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Operation Rollback: America's Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain
Fascinating . . . well-documented . . . thought-provoking and entertaining” (Publishers Weekly), Operation Rollback is a tale of intrigue and espionage that reveals how and why suspicions on both sides drove the world into the Cold War. In 1945 the United States and the Soviet Union started secretly mobilizing forces against each other, building intricate intelligence networks of spies and digging in for the postwar era. America’s secret action plan, known as Rollback, was an audacious strategy of espionage, subversion, and sabotage. Concealed for four decades by all involved, the dangerous episodes of the Rollback campaign have only now come to light.
- GenresHistory
272 pages, Paperback
First published May 4, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 11, 2024
CovertAction Magazine
June 10, 2022
In 1944, sensing the imminent demise of Nazi Germany, the OUN reached out to British intelligence.
The two sides met at the Vatican, not long after which OUN’s leadership surrendered to the Americans. Spirited away to Munich, their Western patrons provided them luxury apartments and SS bodyguards.
In the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat, many of OUN’s soldiers worked as hitmen in the vast network of “displaced persons” camps under the command of MI6.
It was the British and Germans who were the primary patrons of the old OUN at this moment.
Notorious Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen was not just the handler for Stetsko and Bandera, but also their friend. They met while the OUN was fighting for the Nazis and remained friends for the rest of their lives.
The first significant American support arrived in 1947, and with it a greatly expanded mandate.
As Peter Grose detailed in his book Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001), the CIA covertly provided arms, training and support for operations within the USSR itself where many nationalist forces continued to fight against the Red Army as partisans.
The nationalist forces in Ukraine were an amalgamation of SS remnants, OUN/UPA forces, criminals, and various other collaborator militias.
Confined mostly to the forests of western Ukraine, they operated as bandits, raiding collective farms, ambushing soldiers, and assassinating Soviet officials. Jews and CPSU members were particularly coveted targets.
The CIA provided not only weapons but also inserted teams of spies and commandos. Fighting continued until the mid-1950s, with the last stragglers killed or arrested in 1960.
The death toll for these operations is unclear, with estimates ranging from 20-50,000. The vast majority of these were civilians, often killed with axes and hammers—which was the OUN’s trademark. The OUN claims that it was NKVD infiltrators in OUN uniforms who killed the civilians; declassified KGB documents, however, have proven that was not the case.
Starting around 1948, the CIA would begin to slowly break from Stepan Bandera (and, therefore, Stetsko), who they saw as a liability from both a political and operational standpoint.
The CIA much preferred Mykola Lebed, the chief of the OUN’s SB death squads and a man described as a “well known sadist and Nazi collaborator” by the Army.
Lebed, however, was willing to work with other Ukrainian nationalist groups and allowed all Ukrainians into his organization, while Bandera demanded absolute control of the ABN and an ethnically pure OUN.
Bandera also had a cavalier attitude toward security, refusing to use secure communications with the reasoning that the inferior Asiatic Russians were not smart enough to catch him. The KGB would therefore intercept most of his phone calls and correspondences, to the increasing fury of the CIA.
The CIA’s repeated warnings, however, did not dissuade the British and Germans, who remained Bandera’s main patrons.
The situation continued to get worse over the years, driving the CIA to issue a burn notice for Bandera in 1954.
The CIA not only discontinued all support for Bandera, but also threatened to kill him if his patrons at allied MI6 did not follow suit.
[2. If CIA and the SS [British Security Service] are unable to agree upon a formula for coordinated operations along the lines outlined above, the CIA position will be: a. Each side will continue its separate line of action with limited operational coordination at the Washington-London level. b. CIA will take independent action to neutralize the present leadership of the OUN/B.]
The British got the message and withdrew their support for Bandera.
The same year, the ABN expelled Bandera, leaving him permanently marginalized. Five years later, the KGB assassinated Bandera in his home in Munich.
The CIA’s problem was with Bandera personally and so, with him gone, so too were any restrictions on Stetsko.
Rather than feuding with Lebed for funding as before, the U.S. simply doled out twice the money.
Stetsko was now in the driver’s seat, and from this moment on commanded the remnants of Bandera’s bandit army with almost limitless Western support.
...........
Yaroslav Stetsko, the leader of the ABN from 1946 to 1986
Such criticism had some effect; the United States government which had initially supported the ABN came to shun it, saying that Stetsko had "totalitarian tendencies", not the least of which was his habit of ordering the assassinations of rivals.
Furthermore, the American government came to feel that Stetsko was "too extreme" as his stated aim was to provoke World War Three, arguing that this was the best way to achieve his aim of breaking up the Soviet Union.
The possibility of a nuclear war killing hundreds of millions of people and that a Soviet-American nuclear exchange would turn Eastern Europe into a radioactive wasteland did not concern Stetsko or any of the other ABN leaders.
