Cold Warfare

George Washington, while engaging the British in North America, put the wheels of covert action into motion over 50 years before Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. The importance of the Manifesto is that it put the Soviet state directly opposed to the democracies of the world in the 20th century. What evolved some one hundred years after Marx’s writing (1947-48) was a CIA capable of covert paramilitary operations. George Kennan (US State Department) stated that what was needed was not a “department of dirty tricks,” but then stated that the CIA would operate in peacetime with operations including sabotage and guerilla war. The means for this action was National Security Council memorandum 10/2. Cold Warfare: A Compact History is accurately documented with hundreds of footnotes. The prestigious sources used are formerly classified CIA and OSS records, presidential papers, and records from both the National Archives and the National Security Archive.