House, like the Kremlin, finally had a peacetime intelligence service capable of deploying active measures abroad.2

From world war had emerged a global competition for influence; elections, more than anything, drew its dividing lines. As Moscow established Communist regimes across Eastern Europe, Washington charted a different course in Western Europe, where a set of democracies developed and soon prospered. The openness of America’s allies meant that any of their elections could become a contest between East and West.

The first of such battles took place in Italy, where, in 1948, a fight for security and ideological alignment unfolded in the country’s general election. Italy’s economy was struggling, and its Communist Party was surging.3 In Washington, the Truman administration hoped to preserve Italy’s centrist government. What followed was a novel idea: electoral interference executed, in part, by the CIA.

In early 1948, Huntington Smith, a New York Times correspondent, traveled to Gravina, a small town in southern Italy. He found a village in disarray. Residents had stable jobs only three months each year, during the olive harvest. Families lived in cramped, filthy quarters. Tuberculosis was common. Smith visited a bedroom in which ten people, including a baby, lived with a man dying of the disease; two shared his bed. “We are all Communists here,” one woman told Smith, gesturing to the deteriorating walls around her.4

These poor conditions were an aftereffect of World War II, when the Allied powers had occupied fascist Italy and forced its surrender. The fighting was over, but low incomes, inflation, and basic supply shortages still ravaged Italy. Working-class families spent more than 90 percent of their monthly paychecks on food alone.5 In villages like Gravina, widespread impoverishment empowered left-wing politicians.

By 1946, Italy had become a democracy, and its Communist Party, with some two million members, was the largest in Western Europe. In an election that year, the centrist Christian Democratic Party received 35 percent of the vote, compared with a combined 40 percent for the Communist Party (which received 19 percent) and the Socialist Party (which received 21 percent). Also in 1946, the Italian people voted to replace their monarchic system with that of a republic, further breaking with their political past.6 Ahead of the next election, in 1948, much of what made Italy vulnerable to foreign interference was the newness of its political institutions, as well as the polarized nature of its electorate.

The United States and the Soviet Union each had a horse in this race. The White House favored the Christian Democrats and their leader, Alcide De Gasperi, who, while visiting Washington in early 1947, had met with Truman and told reporters that Italy and America were “bound by so many ties of history and civilization.”7 Joseph Stalin, meanwhile, exerted influence over the Italian Communist Party, which did not hide its affinity for Moscow.8 One Communist campaign poster, for example, contrasted depictions of American imperialists and Soviet friendship.9

At first, De Gasperi led an antifascist coalition that included his Christian Democrats, the Communists, and the Socialists. But this arrangement proved dysfunctional. In May 1947, De Gasperi dissolved Italy’s governing coalition and established a new one that excluded the left. Chaos followed. Palmiro Togliatti, the Communist Party leader, called for an “intensification of agitation against the Government.” By the end of 1947, more than eleven hundred strikes had taken place across Italy. Responding to this instability, Truman successfully lobbied Congress for an emergency aid package, partially for Italy, which he signed into law in December.10

The Italian Communist Party, already formidable, announced at the start of 1948 that it would stand with the Socialist Party in the April election as a popular front, echoing the Comintern strategy of the mid-1930s.11 Togliatti aimed to take control of the government through coalition building. It seemed as if he might prevail. “It is not outside the bounds of possibility that the Communists and left-wing Socialists plus a few minor left-wing parties and groups may succeed in obtaining 51 percent or more of the votes at the next general election,” The New York Times reported. “It must be admitted that at present the Communists are riding high, wide and handsome.”12

From Italy, James Clement Dunn, the U.S. ambassador, cabled Secretary of State George Marshall, a war hero and five-star general, that the “present electoral situation justifies grave concern and calls for serious consideration.” The Front’s strategy, Dunn explained, was to corral specific constituencies—youth, veterans, labor, and farmworkers—and to inspire voters, especially women, to turn out.13 Dunn also believed the Soviets were covertly funding the Front’s campaign. He told Marshall the Communists had “unlimited funds” as a direct “result of Soviet support.”14 The CIA concurred. “The Communist Party of Italy was funded, in the first place, by black bags of money directly out of the Soviet compound in Rome,” F. Mark Wyatt, a CIA officer stationed in Italy in 1948, said decades later.15

For Washington, electoral interference seemed necessary precisely because the worst-case scenario—a Communist victory—seemed so plausible. In one classified memorandum, the CIA warned that the Communist Party was planning an “all-out” election effort involving “legal and semi-legal methods.”16 In another, the CIA elaborated upon the perceived stakes of the election. In the Cold War’s emerging battle of ideas, a Front victory would mark the “first instance in history of a communist accession to power by popular suffrage and legal procedure” (discounting, presumably, recent elections across Eastern Europe as illegitimate). Were the Front to win, the memorandum continued, civil war might ensue. Matters would only worsen once the Communists took office, because the Soviet Union would establish influence over Italy’s foreign policy, economy, and military bases, from which Moscow could then threaten shipping across the Mediterranean. Ultimately, the CIA portended, Italian democracy would collapse “by processes made familiar in Eastern Europe,” replaced by “a fully developed police state under open and exclusive Communist control.”17

The call to action was evident; the question was how the Truman administration would respond. On December 14, 1947, Major General Lawrence C. Jaynes and America’s other remaining soldiers in Italy—some 1,600 in all—completed their scheduled withdrawal from the country. The troops set sail from Livorno for Brooklyn, following a ceremony in which an American flag was lowered and replaced with an Italian one. General Mark W. Clark, formerly the U.S. commander in Italy, transmitted a farewell message that read, in part, “I decry, as do my countrymen, the evil influences at work both from outside and from within Italy to foist upon her yet another ‘ism’—communism.” As America’s forces departed, Truman issued a statement renewing his commitment to “the preservation of a free and independent Italy.”18

In his statement, Truman had said that if necessary he would “consider what measures” to take in Italy’s defense.19 Secret plans were, in fact, already in motion. The National Security Council (NSC), in its first-ever directive, dated November 14, 1947, had concluded that America “has security interests of primary importance in Italy” and that “measures … to safeguard those interests should be strengthened without delay,” including to “combat Communist propaganda in Italy by an effective US information program and by all other practicable means.”20 For this mission, U.S. officials recommended covert action. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the army chief of staff, suggested that a list of possible Italian assets be assembled for future operations.21

But who would oversee them? Until this point, America had possessed no formal mechanism for covert action during peacetime. Italy inspired change. Initially, the State Department was to carry out covert operations, but Marshall refused the mandate. He believed such programs would be uncovered and thus undermine his department’s work elsewhere.22 Marshall, at least, understood the risks of manipulating a foreign election covertly while advocating liberal ideals publicly.

Truman next turned to the CIA. During World War II, the Psychological Warfare Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had spread propaganda across Italy. As the OSS’s ultimate successor, the CIA would now do the same. In December 1947, as America’s troops left Italy, the White House issued directive NSC 4-A, which authorized the CIA to “initiate and conduct … covert psychological operations” abroad.23 Truman also sanctioned secret shipments of arms to Italy.24 A generation later, the U.S. Congress would conclude that NSC 4-A “was the President’s first formal authorization for covert operations in the postwar period,” and that “it was used to undertake covert attempts to influence the outcome of the 1948 Italian national elections.”25

The starting point of CIA covert action would be electoral interference.

While the CIA manipulated Italy’s election in secret, the State Department did the same in the light. Overt interference inevitably provokes a backlash—because it is visible and attributable, the benefiting party can be portrayed as a foreign puppet—but Dunn, the ambassador, still felt that such action was worthwhile. In February, he told Marshall that the “full implementation of US policy is essential to an electoral decision by the Italian people for democratic as against totalitarian government.” Italians valued America’s economic support, Dunn explained, and wanted it to persist. “The issue of friendship with the US will in Italy play fully as great a role in the forthcoming elections as will the internal domestic situation,” he wrote. “Every action of the US will have a direct bearing on the outcome.”26 Marshall agreed, cabling that he “concur[s] US actions will have direct bearing on elections, and will take all feasible steps to evince firm US friendship toward Italy.”27