By the mid-1950s, both the British and American governments had ceased to subsidize the ABN, which was regarded as too dangerous.
June 10, 2022
In 1944, sensing the imminent demise of Nazi Germany, the OUN reached out to British intelligence.
The two sides met at the Vatican, not long after which OUN’s leadership surrendered to the Americans. Spirited away to Munich, their Western patrons provided them luxury apartments and SS bodyguards.
In the immediate aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat, many of OUN’s soldiers worked as hitmen in the vast network of “displaced persons” camps under the command of MI6.
It was the British and Germans who were the primary patrons of the old OUN at this moment.
Notorious Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen was not just the handler for Stetsko and Bandera, but also their friend. They met while the OUN was fighting for the Nazis and remained friends for the rest of their lives.
The first significant American support arrived in 1947, and with it a greatly expanded mandate.
As Peter Grose detailed in his book Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001), the CIA covertly provided arms, training and support for operations within the USSR itself where many nationalist forces continued to fight against the Red Army as partisans.
The nationalist forces in Ukraine were an amalgamation of SS remnants, OUN/UPA forces, criminals, and various other collaborator militias.
Confined mostly to the forests of western Ukraine, they operated as bandits, raiding collective farms, ambushing soldiers, and assassinating Soviet officials. Jews and CPSU members were particularly coveted targets.
The CIA provided not only weapons but also inserted teams of spies and commandos. Fighting continued until the mid-1950s, with the last stragglers killed or arrested in 1960.
The death toll for these operations is unclear, with estimates ranging from 20-50,000. The vast majority of these were civilians, often killed with axes and hammers—which was the OUN’s trademark. The OUN claims that it was NKVD infiltrators in OUN uniforms who killed the civilians; declassified KGB documents, however, have proven that was not the case.
Starting around 1948, the CIA would begin to slowly break from Stepan Bandera (and, therefore, Stetsko), who they saw as a liability from both a political and operational standpoint.
The CIA much preferred Mykola Lebed, the chief of the OUN’s SB death squads and a man described as a “well known sadist and Nazi collaborator” by the Army.
Lebed, however, was willing to work with other Ukrainian nationalist groups and allowed all Ukrainians into his organization, while Bandera demanded absolute control of the ABN and an ethnically pure OUN.
Bandera also had a cavalier attitude toward security, refusing to use secure communications with the reasoning that the inferior Asiatic Russians were not smart enough to catch him. The KGB would therefore intercept most of his phone calls and correspondences, to the increasing fury of the CIA.
The CIA’s repeated warnings, however, did not dissuade the British and Germans, who remained Bandera’s main patrons.
The situation continued to get worse over the years, driving the CIA to issue a burn notice for Bandera in 1954.
The CIA not only discontinued all support for Bandera, but also threatened to kill him if his patrons at allied MI6 did not follow suit.
[2. If CIA and the SS [British Security Service] are unable to agree upon a formula for coordinated operations along the lines outlined above, the CIA position will be: a. Each side will continue its separate line of action with limited operational coordination at the Washington-London level. b. CIA will take independent action to neutralize the present leadership of the OUN/B.]
The British got the message and withdrew their support for Bandera.
The same year, the ABN expelled Bandera, leaving him permanently marginalized. Five years later, the KGB assassinated Bandera in his home in Munich.
The CIA’s problem was with Bandera personally and so, with him gone, so too were any restrictions on Stetsko.
Rather than feuding with Lebed for funding as before, the U.S. simply doled out twice the money.
Stetsko was now in the driver’s seat, and from this moment on commanded the remnants of Bandera’s bandit army with almost limitless Western support.
...........
Yaroslav Stetsko, the leader of the ABN from 1946 to 1986
Such criticism had some effect; the United States government which had initially supported the ABN came to shun it, saying that Stetsko had "totalitarian tendencies", not the least of which was his habit of ordering the assassinations of rivals.
Furthermore, the American government came to feel that Stetsko was "too extreme" as his stated aim was to provoke World War Three, arguing that this was the best way to achieve his aim of breaking up the Soviet Union.
The possibility of a nuclear war killing hundreds of millions of people and that a Soviet-American nuclear exchange would turn Eastern Europe into a radioactive wasteland did not concern Stetsko or any of the other ABN leaders.
By the mid-1950s, both the British and American governments had ceased to subsidize the ABN, which was regarded as too dangerous.
January 12, 2020
The book provides an overview of the early Cold War years. Starting in 1945, it traces the emergence of 'political warfare' as a strategy to undermine Soviet rule. The book provides some interesting details on the rivalry between the OPC and the CIA as well as on the collaborations and frictions between Washington and London in areas like Albania and Ukraine. The book ocrrectly cast a sceptical light on these efforts. Compared to similar texts in the genre, I found the book to be quite a tough read. The pace is generally slow and the narrative jumps both back and forward and from one geographical area to another.
