Operation Rollback

Fülszöveg

"The last big story of the Cold War is linally being told. This book rounds out a grim episode heretofore known only in incomplete bits and pieces and is full of fresh diggings from archival and human sources."
— Stephen S. Rosenfeld
Washington Post
"America's foremost CIA scholar has done it again. Peter Grose's Operation Rollback is a riveting, groundbreaking, dramatic, high-stakes Cold War adventure story that illuminates the covert nature of George Kennan's containment policy. The new documentary evidence revealed here about secret U.S. missions to undermine the Kremlin's authority in Eastern Europe during the Truman era is startling. A truly landmark study."
— Douglas Brinkley
director of tiie Eisenhower Center and professor of historv' at the University' of New Orleans
"Peter Grose tells a tale of illusion and staggering conceit — that the U.S. actually thought in the early, heady, reckless days of the Cold War that it could "roll back" the freshly installed Iron... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"The last big story of the Cold War is linally being told. This book rounds out a grim episode heretofore known only in incomplete bits and pieces and is full of fresh diggings from archival and human sources."
— Stephen S. Rosenfeld
Washington Post
"America's foremost CIA scholar has done it again. Peter Grose's Operation Rollback is a riveting, groundbreaking, dramatic, high-stakes Cold War adventure story that illuminates the covert nature of George Kennan's containment policy. The new documentary evidence revealed here about secret U.S. missions to undermine the Kremlin's authority in Eastern Europe during the Truman era is startling. A truly landmark study."
— Douglas Brinkley
director of tiie Eisenhower Center and professor of historv' at the University' of New Orleans
"Peter Grose tells a tale of illusion and staggering conceit — that the U.S. actually thought in the early, heady, reckless days of the Cold War that it could "roll back" the freshly installed Iron Curtain and thus undermine the Soviet empire. Grose's engrossing stor)' is written with a scholar's dedication to detail and a journalist's eye for style and a good quote."
— Marvin Kalb
executive director of Har\'ard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and a former network diplomatic correspondent
"In a thorough and lucid manner, Peter Grose has given us the detailed anatomy of a secret and foolhardy operation that was kept from the American public for many years. This is an important book — it belongs on even,- Cold War shelf."
— Ted Morgan
author of A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anticommunist, and Spymaster


After the collapse of Nazi power in 1945, a sweeping change occurred in international relations that would transform the landscape of world politics for the next half-century. Uneasy allies in the war against Germany, the United States and the Soviet Union started secretly mobilizing forces against each other, building intricate networks of spies and digging in for the postwar era.
America's secret action plan was known flj as Rollback, an audacious strategy of espi-,—• onage, subversion, and sabotage to foment insurrection in the Soviet satellite coun-, tries. The architect of the plan, an enig-
matic American diplomat first known to the world under the pseudonym "X," publicly advocated an effort to "contain" communism. But following his legendary Long Telegram, Mr. X — George Kennan — devised a program of active confrontation with the Soviets through covert action. Within the secret councils of the Truman administration, hidden from the public as well as from most of the government, Kennan and his colleagues set in motion a series of daring and dramatic, though ultimately failed, secret missions behind the Iron Curtain.
Concealed by all sides for four decades, the dangerous episodes of the Rollback campaign have only now come to light. Peter Grose here untangles the extraordinary, litrie-known story for the first time, artfully reconstructing a hidden history of intrigue and tragic obsession, of secret plots and larger-than-life personalities. Operation Rollback reveals how and why suspicions and recriminations on both sides drove the world into the Cold War.

Peter G r o s e is the author of the classic biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. A long-time foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, then executive editor of Foreign Affairs, he is now a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

m Vissza