January 19, 2018
Although it was a bit scattered, this book does a good job laying out early covert Cold War actions behind the Iron Curtain as well as the politics of the Cold War in its first decade. Grose's main argument is that Kennan's containment is often misunderstood as a more passive bottling up of the USSR that avoided any direct action on the USSR. In fact, Kennan's Long Telegram and X article envisioned applying pressure directly to the USSR and E. Block states. He spelled out the importance of direct pressure to the communist bloc, and the OPC, a shady covert team that eventually folded into the CIA, actually organized covert action inside the bloc. Using anti-Communist emigres, the rollback plan organized radio broadcasts, sabotage, fomenting insurgencies, political agitation/counter-organizing, and propaganda operations. Other than Radio Free Europe, none of this amounted to much. Many CIA agents, especially the possibly insane Frank Wisner, saw the Eastern Bloc as permanently on the brink of revolt, needing only a little boost from the US. In reality, Soviet agents had infiltrated these emigre groups and turned a bunch of double agents. On the ground, air drops of partisans into the Eastern Bloc almost entirely turned into catastrophes, other than gathering small amounts of intelligence. By about 1952, Kennan and Truman had turned against rollback.
The funny thing, however, is that at the same time Republicans and conservatives (and some Dems) were working up a political movement to make rollback a plank of the GOP's platform and US foreign policy in general. Building from large E. EU immigrant communities in the Midwest, they argued that rollback should try to liberate the captive nations of E EU and pressure the USSR. They accused Truman of doing nothing on this (ironically, he had already had a program going for 4 years), and pressured Ike to adopt this plan. Ike, being smart, resisted these calls and focused on a more conventional approach to containment.
So rollback didn't really amount to a hill of beans, but it sheds some interesting new light on US strategy in the early Cold War. It suggests a deep discomfort in the US with long-term, uncertain containment strategies that rely on the problems of the target state, rather than direct action by your own state, to either change behavior or change the regime. This book definitely casts Kennan in a different light. It also shows the importance of domestic politics in pushing crazy strategies onto the agenda.
Overall, this is a good book for students of USFP or domestic politics in Cold War, but it might be too specialized for anyone else. There are better books about Cold War espionage or covert action, such as Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. I did find this book a bit thin in some places; it probably could have been a solid 250 if the author fully fleshed out the ideas.
The funny thing, however, is that at the same time Republicans and conservatives (and some Dems) were working up a political movement to make rollback a plank of the GOP's platform and US foreign policy in general. Building from large E. EU immigrant communities in the Midwest, they argued that rollback should try to liberate the captive nations of E EU and pressure the USSR. They accused Truman of doing nothing on this (ironically, he had already had a program going for 4 years), and pressured Ike to adopt this plan. Ike, being smart, resisted these calls and focused on a more conventional approach to containment.
So rollback didn't really amount to a hill of beans, but it sheds some interesting new light on US strategy in the early Cold War. It suggests a deep discomfort in the US with long-term, uncertain containment strategies that rely on the problems of the target state, rather than direct action by your own state, to either change behavior or change the regime. This book definitely casts Kennan in a different light. It also shows the importance of domestic politics in pushing crazy strategies onto the agenda.
Overall, this is a good book for students of USFP or domestic politics in Cold War, but it might be too specialized for anyone else. There are better books about Cold War espionage or covert action, such as Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner. I did find this book a bit thin in some places; it probably could have been a solid 250 if the author fully fleshed out the ideas.
November 18, 2014
The war between a well written historical narrative and staid academia, was unfortunately lost with Operation Roll Back. Primarily because it compressed far too much (good) information into too few many pages at the expense of what it promised, a "rip roaring yarn complete with a colorful cast of characters.." The rip roaring was quickly shot down into the cold sea of sterile academia. Meanwhile characters heralded under the "colorful" banner, exited almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the reader with the most minute grasps of who they were and their motivations.This was extremely regrettable because numerous of the rogues, bumblers, agent- provocateurs, patriots, and adventures, lost their lives -executed as spies- on the rustic front lawns of the humble peasantry under the iron curtain while their "democracy" loving CIA/ Intelligence handlers"shrugged their shoulders, before turning back to the drawing board safe in the west. To add insult to injury, only the most general detail( let alone personal antidotes) are provied as to why these spices failed to penetrate eastern European societies. Again the books information is impressive, but overall, Operation Roll Back reads like a long cliffs note for a senior cold war exam. In full disclosure, I have no bitterness towards the author for exposing my alma mater's roll in building and sustaining the cold war, which did and continues to do terrible damage to our world. I'm just shocked that somehow this detail was left out of my freshman origination.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews