Copyright

William Collins

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © David Shimer 2020 David Shimer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008415808 Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008415822 Version: 2020-06-15

To my teachers

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Democracy Under Siege

PART ONE: THE HIDDEN HISTORY

1 Enter Lenin

2 The CIA in Italy

3 The Explosion

4 The Stasi Changes History

5 The KGB Targets America

6 Democracy Promotion

7 From Yeltsin to Putin

8 A New Age

PART TWO: 2016

9 Delaying Offense

10 Playing Defense

11 Election Day

12 Social Media

13 Inaction

Conclusion: Breaking the Siege

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction
DEMOCRACY UNDER SIEGE

President Barack Obama faced a momentous choice. By the summer of 2016, he knew that Russia was interfering in America’s upcoming election. He also knew that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, was directing this operation. Obama now had to decide whether to retaliate against Putin before or after Election Day.¹

That summer, Celeste Wallander, the top Russia expert inside the White House, submitted to her superiors a classified memorandum outlining ways to punish Putin immediately, in order to deter further interference in the election.² “We wanted to do light deniable countermeasures early, in July,” said Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state who collaborated closely with Wallander. “All of my Soviet and Russia training told me we had to deter with a strong set of measures up front and have them calculate the costs of continuing to attack us, particularly with a player like Putin.”³ Nuland, Wallander, and other officials proposed a range of options: sanctioning Russia, leaking damaging information about Putin, even suffocating Russia’s economy. James R. Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, recalled considering “all kinds of nasty things we could have done to the Russians,” such as “cutting them off from the international financial system.”

But, Clapper continued, the risks were too high: “What would the retaliation have been?”⁴

The answer was unknown. Russian intelligence had already stolen and released emails damaging to the Democratic Party, in an effort to influence voters’ minds. But Russian hackers had also breached electoral systems, which Washington could not systematically defend. States and localities, not the federal government, purchase and manage America’s electoral infrastructure. In some states, voter registration databases were unencrypted and insecure.⁵ “[Russia] could have done things as far as voter registration rolls; they could have done things as far as tallies,” said John Brennan, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).⁶ Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, worried that Russia “could screw around with voter registration lists to a sufficient degree” to alter the outcome of the election, by making Democrats in swing states like Florida unable to cast their ballots on Election Day.⁷

Retaliating against Putin could provoke him into disrupting the voting process itself. With Hillary Clinton favored to win the presidency, and with Donald Trump alleging that the election would be rigged, Obama delayed punishing Russia. Restraint seemed prudent. Instead, at a summit in China in early September, he warned Putin, “You fuck with us and we’ll take you down,” as one of his senior advisers put it.⁸ Of this encounter, Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, said, “We delivered the message to Putin and others in response to what we were seeing in the state systems. That was our focus.”⁹

By October, Russia was still targeting America’s electoral infrastructure. Obama’s team considered efforts to manipulate these systems “a redline of sorts,” said Avril Haines, the deputy national security adviser, and formulated “a series of very significant responses in the event that the Russians engaged in vote tampering.” On Election Day, parts of the federal government secretly braced for such an assault. “We did, in fact, have an entire crisis team set up in the White House,” said Michael Daniel, Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator. “There were teams at all of the respective agencies,” he continued, monitoring for a Russian cyberattack.¹⁰

The worst-case scenario did not arrive: Voting unfolded without interruption. But Russia’s operation had by no means failed. Hacked emails had already dominated the news cycle for months, and Russian propaganda had reached tens of millions of Americans on social media. Obama had prioritized protecting the ballot box from direct manipulation, but at a cost: Russia had brazenly manipulated voters’ minds. Victoria Nuland lamented the White House’s redline mentality. “That is what they were focused on,” she said, regarding the threat of vote alterations. “They were not focused at all on what we knew had been very effective elsewhere: the influence campaign, changing public opinion.”¹¹

Obama, near the end of his presidency, retaliated against Russia with economic and diplomatic countermeasures.¹² Too little, too late, many of his advisers now say. “We did not do enough, at an early enough point in our tenure,” said Jon Finer, then the State Department chief of staff. “I would have done more sanctions sooner.” The then deputy secretary of state Tony Blinken said that, as he has learned more about Russia’s operation, he has asked himself: “Did we do enough in terms of punishment? And I think clearly, we didn’t.” Even James Clapper said it was a mistake to impose costs on Russia only in December: “I would have preferred that been done before the election.”¹³ (President Obama, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this book.)

By waiting to retaliate, Obama effectively permitted a degree of foreign interference in an American election to avoid making an already-bad situation worse. A previous generation of U.S. policy makers—who themselves interfered in many elections overseas—would have found such a scenario unimaginable: the United States, the world’s most powerful democracy, unable to secure its own elections. But Obama was operating in a new world, a digital one, that had left America vulnerable.

The story of Russia’s attack on the 2016 election is, in part, a story of difficult choices, made inside the Situation Room based on imperfect information and incomplete intelligence. In this environment, Obama had settled for a policy of managed interference, working to contain but not stop Russia’s operation. Rather than impose costs on Putin in real time, he had focused on preventing one form of electoral interference—changing actual votes—while neglecting another: changing minds.

In these critical months, Obama had tried but failed to preserve America’s sovereignty. The theorist Hans Morgenthau described sovereignty as the “impenetrability” of the nation; others have argued that sovereignty means being “free from all foreign authority” and is “violated when external actors influence or determine domestic authority structures.”¹⁴ Covert electoral interference targets a democracy’s process of succession and therefore targets the electoral sovereignty of that democracy. When such activity is discovered, the benefiting candidate is plagued with electoral insecurity, or a fear that citizens will consider him illegitimate and indebted to a foreign actor.

Can a democracy maintain its electoral sovereignty in the twenty-first century? Obama’s intelligence chiefs are skeptical. “It would have been impossible, given the nature of this world, for the Obama administration to do something that would have led to a complete cessation of Russian efforts,” John Brennan insisted. “It’s not the way the world works. It’s not the way the Russians work.”¹⁵ Other officials disagree. “Bullshit. That’s just bullshit,” said one of Obama’s senior advisers, who requested anonymity to speak freely, when presented with Brennan’s argument. “There were things we could have done to protect U.S. national security that [Obama] chose not to do.”

Since 2016, Russia’s operation has received ceaseless attention, but much of it remains misunderstood. Basic questions have been left unanswered: What is covert electoral interference? For how long have states executed such operations? When did America’s elections become so exposed? Just how exposed is America? And, in the digital age, what can democracies do to defend themselves?¹⁶

This book seeks to answer these questions by analyzing not just interference in America’s 2016 election but also what came before. Politicians, policy makers, and commentators today often act as though Putin were the first leader to manipulate a foreign election. In this vacuum, covert electoral interference is Russian interference in the 2016 election, in favor of Donald Trump. This ignorance is dangerous. To understand what Russia achieved in 2016, and to prepare for what’s ahead, this book looks beyond the daily news cycle. After Trump won, high-profile investigations into his campaign distracted from the issue that spawned them: a massive foreign operation to undermine a presidential election.

Back in the summer of 2016, Avril Haines and other senior Obama administration officials sought a more complete picture. They requested a report on Moscow’s previous attempts to covertly influence U.S. elections.¹⁷ The briefing they then received, presumably from the U.S. intelligence community, remains classified.

This book can be understood as the unclassified and expanded version. Traveling across six countries, I spoke with foreign heads of state and intelligence chiefs, eight former CIA directors and many more CIA officers, twenty-six former advisers to President Obama and eleven former advisers to President Trump, and a host of leading journalists and technology experts. I also learned from the work of historians and other scholars, and I analyzed hundreds of pages of KGB and Stasi archives, many thousands of pages of declassified CIA files, and as many government reports, official testimonies, and meeting transcripts as I could get my hands on.

My aims are twofold: to examine a century’s worth of covert electoral interference, and to analyze Putin’s 2016 operation as the evolution of a practice rather than its creation. For democracies today, the stakes of grappling with this hidden and revelatory history could hardly be higher. The twin processes of globalization and digital connectivity have empowered hostile actors to manipulate democracies everywhere. The evolving threat of covert electoral interference is a symptom of a still more momentous challenge: the exposure of democracies in the age of the internet. “[Russia] is taking advantage of our free and open societies in using these capabilities,” said H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security adviser. “It’s important for us to develop better means of defending ourselves against this kind of sustained, really sustained campaign of political subversion.”¹⁸ If democracies do not meet this challenge, foreign actors—for now Russia, but soon others—will erode them from within.

Some definitions are needed to keep my arguments precise. The words “covert,” “interference,” and “electoral” determine the scope of this book. An operation is covert only if the hand of the interfering actor is meant to be hidden; a public endorsement by a foreign leader, for example, does not qualify, but stolen emails released by a third party do. An operation amounts to interference only if the foreign actor deploys active measures, defined as “activities intended to influence a person or government that are carried out in coordination with, or at the behest of, political leaders,” including through the “establishment or funding of a front group … covert broadcasting … media manipulation … disinformation and forgeries … funding agents of influence … [and] assassinations.”¹⁹ And an operation qualifies as electoral only if it targets a vote that determines who becomes another country’s leader. Covert electoral interference can thus be defined as a concealed foreign effort to influence a democratic vote of succession. Staged coups d’état do not involve votes of succession and therefore fall outside the bounds of this book.

“Democracy is a procedure to change rulers,” writes historian Timothy Snyder. “Democracies die when people cease to believe that voting matters. The question is not whether elections are held, but whether they are free and fair.”²⁰ Many factors can undermine an election, from voter suppression to voter intimidation. My focus is on foreign disruptions to electoral processes and on the power those operations have to corrupt democratic governments.

This book advances four core arguments. First, the story of covert electoral interference is, above all, a story of Washington and Moscow. This story has spanned the past century, beginning with the end of World War I, when old empires collapsed and vulnerable democracies emerged. The Soviet Union, but not the United States, seized the opportunity to manipulate elections overseas. A break occurred between 1941 and 1945, as a result of a U.S.-Soviet alliance during another world war. The next phase of this history arose thereafter as Moscow rigged elections in Eastern Europe, and the world witnessed an explosion of covert electoral interference. Between 1948 and 1991, the CIA and the KGB, competing in a global Cold War, targeted elections aggressively and frequently. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a divergence took place. The United States moved away from covert electoral interference as a policy option, while Putin’s Russia, empowered by the internet, doubled down on the practice, marking its second global explosion. Today, as in 1919, Moscow is covertly interfering in elections abroad while Washington sits on the sidelines—only now Russia possesses a digital arsenal to which the United States is profoundly vulnerable.²¹

Second, American operations to interfere in elections are comparable but not identical to Russian efforts to do the same. Every instance of covert electoral interference can be understood across two planes. One has to do with individual change: whether the intention of an operation is to promote a friendly candidate, defeat an unfriendly candidate, or exhibits no preference. The other has to do with systemic change: whether the intention of an operation is to strengthen, weaken, or not at all impact the internal functions of a democracy. Washington and Moscow are equivalent across the first plane. Both have used covert electoral interference to advantage specific candidates. But Moscow and Washington are not equivalent across the second plane. Putin and his predecessors have long believed they could use covert electoral interference to weaken foreign democracies, while American presidents, sometimes wrongly, have long believed they could use covert electoral interference to strengthen foreign democracies.

Some operations detailed in this book exclusively involved individual change, as when the KGB supported major-party candidates in Cold War–era U.S. elections, not to weaken American democracy, but to promote friendlier American governments. Other operations exclusively involved systemic change, as when Russia covertly spread propaganda in favor of the Leave campaign in the United Kingdom, in order to weaken British democracy. And certain operations involved both systemic and individual change, as when the CIA, in 2000, supported the opposition to Slobodan Milošević, a murderous tyrant, not just to establish a more conciliatory Serbian government, but also to strengthen Serbian democracy. “The guy was a war criminal,” President Bill Clinton told me, in explaining why he authorized the CIA to interfere in this election. “I didn’t consider Milošević to be a democracy candidate; I thought he was trying to get rid of democracy.”²² In this sense, covert electoral interference is a more tense policy option for Washington—which has purported to manipulate democracies in order to solidify those democracies—than for Moscow, which has manipulated democracies in order to tear them apart.

Third, Russian interference in the 2016 election marked a direct continuation of old ideas. Covert electoral interference has always taken two forms: changing ballots and changing minds. The former can range from falsifying vote counts and buying votes to blackmailing voters and hacking into voting systems; the latter, from influencing foreign media and disseminating propaganda to leaking salacious information and funding political campaigns. The purpose of Russia’s 2016 operation is not new, either: assisting a friendly candidate, undermining a threatening candidate, and sowing discord within a foreign democracy. Voters, once aware of a covert campaign to influence them, have always struggled to accept that they might have been played. And across history, as in 2016, the mere discovery of such an operation can divide a nation. From Britain’s 1924 election, to Chile’s 1964 election, to America’s 2016 election, this book recognizes and learns from these patterns.

Fourth, the digital age has irrevocably enhanced the weapon of covert electoral interference. The internet has enabled hostile actors to penetrate the ballot box in new and more accessible ways, as Barack Obama learned in 2016. It has also empowered interfering actors to target voters based on their personal profiles. A new battlefield has emerged in social media, where foreigners can suppress, turn out, and frighten voters while avoiding real-time detection and sidelining traditional news outlets. Today, the press has less influence over what information—and, importantly, disinformation—reaches citizens.²³ “We’re no longer the filter we once were,” said Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times.²⁴ Platforms like Facebook and Twitter don’t just enhance modern interference operations; they enable them. “The truth is Facebook did fuck up [in 2016],” said Alex Stamos, then the company’s chief security officer, “but we fucked up in the context of a lot of [other] people making mistakes.”²⁵

Newer democracies were once more vulnerable to covert electoral interference than their more established counterparts. The internet has leveled the playing field. All democracies are exposed. In this anarchic environment, Putin foments discord as an end in itself. Valery Gerasimov, a top Russian general, has commented that “the information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy.”²⁶ Gerasimov and his colleagues have weaponized the digital sphere to strike at the heart of democracies: their elections.

The democratic model is not guaranteed to exist. It is a human creation maintained by human actors. Today, Moscow is working to corrupt democracies by assisting illiberal and divisive candidates of any political leaning. This campaign is unfolding not by land, sea, or air but across the internet.²⁷ The first part of this book, spanning chapters 1 through 8, tracks the origins and evolution of covert electoral interference, from Vladimir Lenin’s creations, to the battles of the Cold War, to Putin’s modern strategy. The second part, spanning chapters 9 through 13, examines Russian interference in the 2016 election, illuminating President Obama’s struggle to defend America’s electoral sovereignty, as well as President Trump’s refusal to recognize this threat.

Central to this book is an idea: that the lessons of the past can and must be used to protect democracies in the present.

Part One

Chapter 1
ENTER LENIN

In 1952, Oleg Kalugin, then seventeen years old, graduated from a Soviet high school seeking meaning, adventure, and the chance to combat capitalism. So he joined the KGB, his state’s security and intelligence service. Kalugin spent the next six years training at spy facilities in Leningrad and Moscow, after which he moved to America. He was stationed in New York until 1964 and then, after a brief interlude, was transferred to Washington, D.C., where he worked through 1970, eventually as acting station chief. (As his cover story, Kalugin presented himself as an inquisitive foreign correspondent.) He then returned to Moscow, rising to become the chief of counterintelligence and, in 1974, the KGB’s youngest-ever general. His job was to penetrate the “intelligence and security organizations of the world,” he told me, “and, of course, number one was the United States.”¹

One summer day in 2019, I spent four hours with Kalugin in Rockville, Maryland, about sixteen miles from the White House. His home is modest, nestled in a quiet neighborhood. Paintings and memorabilia line the walls. On display are a photograph with William Colby, a former CIA director, and a signed copy of a book by Michael Hayden, another former CIA director. Since Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, Kalugin has criticized aspects of his regime. The feeling is mutual: In 2002, a Russian court tried Kalugin for treason and sentenced him in absentia to fifteen years in prison.² If Kalugin lived in any other country, he coolly pointed out, Putin would have him killed.

Sitting in his living room, however, Kalugin had many stories to tell about covert electoral interference. The roots of such operations run deep, he explained—back to the very founding of the Soviet Union. To any leader in Moscow, foreign elections present opportunities to redirect nations. The democratic process of succession practically invites interference. “What we did all around the world,” Kalugin said, “was provide money and support to people who we thought would be friendly and would change the foreign and domestic policies of their countries.”³

The Soviet Union first targeted foreign elections a century ago. The historian Tony Judt argued that the Cold War began in Europe after World War I, when Vladimir Lenin consolidated control over the ruins of the Russian Empire and Communist Moscow first clashed with Western democracies.⁴ Lenin, who distrusted the United States, possessed a comparative advantage in the area of covert action: Unlike Moscow, an isolationist Washington had no peacetime foreign intelligence agency.⁵ As Americans looked inward, Lenin surveyed the globe. His grand ambition was for foreign Communists to seize power, shed their preexisting governments, and abolish their nations’ borders. Through covert electoral interference, he could help.

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

Much of Washington’s leverage came from the European Recovery Program, a massive economic program for Western Europe. Marshall had announced the policy, today known as the Marshall Plan, in June 1947. The Front’s leaders claimed that if they won, Italy could still take part in the initiative, even though the Soviet Union had declined to participate and ordered its Eastern European satellites to do the same. In early 1948, Dunn urged Marshall to rebut the Front’s claims publicly and loudly, and, in the process, turn the Marshall Plan into a tool of electoral interference.²⁸

After receiving Dunn’s cables, Marshall declared in a March speech at the University of California, Berkeley, that a Communist-led Italy would not receive Marshall Plan aid. “If [the Italian people] choose to vote into power a Government in which the dominant political force would be a party whose hostility to this program has been frequently, publicly and emphatically proclaimed,” Marshall said, “this Government would have to conclude that Italy had removed itself from the benefits of the European Recovery Program.”²⁹

Marshall’s message reverberated across Italy, reaching impoverished voters who believed a better future was contingent upon American assistance. “His language is crystal clear,” observed Italy’s Il Tempo newspaper, which reported that a Front victory would result in the “suspension of American aid with resulting economic catastrophe in Italy.” Italy’s left-leaning publications reacted scathingly. “Marshall’s language clearly shows how [the] US intends to use aid as electoral weapon of blackmail against [the] Italian people,” read the Communist-affiliated l’Unità paper. For the Christian Democrats, Marshall’s speech was a political gift. The Italian government worked with American officials to produce six million posters and, with the Vatican’s approval, ten million prayer cards about the benefits of American aid.³⁰

Italian voters had a choice: America’s open hand or its closed fist. Back in Washington, other parts of the government raised the stakes still higher. In conjunction with Marshall’s announcement, the Department of Justice, citing a decades-old law, announced that it would not permit Italians who supported the Communist Party to enter the United States. “There sh[oul]d be no doubt left [in the] minds [of] Ital[ian]s that policy [in] this regard [is] unchanged,” Marshall wrote to the U.S. embassy in Italy. This rule had the potential to influence millions of voters; the State Department estimated that as many as fourteen million Italians wanted to move to the United States.³¹

With these sticks also came carrots. American aid continued to flood Italy. In February, Dunn urged Marshall to ensure that the United States kept providing Italy with wheat; otherwise, De Gasperi’s government would have to reduce bread rations. The following month, Truman signed an order transferring twenty-nine merchant ships to the Italian government. As more and more assistance arrived, Dunn, recognizing its psychological power, personally welcomed every hundredth delivery.³²

This overt interference had costs, which Marshall recognized. In a cable to Dunn’s embassy, he emphasized the importance of “offset[ting] possible communist attacks against US ‘interference.’ ” De Gasperi often had to rebut accusations that he was a tool of the United States. On one occasion, he told Italian lawmakers that “there is nothing servile in accepting American aid,” which he described as a “free gift.” Directing his comments at Communist politicians, De Gasperi said, “You should explain this to the working masses. If, after giving them the facts, you should decide to do without American help, you should say so and assume full responsibility for your attitude.”³³ Italy’s struggling economy offered De Gasperi much-needed cover.

But there were limits to what Washington could accomplish overtly. All of its tactics had a common weakness: None targeted voters personally, based on their individual views and biases. The State and Justice Departments, at least, lacked the means to engage in such behavior.

Italian Americans picked up the slack. Between 1876 and 1930, five million Italians had immigrated to the United States; many retained connections to their native country.³⁴ As April approached, the sizable Italian American community became a weapon of electoral interference, participating in a project that at the time seemed spontaneous.

The public face of this effort was Generoso Pope, the owner of the largest Italian-language newspaper in the United States. Ahead of Italy’s April election, Pope executed a clever idea: to use his newspaper to influence Italian voters. He urged readers to mail anti-Communist letters back home, into the mailboxes of their friends and relatives. “I knew that the only way to beat the Communists was to have the people of Italy know the truth,” Pope said at the time. “I started the campaign, realizing that the people of Italy would believe the truth when it was told by a brother, or a friend, or a blood relation.”³⁵

The idea spread quickly. Other non-state actors, from the Roman Catholic Church to more Italian-language newspapers, pressed their followers to take part in what became known as the “Letters to Italy” initiative. Victor Anfuso, a New York–based lawyer and OSS veteran, distributed 250,000 pre-written form letters for Italian Americans to sign and mail home. Anfuso’s letter read, in part, “We implore you not to throw our beautiful Italy into the arms of that cruel despot Communism.” Another form letter, distributed in New Jersey, warned, “If you should vote for the Communists or the Left-wing Socialists you will become the slaves of Russia.”³⁶

As letters poured into Italy, American officials were euphoric. Even the typically pessimistic Dunn was uplifted. “Surge of letters and packages mainly to southern Italy from America definitely is harming Front vote prospects to extent that loud protests have been made,” he told Marshall on April 7. The State Department encouraged Italian Americans to keep writing letters, and just before the election the U.S. government expedited mail deliveries to Italy.³⁷

In all, Italian Americans sent an estimated ten million messages to Italy. In one town in New York, more than 40 percent of Italian American residents took part in the campaign. John Ellis, a Republican politician who traveled to Italy in April, found that the letter writing was “heard all over” the country, in what can best be understood as a primitive form of micro-targeting. In 1948, loved ones could influence voters on a personal basis. The major cost of the initiative, as with Marshall’s speech, was that it was not a secret. Italy’s Communist leaders swiftly denounced the letter writing as foreign interference.³⁸

The letter writers were not alone in influencing Italy’s politics. In an open statement, luminaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Henry Stimson expressed solidarity with Italians struggling against “the threat of oppression and slavery.” Famous Italian Americans like Frank Sinatra, Rocky Graziano, and Joe DiMaggio broadcast similar messages across Italy. (One Christian Democratic campaign poster read, “Even Hollywood stars are against Communism.”) And private American companies sent anti-Communist films to cinemas in Italy. Just before the election, an estimated five million Italians were watching them each week.³⁹

Italians’ psyches were under assault from all angles as a result of American efforts to influence their opinions ahead of the election. In their mailboxes were letters begging them to vote against the Front; in their theaters were anti-Communist productions; on their radios were celebrities urging them to back De Gasperi; and in their newspapers was a clear warning: Voting Communist meant sacrificing Marshall Plan aid and the ability to enter the United States.

Events beyond Washington’s control shaped aspects of foreign interference in Italy’s election. The most important had unfolded in February 1948, when Communists staged a coup d’état in Czechoslovakia. The value of the Italian lira plummeted in reaction to fears that Italy’s Communist Party would similarly seize power. Christian Democrats used these concerns to highlight the stakes of the election. The party’s manifesto stated, in part, that the “recent tragic experiences” of Eastern European countries had elucidated the treachery of Communism and that Italians had to decide between “Bolshevik totalitarianism and sincerely democratic parties.”⁴⁰

In the United States, the Czechoslovak coup assured the passage of the Marshall Plan. Truman urged a joint session of Congress to approve the plan, citing “the tragic death of the republic of Czechoslovakia” as well as the ongoing effort of a “Communist minority to take control” of Italy. Lawmakers voted in favor of the bill, and on April 3 Truman signed it into law at a high-profile ceremony, just fifteen days before Italy’s election.⁴¹

The Czechoslovak coup also alarmed the Roman Catholic Church, which, alongside the United States, had been influencing Italy’s election. Not only did the Vatican instruct its clergy to vote, but Church leaders also encouraged their followers, especially women and nuns, to turn out on Election Day in opposition to the Front.⁴² On March 10, Pope Pius XII issued a directive to priests. “In this grave moment,” he said, “it is your right and duty to draw the attention of the faithful to the extraordinary importance of the forthcoming elections.” All citizens who could vote, he stressed, must do so. “Anybody who abstains, especially because of laziness or cowardice, commits a grave sin—a mortal transgression.”⁴³ The pope had “placed the whole weight and influence of the Catholic Church behind the Christian Democratic party,” The New York Times reported. On March 28, in his Easter address, the pope gave what the U.S. media described as “one of the most political speeches he has ever uttered.” Appearing in St. Peter’s Square, he told more than 150,000 worshippers that “the great hour of Christian conscience has struck.”⁴⁴

The interests of Washington and the Vatican were aligned. Moscow saw only conspiracy. A leading Soviet newspaper reported that “the subversive activity of the Vatican is inspired in every way by American military authorities in Italy.” Knowing the Roman Catholic Church held immense influence in Italy, the Christian Democrats took advantage of its support. One of the party’s slogans was “God can see you in the secrecy of the election booth, but not Stalin.”⁴⁵

The CIA, meanwhile, closely tracked this confluence of overt electoral interference. The agency recorded internally how the Vatican and the State Department were working against the Front. One CIA report said that “to assure the defeat of the Communists,” Dunn wanted America to send more supplies to Italy in support of De Gasperi’s government. Another explained that the State Department had recommended taking “every opportunity” to illustrate the “close support being given to the Italian people by the western powers.”⁴⁶ When overt and covert mechanisms are deployed jointly, intelligence officers often study the former to enhance the latter.

Behind the scenes, CIA officers—with limited time, experience, and tradecraft—were interfering in the election covertly. By the end of 1947, the CIA had dispatched a special operations team to Italy. “We very hastily moved to support the Christian Democrats,” F. Mark Wyatt, who participated in this effort, said in retirement. In January 1948, Defense Secretary James Forrestal pushed Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA director, to expand operations in Italy.⁴⁷ The CIA’s methods had to be unattributable; otherwise, they would backfire. “The United States saw fit to conduct a covert operation in Italy,” Clark Clifford, then the White House counsel, later testified. “Had they done so openly, it not only would have been counterproductive, but I think it would have assured a Communist victory.”⁴⁸

What the CIA did in Italy during those crucial months has long been kept secret. More than seven decades later, many files relating to the operation remain classified. Inside the CIA, however, the History Staff has full access to these documents. The head of this department is David Robarge, who became the CIA’s Chief Historian in 2005. Robarge spends much of his time writing classified histories based on classified sources. One summer morning in 2019, he met me at a coffee shop near Langley, Virginia, where we spent several hours discussing the CIA’s history of electoral interference, including and especially in Italy.

As our conversation progressed, it became clear that the CIA had been intimately involved with overt tactics that had appeared spontaneous. When asked about the makeup of the CIA’s operation, Robarge cited initiatives that ostensibly had nothing to do with the agency: “the letter-writing campaign from the U.S.” and “working with the church.” In March 1948, an NSC directive had said to “immediately initiate in this country … [a] letter-writing campaign by private citizens, regarding the political issues in Italy.”⁴⁹ But still, wouldn’t the letter-writing initiative have happened without the CIA? “I can’t say whether anybody would have either come up with the idea or reinforced it the way we did,” Robarge responded, since the CIA was “facilitating it through American contacts, principally the church, but also the ethnic communities in New York and Boston and elsewhere.”⁵⁰

The same went for the Roman Catholic Church’s propaganda campaign. The church opposed the Communist Party on its own initiative, Robarge said, but the CIA “piggybacked” on its efforts by “making them more expansive [and] more robust.” To Robarge, it was this synergy between the overt and the covert that made the CIA’s operation more effective than any funding from the Soviet Union. “Ours is much more tactically savvy because of the tradecraft,” he explained. “The Communists did not have a letter-writing campaign, the Communists did not work with the Catholic Church, etc., etc. You can just baldly see the differences.”

And then, of course, there was cash—lots of it. “We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets,” F. Mark Wyatt has said. With these funds, Christian Democrats and other anti-Front politicians could better reach and manipulate voters. “We bought that election,” Donald Gregg, who worked for the CIA from 1951 to 1982, told me. “It is a classic example of how really interfering in another country’s political system can pay off, if you’re convinced that it needs to be done, as we were.”⁵¹

Some historians have claimed that the CIA expended as much as $10 million interfering in Italy’s 1948 election (roughly $107 million in 2020 values), although no known source corroborates this figure. One report by the U.S. Congress in the mid-1970s pegged spending at just $1 million, far less. The truth, Robarge said, is in the middle. “It was several million,” he maintained. “It was a very high-priority operation and one that the U.S. was committed to seeing through.”⁵²

Much of the propaganda that the CIA funded had a specific purpose: to frighten. “Mainly it was to scare the Italians into not voting for the Communists,” Robarge said, including by spreading disinformation. Some pieces of propaganda warned that the Communists would stage a coup d’état in Italy, as they had in Czechoslovakia. Others raised the specter of the Soviet military inside the country. “The point here was to get out the vote, in part by scaring people,” Robarge explained. “It was spending a lot of money, sending people to do the work to get people to vote: knock on doors, organize rallies to stir up pro-western voter centers, and scare people against the Communists.”⁵³

In executing this operation, Wyatt claimed that the CIA worked directly with De Gasperi, the Italian prime minister. “Certainly, De Gasperi was witting and engaged with us,” Robarge confirmed. “He’s certainly aware the funding is coming in, he knows where it’s going, he’s approving its use and its distribution… . We haven’t recruited him, we don’t control him, but [there’s] a relationship.” The agency also collaborated with lower-ranking Christian Democratic officials. “You have an effective party with a ground structure, why not use it?” Robarge asked. The CIA relied on its party contacts, he explained, for “passing the money around, making sure it got into the right hands, letting us know about upcoming rallies, letting us know that they were in touch with certain media individuals, that kind of synchronization of activities.”⁵⁴ The U.S. embassy was operating alongside the CIA. In the weeks preceding the vote, Dunn’s team functioned, by his own account, as a “political action committee” working to defeat the Front.⁵⁵

The CIA focused on manipulating the psyches of Italian voters. Today, billions of people have uploaded their psyches onto the internet, exposing them to targeted manipulation. The platform is new, but the goal of shaping people’s views is not. For renowned diplomats like George Kennan, whose writings had provided a foundation for the strategy of containment, psychological tactics held immense promise.⁵⁶ At a public lecture prior to Italy’s election, he said, “It would be a mistake to consider psychological measures as anything separate from the rest of diplomacy.”⁵⁷

The CIA did have limits, though: Its officers focused on changing minds rather than changing actual ballots. The CIA has “hardly ever” altered votes directly, Robarge said, and the agency did not stuff ballot boxes or bribe election officials in Italy.⁵⁸ With the CIA’s operational files still classified, some of the agency’s work has undoubtedly escaped the historical record. What is certain, though, is that the CIA enhanced overt tools, spread misleading and incendiary propaganda, and funneled millions of dollars into De Gasperi’s campaign.

But would it be enough? Because the CIA was influencing voters rather than altering votes, its work brought no guarantees. This uncertainty unnerved Kennan, who, during the Italian campaign, was serving as the State Department’s first-ever director of policy planning. On March 15, 1948, he sent Marshall, his boss, a top secret cable proposing even bolder action. “It would clearly be better that elections not take place at all than that Communists win in these circumstances,” he wrote. The message continued,

I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war… . This would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to the deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.⁵⁹

For Kennan, the question was how, not whether, to manipulate Italy’s democracy. His proposal—basically, to cancel the election—lacked the subtlety of electoral interference. His colleagues felt that such rash action would prove self-defeating. John Hickerson, a senior State Department official, scribbled onto Kennan’s memorandum the many reasons why he opposed this “drastic” and “unwise” recommendation. “Instead, U.S. Govt. should do everything it properly can to strengthen non-communist forces and parties,” Hickerson wrote, endorsing electoral interference anew.⁶⁰ Kennan’s idea was a nonstarter, but it reflected Washington’s priority at the time: to defeat the Communists and maintain its influence over Italy, even if that meant violating the country’s electoral sovereignty.

Kennan’s letter points to a broader issue for interfering actors: the need for contingency planning. In any election that attracts foreign attention, the question lingers of what will come after the vote of interest. In this case, American officials feared that Italy’s Communists would claim in defeat that the race was “not free,” stage riots, and mount a coup d’état. Italians, too, braced for chaos. “There is no doubt that the Communists intend in the more or less distant future to plunge Italy into a frightful civil war,” the Tempo newspaper reported just before the election.⁶¹

There was also the possibility that the United States would stage a coup d’état if the Front prevailed. Kennan had already proposed canceling Italy’s election. In February, the left-wing l’Unità and Avanti! newspapers alleged that the Italian government intended to call off the contest. A CIA memorandum from March 1948 read that if the Front won, its “actual accession to power might be prevented by falsification of the returns or by force.” On Truman’s orders, the United States had been smuggling arms and supplies to the Italian military. “The CIA has its emergency plans,” Victor Marchetti, a Cold War–era CIA officer turned agency critic, later said, for if Italy’s leftist parties won a national election. “Support to Italian colonels would not be lacking.”⁶²

Italy’s election had become a dual contest: one between the Front and the Christian Democrats, and the other between Moscow and Washington. TASS, the Soviet news agency, emphasized American “interference” in the election. From the other side of the world, The New York Times summed up the dynamic with the headline “The Great Issue in Italy: Russia or the U.S.” Inside Italy, this superpower competition had become a key campaign issue. Communist politicians warned that “every vote for De Gasperi is a vote for Truman,” while Christian Democrats retorted that “every vote for Togliatti is a vote for Stalin.” To increase turnout, the Vatican rescheduled church services so that its followers could get to the polls. Come Election Day on April 18, a remarkable 92 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots.⁶³

In the end, it wasn’t even close. The Christian Democrats triumphed with 48.5 percent of the vote, compared with just 31 percent for the Front. “Most interpret results primarily as striking defeat for communism,” Dunn reported. And critically, the Front’s leaders announced that they would respect the results. (Soviet officials had, behind the scenes, discouraged Togliatti from resorting to violence.) The right-wing l’Ora newspaper ran the headline “No to Stalin!,” while The New York Times declared that the “U.S. has scored over Russia in worldwide battle.”⁶⁴

Reactions were swift and emotional. Pope Pius XII announced his “profound joy.” Truman celebrated publicly. At a news conference, he said, “I know that free peoples everywhere will be encouraged by the outcome of the recent Italian elections.” A few weeks later, Italy received its first Marshall Plan delivery.⁶⁵ Towns like Gravina reaped the benefits.

Members of the Italian Left fumed. Togliatti attributed his defeat to “the intervention of foreign powers and the Vatican,” while l’Unità accused the Catholic Church of manipulating its followers. Pivotal elections can divide a country, especially when a foreign actor involves itself in the contest. Much of America’s operation had been overt, exposing its hand and, in the process, polarizing Italy’s electorate. Many Front voters felt they had been tricked into participating in an unfair election.⁶⁶

Some Americans, too, protested Washington’s interference. Just before the election, about eighty individuals, including a U.S. senator, had sent a joint telegram to Truman requesting “an end to all outside interference with democratic electoral procedure” in Italy. “The Italians are not a savage people who need to be taught what to do,” they wrote. “No American would tolerate Italian interference in American elections.” Foreign interference in a U.S. election, though, was unthinkable at the time. Washington was operating from a position of strength: As a well-established democracy, its elections seemed impenetrable.⁶⁷

The most consequential reactions to De Gasperi’s victory unfolded in CIA headquarters. For America’s intelligence officers, the outcome had confirmed the value and potential of covert electoral interference. “It was very, very exciting,” Wyatt recalled. “I mean, we were euphoric: ‘We’ve won this one, and we’ll win others.’ ” Within the U.S. government, this operation became legend and inspiration. “Italy was always raised as one of the successes that we had staged,” said Bobby Inman, the CIA’s deputy director in 1981 and 1982. John Negroponte, the U.S. deputy national security adviser toward the end of the Cold War, likewise said, “The policy makers of the next generation, they all remembered Italy, and the threat of Communists taking over, and the huge effort we made to prevent that from happening, when we went in big-time to influence things.”⁶⁸

When an interfering actor’s preferred electoral outcome is achieved, it is tempting to attribute the result to covert action. But the historical record paints a more uncertain picture. The CIA was in its infancy in 1948. It lacked not only a playbook but also experience. After the election, CIA officers, while triumphant, had no evidence that their tactics, which were just part of a broader operation, had made the difference. Maybe Marshall’s speech was the decisive factor, or maybe De Gasperi would have won unassisted. “We still argue about it,” Robarge said. “The best we can say, even at this late date, is that we probably gave the [Christian Democrats] enough of a margin [of victory]—a big margin—to be able to say the election was honest, the Communists lost fair and square, and there’s no reason for them to take to the streets.”⁶⁹

Robarge’s assessment is entirely plausible but, in tracking the development of American foreign policy, largely irrelevant. In Washington’s collective imagination, the CIA had rescued Italy’s democracy. The CIA’s work “resulted in the Christian Democrats essentially dominating Italy for the next fifty years,” commented Joseph Wippl, a Cold War–era CIA officer, “and certainly it was in our interests to support them.” When I pressed Wippl, though, he recognized that he did not know if the agency had accomplished what he had just claimed it did. “If you were to ask me, ‘Joe, can you prove that that $10 million we spent in that election actually resulted in the election result?’ I can’t. It maybe would have happened anyway.”⁷⁰

No proof was needed. America’s preferred party had won. And influential voices noticed. After 1948, Averell Harriman, a close adviser to Truman, and Allen Dulles, the CIA’s powerful deputy director, pressed for further interference in Italy’s elections.⁷¹ Dulles, in 1951, warned that the Italian Communist Party “constituted a continuing threat to democratic government and even to the security of the NATO forces in Western Europe.” Dulles further argued that the Christian Democrats—whom he described as “complacent and somewhat feeble”—would not act boldly on their own. “They may be prepared, however, with some backing from us and if persuaded by our seriousness, to take on, one by one, a series of measures to cripple the Communist Party.”⁷² Psychological warfare applies not only to the masses: Often, covert interference involves manipulating friendly officials, too.

Dulles advocated an aggressive posture. He called for a surge in covert support for “patriotic citizens” in the “press, radio, motion pictures and like media,” as well as efforts to “break the strength” of Communist-aligned labor unions. At the end of his cable, he concluded that “it should be a major point of American and of NATO policy to cripple these Communist Parties, to uncover their true intentions, to sow discord in their ranks and promote defection, to deprive them of privilege and respectability, and to drive them underground.”⁷³

The CIA went to work. After 1948, it funneled almost $65.2 million into Italy (roughly $582 million in 2020 values) over the course of twenty years. Nearly 84 percent of those funds, or $54.6 million went to the Christian Democrats and related organizations, while the rest went to “other non-Communist parties and affiliates.”⁷⁴ Dunn, for his part, suggested in 1951 that “a most effective way of combating Communism is … in such a way that the workers are approached on a personal basis.”⁷⁵ But by then, targeted forms of interference had become difficult to execute. No future election elicited as much emotion as that of 1948, making another letter-writing campaign unfeasible. America needed a new playbook for a new moment.

The CIA picked William Colby, a young and ambitious intelligence officer, for the job. In 1953, he moved to Rome, where he spent the next five years manipulating Italy’s elections. In his memoirs, he described the effort as “by far the CIA’s largest covert political action program undertaken until then or, indeed, since—an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate that secret aid could help our friends and frustrate our foes without the use of force or violence.” America’s preferred parties used the CIA’s money to execute newsletter, leaflet, and poster campaigns, as well as to organize public rallies, membership events, and voter registration drives—all to reach and influence the masses. “More was needed than the sporadic election year support,” Colby explained, “especially since Moscow was covertly pouring in massive support to the Italian Communists.”⁷⁶

Colby was especially passionate about the media. While in Italy, he recruited a newspaper editor to whom he could feed anti-Communist stories, which other outlets then reproduced. Thomas Fina, an embassy official in Rome, later said that the United States had “the tilting power to shift decisions marginally one way or another” in Italy, including by “subsidizing the publication of books, the content of radio programs, subsidizing newspapers, [and] subsidizing journalists.”⁷⁷ Colby rarely contacted the recipients of CIA funds directly. Most of the time, he worked through third parties, or cutouts, which protected both the agency and its beneficiaries.⁷⁸

America was intent on keeping its hand hidden. Dulles wanted measures deployed against Italy’s Communists to “be covert not overt” and “presented to the people as independent” developments.⁷⁹ Dunn, the ambassador, likewise concluded that “the most effective action in influencing the Italian people away from Communism would be that taken … without too much evidence of American participation.”⁸⁰ His attitude had evolved since 1948, when much of America’s operation was visible and attributable. The second-term Truman administration, convinced that overt tactics would backfire, informed as few people as possible about the CIA’s work. This secrecy stretched across presidencies. In January 1953, the CIA director, Walter Smith, briefed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Truman’s successor, on world affairs. During the briefing, one of Eisenhower’s advisers said the “remarks of our aiding the Italian elections” should not be shared with members of Congress—a suggestion promptly “agreed upon” by the room.⁸¹

The CIA equated its effectiveness with which party led Italy. By this measure, every election was encouraging. The Christian Democrats governed through 1994, by which point the Cold War had ended. The perception inside Washington was that the CIA had changed Italy’s future. “Our accomplishments could not be measured in short-term ways,” Colby acknowledged in his memoirs. But he insisted that in the long term the CIA had strengthened the Christian Democratic Party, divided the Front, and therefore “did succeed.” He then launched into a passionate defense of covert electoral interference:

The charge has been leveled that the United States and, most certainly, the CIA have no business “interfering” in the domestic political affairs of another sovereign nation, that their assistance to one side or another in an election there is not only illegal but immoral… . [If] military “interference” is accepted, then surely lesser forms of interference can be justified under the same conditions. The test involves both ends and means. The end sought must be in defense of the security of the state acting, not for aggression or aggrandizement, and the means used must be only those needed to accomplish that end, not excessive ones. In this moral and philosophical framework, assistance to democratic groups in Italy to enable them to meet the Soviet-supported subversive campaign there can certainly be accepted as a moral act. It was clearly for the defense of the United States and its NATO allies against the danger of Soviet expansion, and the financial and political support given was plainly a low-key and nonviolent means of acting for that end. This framework cannot justify every act of political interference by CIA since 1947, but it certainly does in the case of Italy.⁸²

Figures like Colby, who went on to direct the CIA, had come to believe in covert electoral interference, just as the Cold War expanded in scope and intensity. In 1950, Truman’s foreign policy team filed NSC 68, a top secret document advocating, in part, the need for “operations by covert means in the fields of … political and psychological warfare.”⁸³ Covert action, initially limited in use, became central to American foreign policy. In 1953 alone, the CIA executed hundreds of covert action projects across forty-eight countries.⁸⁴ Electoral operations were central to this web of activity. Miles Copeland, who joined the CIA in 1947, later summarized this evolving dynamic: “In an election in such-and-such a country, the Soviet KGB backs a candidate, the CIA backs a candidate, and the CIA candidate wins.”⁸⁵

Decades later, in 1984, William Colby married Sally Shelton, his second wife and a former ambassador, eight years after retiring as CIA director. Colby suggested a destination wedding, with a specific location in mind: Venice, Italy.

“I think he wanted somehow to reconnect with Italy through marrying me, given our respective backgrounds, since we both loved Italy and both spoke Italian,” Shelton-Colby told me, reminiscing about her late husband. “He had a thing for Italy, a certain fascination for the country,” she recalled, as his time there “was one of the highlights of his career.”

Colby forever felt attached to the country he thought he had saved. Not long after their wedding, he and Shelton-Colby traveled there again. While strolling on a side street, Colby noticed a poster for the Democratic Party of the Left, the successor to the Communist Party, which had disbanded. He asked his wife to photograph him next to it. “We did it,” Colby told her, staring at the poster, tears in his eyes. “The U.S. did it.”⁸⁶

Chapter 3
THE EXPLOSION

From Italy emerged an era of covert electoral interference. The Italy operation became “a template,” explained David Robarge, the CIA’s chief internal historian, for what the agency then did “in many, many countries around the world.”¹ The appeal of this tactic was obvious: The costs were manageable, the loss of life was zero, and the payoff seemed substantial. Influencing an election to the detriment of a certain politician was also more palatable than, say, staging a coup d’état against that politician (as both Moscow and Washington did, in select cases, including CIA operations to topple the elected leaders of Iran and Guatemala in the early 1950s).

Manipulating democratic elections in the name of democracy might seem contradictory. But during the Cold War, in what felt like an existential battle with the Soviet Union, the ends appeared to justify the means. “It was 100 percent ensuring that you got a government that was pro-U.S. as opposed to pro-Soviet,” said Bobby Inman, the CIA’s deputy director in 1981 and 1982. “Everything was seen in the light of bipolar: You are either with us or you are against us.”² American policy makers feared that Communist politicians, once in power, would abandon the democratic model, as they had in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. These precedents provided officials in Washington with a moral rationale for covert electoral interference: better to undermine undemocratic candidates at the ballot box than let those candidates take power and unravel their democracies from within. Manipulating voters in the short term, the argument went, protected the rights of those same voters in the long term.

While the CIA escalated its covert operations, the KGB did the same, targeting democracies everywhere. “The Cold War affected everyone in the world,” writes historian Odd Arne Westad, and without it “Africa, Asia, and possibly also Latin America would have been very different regions today.”³ It should be said that comparing the CIA with the KGB is a fraught business. Domestically, there is no comparison: The KGB terrorized its citizens in a way that America’s equivalents never did. But on electoral matters, after 1948, both Soviet and American intelligence had entered “the game,” as various CIA officers put it. “This issue of intervening in elections was part of a comprehensive strategy, which both sides were doing,” said Arturo Muñoz, who joined the CIA in 1980. “We were a mirror image of each other.”⁴

Colby and Wyatt, while in Italy, had suspected that Moscow was bankrolling the Front, but lacked conclusive evidence. Now it seems all too clear. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union, despite its economic struggles, still used the KGB to distribute $200 million (roughly $480 million in 2020 values) to the Communist Parties of eighty countries.⁵ Although Italy’s Communist Party never took power, the KGB kept supporting its campaigns. Plan A was a Communist victory, but Plan B was what happened instead: Communist candidates receiving significant popular support. In foreign elections, America’s sole measure of success was whether its preferred parties triumphed. Moscow, by contrast, saw advantages to performing well in defeat. The robust standing of Italy’s Communist Party—in 1976, it received more than 12.5 million votes—lent Moscow influence abroad and propaganda at home. State-sponsored news outlets could advertise that in Italy, a country entrapped in America’s sphere of influence, millions of citizens still desired Communist rule.

For Moscow, covert electoral interference was a win-win. So the KGB provided Italy’s Communists with $6.2 million in 1972 and $6.5 million in 1976, hoping for victory but reaping benefits regardless.⁶ Beyond bankrolling campaigns, the KGB funded news outlets, bribed journalists, and spread disinformation. Ahead of the 1974 election in France, where the Communist Party boasted considerable support, the KGB carried out dozens of “significant operational measures” designed to advantage François Mitterrand, the head of the left-wing coalition, over Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, his right-wing rival; one such measure involved circulating a fake document connecting Giscard’s policies with the murder of one of his relatives. Mitterrand narrowly lost, but the interference persisted. In 1979 and 1980, the KGB’s Paris station planted 287 news articles, held 146 “influence conversations,” spread disinformation verbally seventy-eight times, and disseminated leaflets, books, and forgeries. The money also kept flowing. Ahead of another election, the French Communist Party received $2 million from Moscow, but its leader, Georges Marchais, was not yet satisfied. He wrote Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, requesting more “emergency financial aid.” The KGB dutifully delivered another $1 million.⁷

Compared with their American counterparts, Soviet intelligence possessed an advantage—a lack of boundaries and accountability—and a disadvantage: They had no background in professional campaigning. The Soviet Union never held a competitive election, so the initiatives that the CIA concocted in Italy, like voter registration drives, were unfamiliar to the KGB. But Moscow made up for its lack of experience with sheer will.

Targeted countries had at least one feature in common: They held competitive elections. Much of the world did not, and the countries that did were typically in America’s sphere of influence. For the CIA, unlike the KGB, manipulating an election often meant manipulating an ally.⁸ Such was the case with Japan, the target of a three-pronged electoral interference operation executed by the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s. The first component involved delivering money and campaign advice to key members of the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The motivation was familiar—to preserve a friendly government—as was the method: The CIA used cutouts, or middlemen, to transfer the funds. “In effect the LDP was kind of in our pocket,” Robarge said. The second component, authorized in 1959, was to sow division within Japan’s leftist bloc. And third, the CIA ran a well-funded propaganda operation aimed at manipulating Japanese citizens.⁹

Each of these tactics had originated in Italy and had since become a part of the CIA’s playbook: subsidizing campaigns, dividing the opposition, and influencing voters’ minds. The effort appeared successful. The LDP governed without interruption from 1955 to 1993. “The principle was certainly acceptable to me,” U. Alexis Johnson, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, said in 1994. “We were financing a party on our side.”¹⁰

In certain instances, Washington used covert electoral interference to establish rather than merely preserve its influence over another country. Before Guyana’s 1964 election, the CIA, hoping to unseat Cheddi Jagan, the country’s left-wing leader, provided the opposition with money and counsel. “Jagan must be defeated in the next election,” Dean Rusk, then the secretary of state, cabled President Lyndon B. Johnson. The operation, again, seemed to pay off. Forbes Burnham, America’s preferred candidate, was able to form a majority coalition. But as was so often the case, CIA-led interference in Guyana did not end with a single contest.¹¹

As the next election approached, the CIA worked to “assure” Burnham’s continued success at the polls.¹² In this instance, the United States, while influencing voters, also showed a tolerance for altering the actual vote count. In 1968, Burnham won the election by a wide margin—by cheating. Policy makers in Washington had known about his plans in advance. “When the U.S. Government learned that Burnham was going to use fraudulent absentee ballots to continue in power in the 1968 elections, it advised him against such a course of action, but did not try to stop him,” the State Department recently acknowledged. In all, from 1962 to 1968, the CIA spent more than $2 million on its covert action programs in Guyana, which Burnham ruled until his death in 1985.¹³

In Washington, covert electoral interference had earned a reputation for effectiveness. When the CIA got involved, America’s preferred candidate always seemed to win. Henry Kissinger, a famed practitioner of realpolitik, advocated such operations while serving as national security adviser, a position he assumed in 1969. A German refugee with a PhD from Harvard, Kissinger was known for identifying hidden opportunities to advance America’s interests. In 1970, he told President Richard Nixon about an “excellent” CIA memorandum detailing “covert programs to offset the threat of Communist election victories in the Free World,” from Chile to Guyana.¹⁴ Kissinger then sent Nixon the full document, part of which read,

There have been numerous instances when, facing the threat of a Communist Party or popular front election victory in the Free World, we have met the threat and turned it successfully. Guyana in 1963 and Chile in 1964 are good examples of what can be accomplished under difficult circumstances. Similar situations may soon face us in various parts of the world, and we are prepared for action with carefully planned covert election programs when U.S. policy calls for them.¹⁵

The case of Chile—top of mind for both the CIA and Kissinger—was unique in several respects. At a time when Moscow and Washington were targeting elections globally, CIA interference in Chile proved unusually extensive and unusually representative of the tools the agency used to interfere in elections. And because the U.S. government has declassified many of its Chile files, the CIA’s work there can be examined in exceptional detail.

While Italy marked the beginning of CIA-led electoral interference, Chile marked its peak.

Porter Goss much prefers to discuss his work as CIA director under President George W. Bush than his work as an intelligence officer a generation earlier. What Goss saw and did for the CIA is legend within the agency. After graduating from Yale in 1960, he joined the CIA’s clandestine service. “It was men from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, gentleman-type organizations, working with extremely loose rules in terms of gentlemen knowing what was right or wrong,” Goss told me on his porch in the Florida Keys. Even now, Goss speaks, thinks, and acts like a spy. “You see a nice thing that happened,” he proposed excitedly. “Maybe it’s an election; maybe the good guys win an election. If nothing that you can observe seems out of the ordinary, ‘oh, isn’t that a good thing, and it just happened,’ well, guess what: It happened because of covert action.”¹⁶

Goss recalled why the CIA became so involved in Chilean politics. “It was worries about what was going on in our hemisphere, defending the Monroe Doctrine, are Communists moving into our quarters, do we have stable governments,” and, above all, it was about Allende.

In interviews with Goss and his contemporaries, the same name always arose: that of Salvador Allende, a Chilean politician whom the CIA relentlessly worked to undermine. Allende was born to privilege in 1908 in the town of Valparaíso. As a young man, he was twice jailed for his political activism while pursuing his medical degree. A year after graduating, he founded the Chilean Socialist Party alongside fellow Marxists. He spent his adult life operating at the highest levels of Chilean politics. Well educated, deliberate, and ambitious, he was elected to the Senate in 1945. He first ran for president in 1952 but lost resoundingly. Six years later, in 1958, he ran again and came within thirty-three thousand votes of victory. Many Chilean analysts had anticipated that Allende would perform well, as a result of a decline in real wages, entrenched wealth inequality, and swelling resentment of the American companies that controlled copper mines in Chile. Washington, though, was caught off guard: A self-described Marxist had nearly won an election in the Western Hemisphere.¹⁷

Then, in 1959, Fidel Castro seized control over Cuba.¹⁸ Allende soon visited and met with Castro, to whom he became personally close. The CIA warned internally that “Communist influence has been rising in Latin America,” threatening “all aspects of US-LA relations—diplomatic, economic, and cultural.” The KGB, meanwhile, drew inspiration from Castro’s rise. Oleg Kalugin, then based in New York, said that “isolating America” from countries in its hemisphere was a “major strategic part of the anti-America battle.”¹⁹

In this environment, Chile’s 1964 election, in which Allende would again compete, captivated Washington. As in Italy, the logic of containment applied to Chile. The U.S. embassy in Santiago assessed that an Allende administration would pursue the “drastic reduction [of] US influence in Chile and the Hemisphere,” marking a “defeat for US policy” and prompting “alarms from the U.S. press and business interests.”²⁰ The loss of Chile would also reflect poorly on the Alliance for Progress, America’s massive aid program for Latin America, for which Chile was meant to be the showcase.²¹

Worst of all, Allende sought to take power through a competitive election. “Another ‘Castro’ in the Hemisphere, particularly one who achieved power through the democratic process in a country where we have invested the highest rate of per capita assistance, would be awfully tough to handle,” reported a U.S. embassy official in mid-1964. A Time article similarly warned that Chile would be the first country in the Western Hemisphere to elect a Marxist president. The CIA feared other countries would then follow suit.²²

As America plotted in secret, the Soviet Union did as well. Washington suspected what the KGB archives now confirm: Allende was cooperating with Soviet intelligence. Svyatoslav Kuznetsov, a KGB colonel, established contact with Allende in 1953 and assigned him the code name “Leader.” Through the 1950s, they met in various Latin American countries and established a “friendly and trusting” bond.²³ Moscow began providing Chile’s Communist Party—which belonged to Allende’s coalition—with an annual subsidy, ranging from $50,000 to $400,000.²⁴ The KGB recorded that, in 1961, a “trusting relationship” as well as “systematic connection” with Allende had been “solidified.” The archives read,

In that period, Allende declared his readiness to confidentially cooperate and provide necessary help since he considered himself a friend of the Soviet Union. He readily shared political information and, at the KGB’s request, took direct actions to protect Cuba and took steps to establish diplomatic relationship between Chile and the USSR.²⁵

Moscow hoped Chile would enter its orbit. Kalugin explained, “We were trying just to widen and strengthen the pro-Cuban left-wing—any movement in Latin America or Central America which would be friendly toward Fidel Castro, and thus be a pro-Soviet regime.”²⁶ The CIA was convinced that both the Soviet Union and Cuba were supporting Allende covertly. In March 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s daily intelligence briefing conveyed that Cuba had “agreed to provide funds” for Allende’s campaign. The next month, the CIA relayed that Che Guevara, a revolutionary in Cuba, “obviously believes that Allende, who has visited Cuba often and is being bankrolled in part by Havana, will win the presidential election in the fall.”²⁷

With Allende again on the ballot in September 1964, and with America’s adversaries backing him, the stage was set for a massive operation of CIA-led electoral interference.

The CIA enjoyed considerable autonomy in its early years. The agency could approve internally covert action programs it deemed “low risk” and “low cost.” For more sensitive operations, the CIA director would deliver classified proposals to a committee, or Special Group, of senior government officials. Members included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy secretary of defense, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, and the national security adviser. The Special Group acted as judge and jury. It could authorize covert operations without alerting Congress or even the president. Richard Helms, CIA director from 1966 to 1973, later explained that this arrangement provided plausible deniability. “The mechanism … was set up,” he said, “to use as a circuit breaker so that these things did not explode in the president’s face and that he was not held responsible for them.”²⁸

Covert electoral interference requires advance planning. The CIA laid the groundwork for operations in Chile in 1961, when it established relationships with select political parties, as well as networks through which to distribute propaganda. By March 1964, with the election seven months away, McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, was under pressure to formulate an actual strategy.²⁹ The election had effectively become a two-way contest between Eduardo Frei, a Christian Democrat, and Allende’s Popular Action Front, a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and smaller left-wing parties. Allende was campaigning on a policy gambit that Frei had rejected as risky and provocative: nationalizing U.S.-controlled copper mines.³⁰

For Washington, the path forward was clear: Support Frei, and keep Julio Durán of the Radical Party in the race as a third-party candidate. Durán stood no chance of victory, and the CIA believed his candidacy would benefit Frei more than it would Allende.³¹ “Generally speaking, we should simply do what we can to get people to back Frei,” Gordon Chase, a White House aide, told Bundy, lest Allende win the presidency, nationalize the copper mines, and, in the process, increase Moscow’s influence over Chile.³²

In the Christian Democratic Party, America found a willing partner, as it had in Italy. In late March, Frei’s advisers visited the U.S. embassy in Santiago, where they painted a grim portrait: His political operation was struggling to cover its $100,000 monthly expenditures but needed to spend three times that to run a winning campaign. The Chileans then requested $1 million in assistance. Embassy officials left the meeting with two impressions: first, that Washington could and should provide the funds but, second, that this assistance should be delivered covertly and through third-party cutouts. Direct contact would invite unnecessary risks. The embassy urged the Special Group to ensure that funding for Frei’s campaign “not seem to come from U.S. sources.”³³

At 3:30 p.m. on April 2, the members of the Special Group gathered in the White House Situation Room to consider a CIA proposal to interfere in Chile’s election. The plan, budgeted at $750,000, included eight specific steps. Some concerned high politics, such as bribing certain politicians to back Frei. Others involved financing specific organizations—such as women’s, peasant, youth, and labor groups—and executing “specialized propaganda operations, some of which will be black, to denigrate Allende.” Both of these tactics revolved around manipulating voters’ minds. More aggressively still, the proposal authorized a more direct form of interference: “in the latter stages of the campaign to buy some votes outright if required.”³⁴

The Special Group approved the CIA’s plan. Its members also settled a contentious question: whether to keep the agency’s hand hidden from Frei himself. Embassy officials in Santiago had advocated non-attributability; the CIA felt otherwise. The agency’s top priority was to secure a Frei victory. Its secondary priority, though, was to develop influence over his government. Achieving victory was thus a means to a still further end: for Frei to know to whom he owed his power. “An effort should be made to achieve greater influence over [Frei] by modifying the Special Group restriction on non-attributability,” Joseph King, a senior CIA official, had urged. “Funds could be provided in a fashion causing Frei to infer United States origin of funds and yet permitting plausible denial.”³⁵

The Special Group sided with the CIA. “Attribution of U.S. support would be inferred but there should be no evidence of proof,” the committee decided.³⁶ In this operation, the CIA would attempt to manipulate the masses and the benefiting candidate.

To oversee the operation, the CIA, White House, and State Department formed an interagency electoral interference committee. Its members included Thomas Mann, an assistant secretary of state; McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser; Ralph Dungan, his special assistant; and Desmond Fitzgerald, a CIA official. A parallel committee worked out of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Its members included the CIA station chief, the U.S. ambassador, and senior embassy officials.³⁷

The chain of command reached the very top. On April 29, the CIA director, John McCone, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke twice about Chile’s election. A few weeks later, Bundy forwarded a memorandum about the CIA’s operation to Lyndon B. Johnson, along with a brief cover note. “In essence, the problem we face is that a very popular and attractive candidate, named Allende, who has thrown in his lot with the Communists, has more than a fighting chance to win,” Bundy wrote. “We have a coordinated Government-wide program of action to strengthen his opponent… . [W]e will be watching it very closely, but I do think you ought to know about it yourself.”³⁸ On a subsequent call with Mann, Johnson sought more information, evidently balancing a desire for plausible deniability with the need to manage his own intelligence services. “What are our problems now?” the president asked. “What are the hot ones? You got an election in Chile.” Mann asserted back, “We’re going to win this election in Chile, things look good, we’ve done a hell of a lot of work on that.”³⁹

The CIA’s covert operation ran on two tracks: directly supporting Frei’s campaign, and disseminating propaganda among the masses. For Frei’s campaign, the agency provided money and helped conduct polls, register voters, and get out the vote. It was an American-like campaign, exported to Chile. As for propaganda, the CIA circulated films, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, and mailings. Some of the information spread was standard fare; some, less so. “ ‘Disinformation’ and ‘black propaganda’—material which purported to originate from another source, such as the Chilean Communist Party—were used,” the U.S. Congress has acknowledged.⁴⁰

Taking a page out of its Italy playbook, the CIA invested heavily in another scare campaign, spreading depictions of Soviet tanks and the Cuban armed forces. This fearmongering especially targeted women, who had overwhelmingly opposed Allende in the last presidential election. One poster warned, “Chilean Mother: Fidel Castro sent 15,000 children to Russia, tearing them from their mothers’ arms. If you don’t want to lose your children, vote for Durán.”⁴¹

The CIA also corrupted Chile’s media, recruiting reporters, columnists, and editors. Some planted anti-Allende stories, while others suppressed anti-American articles. The CIA financed wire services, magazines, and a weekly newspaper. By the end of June, a single CIA-funded propaganda group was producing twenty radio spots, issuing five news broadcasts, and distributing three thousand posters per day—all to persuade Chilean voters to oppose Allende.⁴² This wide-ranging effort was not cheap. Between May and July, the Special Group—renamed the 303 Committee—approved another $1.75 million for the operation. The CIA also transferred three more officers to its Santiago station.⁴³

Targeting voters’ minds was, as always, a gamble. Frei might win; he might lose. Still, Bundy left as little as possible to chance. One of his advisers put it well: “We can’t afford to lose this one, so I don’t think there should be any economy shaving in this instance. We assume the Commies are pouring in dough; we have no proofs. They must assume we are pouring in dough; they have no proofs. Let’s pour it on and in.”⁴⁴

All told, the CIA spent $3 million (roughly $25 million in 2020 values) on its operation, a remarkable amount, given that fewer than three million Chileans would actually vote in the election. More remarkably still, the United States funded over half of Frei’s campaign.⁴⁵ In the pre-digital era, manipulating an election at scale required substantial investment.

Washington remained publicly silent as the CIA carried out its covert operation. In August, Chile severed its diplomatic ties with Cuba. Bundy promptly informed Johnson that “our friends in Santiago” hoped the White House would provide no comment. “If we look as if we are interfering in any way,” Bundy explained, “it will be bad for our friend Frei.”⁴⁶ The CIA had forecast in various memoranda that Allende would lose the election, and that his supporters might “resort to violence” in defeat. At a National Security Council meeting, Dean Rusk predicted that Frei would triumph “partly as a result of the good work of CIA.”⁴⁷

Then came September 4: Election Day. The Santiago embassy sent hourly updates to the State Department, which forwarded them to the White House. The CIA’s projections proved prescient. At 9:10 p.m., Allende conceded. He then urged his followers to accept the outcome. Fears of violence abated.⁴⁸

Frei had not just won; he had won in a landslide, receiving 56 percent of the vote compared with Allende’s 39 percent and Durán’s 5 percent. For the first time in decades, a Chilean presidential candidate had secured an outright majority. “Frei, Victor in Chile, Vows Cooperation with the U.S.,” read a front-page New York Times headline. In his inaugural address, Frei called for renewed commitment to the Alliance for Progress.⁴⁹ America’s man indeed.

In Washington, the credit for Frei’s performance went to the CIA, in what appeared to be yet another success for covert electoral interference. The agency bragged internally about Frei’s “smashing” victory. The CIA had secured Frei’s majority, John McCone told the 303 Committee, and this outcome had delighted certain American businessmen. Today, the CIA’s best assessment, according to David Robarge, is that “Chile ’64 and Italy ’48 are somewhat analogous” in that the CIA had “provided a cushion for Frei.”⁵⁰

Regardless of the effectiveness of the CIA’s operation, Johnson—himself competing in an election—reaped political benefits from Frei’s victory. In a news conference, he declared the outcome a victory for democracy. Johnson also made sure to specify that the contest “was an internal matter in which the people of Chile were the only judges of the issues.” In private, Frei thanked the U.S. ambassador in Santiago for Johnson’s comments and for the American embassy’s “discretion and cooperation” during the campaign.⁵¹

The new leader of Chile was indebted to a foreign nation. He hoped this debt would remain hidden. John McLaughlin, a Cold War–era CIA officer who later directed the agency, explained, “You always had to weigh the question of whether by interfering in an election you would be exposed and that would play to the disadvantage of the side you were favoring, because you’d make them appear like puppets.”⁵²

Such was the case with Frei. The scale and scope of the CIA’s operation in Chile proved too significant to go unnoticed. Time and The New York Times had both reported that it was “no secret” that America favored Frei. And just before the election, Radio Moscow had alleged that Chile was “swamped with agents of the CIA.”⁵³ Rumors that Frei was an American puppet dogged his presidency and tarnished his electoral legitimacy. “In Chile in 1964, there was simply too much unexplained money, too many leaflets, too many broadcasts,” Congress later found. “That the United States was involved in the election has been taken for granted in Latin America for many years.”⁵⁴

In defeat, Allende remained a political force, ready and waiting to pursue the presidency after Frei’s six-year term. In those intervening years, however, Washington changed, as Lyndon B. Johnson deployed hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Vietnam. In 1968 alone, nearly seventeen thousand American soldiers died there—prompting major protests at home—and a beleaguered Johnson decided not to seek reelection.⁵⁵

Amid this instability, Chile’s politics seemed relatively stable. To manipulate Chile’s 1965 congressional election, the 303 Committee sanctioned just $175,000. For the 1967 municipal election, it approved no funds at all. America was still directing overt aid into Chile, but money for covert electoral interference had dried up just as conditions in Chile were deteriorating.⁵⁶ The CIA reported in a series of memoranda that Frei was enduring an “upsurge of strikes for higher wages,” “serious inflation,” “economic stagnation,” and political isolation.⁵⁷ Frei had moved to “Chileanize,” or partially control, copper mines, but many voters remained unsatisfied, and most of his other reforms had failed. In March 1968, the CIA warned that Chile’s struggling economy could catapult leftist parties into power.⁵⁸

Even still, the CIA spent just $200,000 interfering in Chile’s 1969 congressional election. For this operation, the agency worked to undermine the left rather than promote a specific party. After Frei’s victory in 1964, Mann, the assistant secretary of state, had told CIA representatives that America was not in the business of helping one “non-Marxist” group defeat another, because that would amount to intervention. The CIA abided by this line. In 1969, its officers supported candidates of varying party affiliations competing against members of Allende’s coalition in swing districts. “The basic concept is to undertake a district by district analysis of the voting patterns and electoral trends in each district so that we can determine where covert leverage can be most effectively applied,” explained William Broe, a senior CIA official, prior to the election. Of 180 races, the CIA identified just twelve candidates worth backing. Even for such a limited effort, the CIA noted internally, “the risk of exposure is always present in an election operation.”⁵⁹

Ultimately, ten of the twelve U.S.-backed candidates won. But Richard Helms, the CIA director, was not feeling celebratory; Frei now predicted that Allende would make a “very strong bid” in the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for September 1970. Helms urged advance planning. “CIA has learned through experience that an election operation will not be effective unless an early enough start is made,” he told the 303 Committee in April 1969. “A great deal of preliminary work is necessary.” Helms’s argument fell on deaf ears, as the newly inaugurated Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, focused on other issues.⁶⁰ In January 1970, a Popular Unity coalition chose Allende as its nominee for the election, to compete against Radomiro Tomic of the increasingly unpopular Christian Democratic Party and Jorge Alessandri, a right-wing candidate and former president.⁶¹

Unlike in 1964, little momentum existed in Washington for covert electoral interference. Neither of Allende’s competitors held obvious appeal. Tomic was “running a distant third,” the CIA reported, while Alessandri was of “advanced age” and boasted an “undistinguished record.”⁶² Washington had also evolved: New personalities held positions of power. Many were reluctant to act. At an interagency meeting, John Crimmins, a senior State Department official, said he was skeptical that the United States should involve itself in the election at all. Edward Korry, the U.S. ambassador to Chile, said that he, too, “would not be unhappy if we decided to do nothing,” although he did worry about the political risks of inaction, since an Allende victory would reflect poorly on the Nixon administration.⁶³

Perhaps seeking to protect themselves, the officials settled on a half measure: an operation to undermine Allende’s candidacy. The 40 Committee (the 303 Committee, renamed) approved this plan. The budget: a mere $125,000. “If Allende is the threat the paper posits, should we not do more than we propose to insure his defeat?” Viron Vaky, an adviser to Kissinger, asked in response.⁶⁴

For its operation, the CIA adopted familiar tactics: disseminating black propaganda, spreading posters and leaflets, and planting articles in outlets like the influential El Mercurio newspaper. “The difference with El Mercurio was it was not a rag,” said Jack Devine, who was stationed in Chile as a CIA officer from 1971 to 1974. But the agency was working with limited funds and had abandoned several key tools: polling, grassroots organizing, and direct support for a specific candidate.⁶⁵ The CIA had also become a “potent … political target” in Chile, according to The New York Times, as Allende’s allies alleged that Frei had won the presidency with the agency’s help. This fraught environment, the CIA cautioned internally, was “not conducive to the mounting of a large-scale election operation.”⁶⁶

The CIA’s restrained mandate made some of Nixon’s advisers nervous. In June, Helms told Kissinger that the agency was in “a quandary as to what action” to take in Chile. That same month, the 40 Committee approved an additional $300,000 for the CIA’s operation, largely at Kissinger’s urging. “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” he told his colleagues. Vaky, still skeptical of the plan, had told Kissinger that “there is no guarantee it would have any real effect.”⁶⁷ The $425,000 that the 40 Committee had approved was far less than the $3 million spent in 1964, and no money was going directly to Allende’s opponents. “If the funds approved in March were much too little, those reluctantly voted at the end of June were far too late. (They were also too little),” Kissinger later wrote.⁶⁸ (Kissinger, through a representative, declined to be interviewed for this book.)

Washington was bringing a butter knife to a gunfight. Allende had his own benefactors. Cuba had transferred roughly $350,000 into his campaign, and the Soviets were supporting him as well.⁶⁹ In early 1970, the KGB sent Kuznetsov, Allende’s contact, back to Chile. “He was tasked with establishing a business relationship with Allende, receiving political information and conducting active operations to benefit Popular Unity,” according to the KGB’s archives.⁷⁰ In addition to a $400,000 annual subsidy for the Chilean Communist Party, the KGB delivered $50,000 to Allende personally and paid a lawmaker $18,000 to remain in his coalition. In July, the Soviet Politburo sanctioned even more funds for Chile’s Communists.⁷¹ The KGB also tried to strengthen its hold over Allende. “KGB focused on deepening Allende’s anti-American sentiments,” the agency’s archives read, through a “serious and focused” effort to provide Allende with “information gathered by the KGB residency in Chile about the actions of American agents.”⁷² For years, the CIA had been manipulating Chilean politics. The KGB now turned this hidden history to its advantage.

While the KGB assisted Allende, the White House hesitated. In July, Kissinger requested a report on how the United States should react to an Allende victory.⁷³ National Security Study Memorandum 97 (NSSM 97), submitted in response on August 18, had a two-pronged argument. On the one hand, Allende would seek to establish an “authoritarian Marxist state,” and his victory “would undoubtedly provide Marxists everywhere with an enormous boost in morale and in propaganda.” But on the other, Chile mattered little in the broad sweep of American foreign policy. In 1964, Washington had judged Allende a major threat. But at this critical moment, NSSM 97 concluded that “the U.S. has no vital national interests within Chile.”⁷⁴

Allende was, evidently, not such a threat after all. And regardless, the CIA believed that he would lose. In the president’s daily briefings, Allende was portrayed as overexposed and faltering, while Alessandri was said to have a “slight lead.”⁷⁵

But Allende actually won the election, receiving 36.6 percent of the vote, next to Alessandri’s 35.3 percent and Tomic’s 28.1 percent.⁷⁶ The scenario that Johnson’s administration had worked so hard to prevent in 1964 had come to fruition six years later. The CIA, changing its tune, described Allende’s victory as a “political watershed” but did not reflect upon the failure of its operation.⁷⁷ David Robarge said the agency now assesses that it came up short because of a dearth of resources and preparation, as well as the decision not to assist a specific campaign. “They didn’t bite the bullet on it,” commented Jack Devine, the former CIA officer. “What they authorized was stupid, a denigration campaign against the Socialists, but not support for either candidate.”⁷⁸

It is, of course, possible that Allende would have triumphed even if the CIA had acted more aggressively. But his margin of victory was just thirty-nine thousand votes, and the CIA’s operation was, as the Senate put it, “much smaller” than it had been in 1964. Kissinger, for his part, was filled with regret. “Had I believed in the spring and summer of 1970 that there was a significant likelihood of an Allende victory,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I would have had an obligation to the President to give him an opportunity to consider a covert program of 1964 proportions, including the backing of a single candidate.”⁷⁹

The Nixon administration had forgotten a key lesson of Italy: Covert electoral interference succeeds when it is sustained. The 1964 operation, as extensive as it was, only helped to delay Allende’s victory. While Frei’s election marked a triumph from the perspective of the CIA, the 1970 election marked an unforced error.

And in its aftermath, the White House entered into crisis.

Richard Nixon now faced a question that Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson had avoided: what to do when covert electoral interference fails. Because Allende had achieved only a plurality of support, the Chilean Congress would vote on whether to elect him or Alessandri, the second-place finisher. If Nixon hoped to prevent an Allende presidency, he had to act before October 24, when this vote would take place. The choice was stark: further subvert Chile’s democracy, or allow Allende—whom American analysts had so recently deemed an inconsequential threat—to take office.

For Nixon, it was not much of a dilemma at all. Ahead of October 24, the CIA assaulted Chile’s political system to an extraordinary degree, all to keep Allende out of power.⁸⁰

One of the CIA’s tactics involved rigging the congressional vote through a concentrated operation of covert electoral interference. Back in August, Kissinger had authorized planning for vote buying, in case Allende won a plurality.⁸¹ Altering ballots was the backup option for a reason. “The buying of congressional votes is a far more sensitive operation than a propaganda campaign, and would have penalties for disclosure far more heavy and wide-ranging,” warned Charles Meyer, an assistant secretary of state.⁸² But manipulating the masses had failed. The contingency plan was to purchase a congressional majority for Alessandri, who could then resign and call for a new election. The result would, in effect, be an electoral do-over. At least one step in this sequence of events actually happened. On September 9, Alessandri announced that he would step down if he won the vote, triggering a second election. And on September 14, the 40 Committee authorized $250,000 for vote buying.⁸³

But interfering in the congressional vote quickly proved impractical. Given Allende’s sizable coalition in Chile’s two-hundred-person Congress, the CIA estimated that he needed the support of just eighteen additional lawmakers to secure a majority, and that its officers would have to persuade not one, not two, but several dozen representatives to back Alessandri.⁸⁴ Although the $250,000 was still approved, none of it was spent. The likelihood of exposure was too high, as was the number of votes to be purchased. And Frei, plagued by electoral insecurity, would not participate in the scheme.⁸⁵ As Helms had warned, when it comes to covert electoral interference, planning is paramount. The CIA was a day late and a dollar short.

Working with limited options, Kissinger had also requested a “cold-blooded assessment,” according to the 40 Committee’s meeting minutes, of the “pros and cons and problems and prospects involved should a Chilean military coup be organized now with U.S. assistance.”⁸⁶ By this point, the White House had authorized two types of electoral interference: influencing minds and altering votes. Neither had succeeded, so the CIA turned to other ideas. “It is reasonably clear, in exploring avenues to prevent an Allende government from exercising power, that (a) the political/constitutional route in any form is a non-starter,” the CIA cabled its Santiago station. As a result, the cable continued, “the only prospect with any chance of success whatsoever is a military [coup].”⁸⁷

In Italy, officials like William Colby had argued, and genuinely believed, that their actions were democratic at heart. No such sentiment existed here. “We don’t want a big story leaking out that we are trying to overthrow the Govt,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 12.⁸⁸ In a phone call two days later, Secretary of State William Rogers conveyed a similar message to Kissinger:

R: My feeling—and I think it coincides with the President’s—is that we ought to encourage a different result … but should do so discreetly so that it doesn’t backfire.

K: The only question is how one defines “backfire.”

R: Getting caught doing something. After all we’ve said about elections, if the first time a Communist wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.

K: The President’s view is to do the maximum possible to prevent an Allende takeover, but through Chilean sources and with a low posture.⁸⁹

Debates about the threat posed by Allende persisted in these hectic weeks. On September 14, Viron Vaky, Kissinger’s adviser, described a coup as “impossible” to execute and ill-advised. “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets,” he wrote of further intervention in Chile. “If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g., to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the US? It is hard to argue this.”⁹⁰

But only Nixon’s opinion mattered, and he wanted to thwart Allende. On September 15, the president ordered Helms to foment a coup d’état in Chile, which set off a chain of events that has been detailed in other works but is briefly examined here, for insights into what can follow an unsuccessful covert electoral interference operation.⁹¹

“1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!” Nixon instructed Helms, per the CIA director’s handwritten notes. “Not concerned risks involved … no involvement of embassy … $10,000,000 available, more if necessary … full-time job—best men we have … make the economy scream.”⁹² The next day, Helms briefed his team on Nixon’s directive, to which neither the Defense and State Departments nor Ambassador Korry was alerted. A cable from CIA headquarters to its Santiago station relayed that “it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup” and that it would be “much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date.”⁹³

And so the CIA sought to topple a democratically elected government. As part of this effort, the agency engaged with two groups of Chilean military officials planning to kidnap General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces who had pledged to accept Allende’s government. The CIA has itself explained, “Schneider was a strong supporter of the Chilean Constitution and a major stumbling block for military officers seeking to carry out a coup to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.”⁹⁴ At 2:00 a.m. on October 22, the CIA delivered submachine guns to one group of Chileans. A few hours later, the other group ambushed Schneider and shot him to death. (Later, the CIA provided a member of this cohort with $35,000 to “keep the[ir] prior contact secret.”)⁹⁵

Schneider’s death prompted a moment of national unity inside Chile, at a time when America’s aim was to sow division. Thousands attended his funeral, after which Frei and Allende together led pallbearers out of a Santiago cathedral. Rumors of CIA involvement in the murder immediately circulated. “All of these people have been trained by the CIA,” Chilean senator Aniceto Rodríguez alleged at the time.⁹⁶

Allende, meanwhile, adeptly removed the roadblocks to his confirmation. On October 24, he won the congressional vote. A few days later, he announced that three Communist Party members would serve in his fifteen-person cabinet. And on November 3, he was sworn in as president.⁹⁷

Over the next three years, the CIA spent millions of dollars seeking to destabilize Allende’s government.⁹⁸ Jack Devine, who took part in these operations, had hoped that the White House would learn from Alessandri’s defeat in 1970 and authorize “big-time political action” in future elections. But, he continued, Chile “never got there.” On September 10, 1973, the young Devine, tipped off by sources inside Chile, cabled Washington: A COUP ATTEMPT WILL BE INITIATED ON 11 SEPTEMBER.⁹⁹ Indeed, on September 11, the Chilean military overthrew Allende’s government; Allende himself committed suicide before he could be taken into custody. Afterward, Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean general, established a repressive military dictatorship.¹⁰⁰ Chilean democracy had died with Allende. (It was not until December 1989 that Chile again held a competitive election, after which Patricio Aylwin, the victor, succeeded Pinochet as the country’s leader.)

The road to Allende’s downfall had begun a decade earlier, when the United States first targeted Chile’s elections, as part of a global strategy of covert electoral interference. When Allende won the presidency, in 1970, Nixon was unwilling to accept this outcome. He cared more about destroying Allende than maintaining a foreign democracy. One form of covert action—electoral interference—gave way to another: coup plotting. Although the CIA was not directly involved in Allende’s eventual overthrow, historian Peter Kornbluh concludes that the Nixon administration “sought, supported, and embraced the coup.”¹⁰¹

“Our objective was not to preserve a free democratic election process in Chile,” Morton Halperin, an adviser to Kissinger in 1969 and 1970, testified a few years later, after the CIA’s covert action programs there had been outed publicly. “Our objective was very simple. It was to keep Salvador Allende from coming to power,” including by “intervening in elections,” “creating false propaganda,” and pushing the military toward “overthrowing the constitution.”¹⁰²

Chapter 4
THE STASI CHANGES HISTORY

Half a world away, a spectacle was unfolding in West Germany. On April 27, 1972, its citizens gathered around radios and televisions; journalists prepared to file breaking news stories; and in the White House, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger awaited updates. Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor, would learn his fate in just a few minutes.

Rainer Barzel, the conservative opposition leader, had called for a vote of no confidence within the Bundestag, the West German parliament. If successful, the motion would result in Brandt’s removal. It would also mark the end of his conciliatory foreign policy, Ostpolitik, designed to renew ties with the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc.¹ Barzel needed the support of a majority of lawmakers to take power. This concentrated electoral process could redirect West Germany at a pivotal moment in the Cold War. Since becoming chancellor in 1969, Brandt, the head of the Social Democratic Party, had negotiated reconciliation agreements with the Soviet Union and Poland. If he fell, these agreements would fall with him.

One by one, lawmakers entered a booth and marked their voting cards with a “yes” or “no,” or, to abstain, left the card blank.² All ballots were anonymous. Brandt watched, stone-faced, as his colleagues determined his future.

For the Soviet Union, however, the stakes were too high to do nothing. Behind the scenes, the East German Stasi, on orders from Moscow, worked to succeed in West Germany where the CIA had failed in Chile: to rig a parliamentary vote of succession. “We were a very good team and could count on each other and did what was necessary,” Horst Kopp, a former Stasi officer who participated in this covert operation, told me in Berlin, forty-five years later.³

After lawmakers cast their ballots, the president of the Bundestag motioned for silence, results in hand. West German citizens held their breath. So did Soviet and East German officials, who would soon learn whether their plan had worked.

Covert electoral interference operations often reflect the character of the states that execute them. In America, presidential elections occur every four years, so CIA officers instinctively knew how to export traditional campaign techniques to faraway places. William Colby’s work in Italy, and the 1964 operation in Chile, benefited from this familiarity with competitive campaigning.

The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites had a far different domestic experience. Competitive elections were not held, and secret police terrorized citizens. The KGB and its peer agencies like the Stasi, East Germany’s security service, proved most adept at exporting the tool kit of a surveillance state: bribery, blackmail, and psychological warfare. At opportune moments, Eastern operatives could use these weapons to manipulate foreign electoral processes. Such was the case in April 1972.

The road to the Stasi’s operation had begun years earlier, when its intelligence officers set their sights on two men: Julius Steiner and Leo Wagner. Both were conservative members of the Bundestag who drank heavily, chased women, and amassed debts. Both were thus ripe for recruitment. “Irresponsible habits are all classic signals that someone can be recruited, and money was always the go-to tool for people in debt,” said Donald Gregg, a CIA operations officer for almost the entirety of the Cold War.⁴

Steiner, the first lawmaker, was a junior member of Barzel’s conservative bloc, made up of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU). He needed money to support his lavish lifestyle. “He was a drinker, seeking women, in debt,” recalled Kopp, who worked for the Stasi from 1960 to 1985 as a member of Department X, a branch of its foreign intelligence division. In exchange for cash, Steiner began feeding information to East German officers as early as 1970.⁵ The intelligence he provided was documented carefully in the Stasi’s files:

SA7301219: Foreign policy measures of the CDU.

SA7301725: The current situation and the process of differentiation in the CDU/CSU resulting from the disputes over the basic contract.

SE7301717: Efforts by CDU politicians to reach an agreement with the FDP.

SE7301719: Proceedings within the CDU and CDU/CSU factions regarding the struggle for leadership positions.⁶

The second target, Wagner, was a high-ranking member of Barzel’s conservative bloc. The Stasi studied him closely, recording his home address and birthday, political activities, and family details: “Catholic, married, two children.”⁷ In 1961, Wagner was elected to the Bundestag; he quickly became a rising star. Wagner was a friend and “close confidant” to Franz Josef Strauss, the longtime head of the CSU. By 1971, he was one of the conservative bloc’s parliamentary managing directors.⁸

In public, Wagner appeared confident and ambitious. He even had a nickname: Handsome Leo. In private, however, he was near financial and personal ruin. While campaigning for the Bundestag, he frequently took out loans that he then struggled to repay. He was a regular at high-end clubs like Chez Nous, where he spent up to 4,000 deutschemarks (roughly $7,800 in 2020 values) each night on champagne and caviar. A married man, Wagner carried out several affairs at once. “Leo Wagner, for us he was the mysterious Leo,” Hans Korneli, a former bartender at Chez Nous, recalled in a documentary about Wagner produced by his grandson. “He was a real VIP guest and a very reserved person.” Wagner’s longtime driver, Wolfgang Jankowiak, described him as a “politician by day, and by night, in these bars, a totally different person.”⁹

Wagner’s reckless behavior tore his family apart. “I basically buried him long before his death,” Ruth Schwarzer, his daughter, said in the documentary. Wagner spent most of his time in the West German capital, Bonn, away from his wife and children, who lived in his home district. His Bonn apartment had a back entrance, so visitors—including mistresses—could visit without detection. On one occasion, Elfriede, Wagner’s wife, called without warning; another woman answered the phone. “You whore,” Elfriede yelled, before hanging up. She pleaded for a divorce, but Wagner, ever mindful of his reputation, refused. “You’ll never get a divorce. It’s out of the question,” he screamed, based on Ruth’s recollection. Elfriede, trapped in a loveless marriage, descended into alcoholism and depression. She soon died of cancer. A distraught Ruth then attempted suicide by drinking ant poison. She fell into a weeks-long coma but ultimately survived.¹⁰

The instability of Wagner’s personal life made him vulnerable. “We tried to recruit Leo Wagner because he was so open to attack, especially for financial reasons,” Kopp explained. Wagner tried to hide his indiscretions. He succeeded at least partially: His colleagues did not notice his self-destructive behavior. For the Stasi, this disconnect presented an opportunity.

The recruitment of Wagner was a complex affair. It began when he met Georg Fleissman, a Bavarian journalist employed by the Stasi, toward the end of the 1960s. As Kopp told me, “You can hardly understand this story without the shining person Georg Fleissman.” Fleissman targeted Wagner on behalf of the Stasi, working meticulously to master Wagner as an individual. “Fleissman had Leo Wagner completely under his control,” Kopp continued. “He was completely aware of his financial and family situation up to the tiniest detail.”¹¹

Beginning in 1970, Wagner provided intelligence to Fleissman, who claimed to represent private corporations desiring access to Eastern markets. The Stasi crafted Fleissman’s cover story. “It was developed by experts here,” Kopp said. “We had faked documents for the trade interest groups with proper names, addresses, and letterheads,” all to convince Wagner that Fleissman worked for lobbyists aligned with American rather than Soviet interests. In exchange for Wagner’s reports, Fleissman provided cash and insider information about Brandt’s coalition, which he claimed to have obtained through his work as a journalist. But Fleissman’s actual source was the Stasi.¹²

Over time, Wagner came to depend on these secret payments. He often sent Wolfgang Jankowiak, his driver, to back alleys, where anonymous couriers waited with packages. “It had always been a brown envelope,” Jankowiak said in the documentary, “filled with quite some bills.” Jankowiak did not know who was providing the money.¹³ It is possible that Wagner did not, either, because he worked through Fleissman, a middleman. Sometimes, with covert operations, interfering actors prefer to keep key players in the dark. Whether Wagner knew it or not, this arrangement lent him plausible deniability. “Wagner just wanted to receive the money,” Kopp said. “He was deep in debt, and he fully relied on Fleissman [to live] a lifestyle like somebody great without having the means for such a lifestyle.”¹⁴ Wagner did not care for whom Fleissman worked; what mattered was what Fleissman could give him.

While the Stasi targeted Steiner and Wagner, Moscow was seeking an economic lifeline in high politics. By the end of 1968, Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, had become insecure about the stability of his sphere of influence, which was rotten from the start. The Soviet Union had established control over Eastern Europe through a liberation turned occupation and then through aggressive electoral interference operations. Lacking access to the ballot box, Eastern Europeans instead expressed discontent through revolt. Between 1953 and 1956, East Germans, Poles, and Hungarians all staged popular uprisings. And in 1968, Czechoslovakia seemed to follow suit by pursuing a series of liberal reforms that Alexander Dubček, the country’s leader, called “socialism with a human face.”

The Czechoslovak movement, known as the Prague Spring, alarmed Moscow. The events of 1968 “brought upheavals whose effects were long-lasting,” Brandt later wrote, even though “the traces of change seemed to vanish swiftly.” That August, Soviet and allied forces invaded Czechoslovakia, some twenty years after Communists had seized control of the country. Worried that other states in the Eastern bloc would imitate Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev announced what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine: A threat to socialism in one country, he said, would be treated as the “common problem” of “all socialist countries.” Externally, this pronouncement signaled resolve; internally, it was a bluff that Soviet leaders hoped would deter further dissent. Brezhnev, a lifelong Communist Party member, was a “cautious, reactive, formulaic, and technocratic” figure intent on maintaining a fragile sphere of influence.¹⁵

What Brezhnev needed was stability, which he hoped to achieve through détente, or deepened cooperation, with the United States and its allies. Engaging with the West could jump-start Eastern economies, which had begun to stagnate. In August 1970, while meeting with Brandt, Brezhnev emphasized that “the Soviet Union is ready to join in wide-ranging economic ventures.” Joseph Wippl, a CIA officer stationed in West Germany in the mid-1970s, concluded that the Soviet Union’s and East Germany’s “real policy was based on just one thing: money, hard currency. They desperately need[ed] it.”¹⁶ Beyond economics, a superpower rapprochement would also position the Soviet Union to secure international recognition of Europe’s postwar borders, which occurred at Helsinki in 1975, and to demonstrate its continued leadership of the world Communist movement, despite a break with China.¹⁷

But Brezhnev had a problem: Before achieving a period of détente, the Soviet Union had to mend relations with West Germany, the dividing line between East and West. Tensions over Germany’s future had spawned some of the Cold War’s most dangerous episodes, including the Berlin airlift of 1948 and 1949, the Berlin crisis of 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 (when Washington was convinced that Moscow’s real plan was to seize all of Berlin).¹⁸ Reconciling with West Germany was the required first step in reaching across the Iron Curtain.

And this is why Moscow so valued Brandt. Before 1969, a conservative coalition had governed West Germany without interruption. Each of Brandt’s predecessors had abided by the Hallstein Doctrine, which called for the nonrecognition of East Germany and any state that recognized East Germany (excluding the Soviet Union). Conservative lawmakers also resented that as part of the postwar settlement, Poland had received German lands east of the Oder and Neisse Rivers.¹⁹ Under the Hallstein Doctrine, Kopp said, East Germany was a “non-state [and] isolated in trade relations, culturally, and politically.” But, he continued, Brandt “broke the pattern.”²⁰

After the 1969 election, Brandt secured a majority coalition and became chancellor. He was determined to be “the advocate of our own interests vis-à-vis the governments of Eastern Europe,” and to build new connections with the Soviet Union and its satellites.²¹ His objectives aligned with Brezhnev’s: to remove Berlin as a Cold War flash point and open West Germany to trade. It was in this context that Moscow sought to preserve Brandt’s government.

Covert electoral interference is always motivated by security-based concerns, real or imagined. The United States believed that containing leftist candidates would minimize threats to its welfare, identity, and even survival; next came CIA operations in countries like Italy, Chile, and Japan.²² The Soviet Union had manipulated elections to establish a security buffer across Eastern Europe. The KGB then backed like-minded politicians around the world who, if elected, would provide Moscow with friends abroad and talking points at home that Communism was an appealing ideology. The CIA’s and KGB’s interference operations varied in their objectives—some were meant to preserve regimes, while others were meant to install new ones—but they all reflected the threats and opportunities of the moment.

The vote of no confidence came at a pivotal historical moment, in which Brandt was center stage. As chancellor, he pursued his conciliatory Ostpolitik, which coincided with Moscow’s interest in détente. Brandt first negotiated a treaty with the Soviet Union. In May 1970, Bonn and Moscow reached a preliminary reconciliation agreement.²³ That same month, cracks within Brandt’s coalition emerged. He had been updating his cabinet on negotiations, but lawmakers still complained about a lack of transparency. Rumors circulated that members of his coalition might switch sides. During a cabinet meeting, however, Brandt allayed the concerns of his wary allies—for the time being.²⁴

The foreign ministers of the Soviet Union and West Germany finalized their agreement in August 1970, in what The New York Times described at the time as “an almost jovial atmosphere.”²⁵ The signatories not only confirmed the boundaries of Europe but also pledged to “improve and extend cooperation between [their two countries], including [in] economic relations.” With the agreement complete, Brandt traveled to Moscow, a gesture to which he believed the Soviets would attach “major importance.” A visibly thrilled Brezhnev invited Brandt into his office, where they talked for four hours. Then, in a television address, Brandt advertised the merits of what was called the Moscow Treaty, declaring that it was “time to rebuild our relations with the East.”²⁶

Next, in December, West Germany and Poland agreed to the Treaty of Warsaw. The agreement normalized relations between the two countries and, as in the Moscow Treaty, confirmed their postwar border along the Oder-Neisse line, infuriating conservative lawmakers.²⁷ While in Warsaw, Brandt, in a scene captured by television crews, fell to his knees after laying a wreath at the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, when German soldiers had slaughtered Jewish resistance fighters. Brandt, humbly and intentionally, was attempting to reestablish trust with the nations Hitler had terrorized.²⁸ A transit accord between East and West Germany, signed in 1971, advanced Ostpolitik still further.²⁹

Brandt’s treaties won him global acclaim, including a Nobel Peace Prize in October 1971. They also made him enemies in parliament. The conservative bloc derided his accolades as premature: The Bundestag had not even debated the accords. While meeting with Brandt toward the end of 1971, Brezhnev, preoccupied with his economic interests, asked, “just between ourselves,” whether the Moscow Treaty would be ratified. The answer was anyone’s guess. When the Bundestag finally opened debate on Brandt’s agreements in February 1972, the conservatives remained fiercely opposed. As Kenneth Rush, the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, warned Richard Nixon, “[The conservatives] oppose détente. They’re Catholic and feel you can’t deal with the devil.”³⁰

Admired abroad, Brandt had become an increasingly divisive figure at home. He had failed to anticipate the domestic uproar his foreign policy would generate. He put it best: “The battle over the treaties had become a struggle to overthrow my government.”³¹ Empowered by a series of defections, Barzel pursued a vote of no confidence. Neither the Soviet Union nor East Germany could stop him from trying to unseat Brandt. An electoral mechanism in the West German constitution, Article 67, permitted a constructive vote of no confidence in the chancellor. “It was really important [whether] to pass those treaties,” recalled Joseph Wippl, the former CIA officer. “I must say I give Barzel credit for rolling the dice on the no-confidence vote.”³²

Barzel aimed to reverse, by ballot and at the eleventh hour, the policies of Ostpolitik.

Interference in the vote of no confidence had little to do with ideology—Brandt was no Communist—but much to do with the interests of the Soviet Union. “Many in Moscow saw in Chancellor Willy Brandt and his coalition partners for their policies,” Barzel, the opposition leader, later wrote.³³

Moscow worked through Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s feared and elusive spymaster. “I knew Wolf personally,” said Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB general. “West Germany was totally infiltrated by the East Germans, and Markus Wolf in that sense was their number one man.” Wolf led the Stasi’s foreign intelligence directorate for more than three decades. In his memoirs, published in 1997, Wolf detailed how he manipulated his targets—most famously, by planting so-called Romeo Spies inside West Germany, who then seduced women with access to state secrets. “The link between romance and espionage is no invention of mine,” he wrote. “But if I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.” Wolf was comfortable crossing boundaries to achieve his objectives. And, like many in East Germany, he valued Brandt, whom he described as an “engaging, intelligent, [and] morally upright man.”³⁴

In early 1972, as Brandt’s domestic standing faltered, Wolf and other Eastern leaders lent a helping hand. Brezhnev announced that he would consider recognizing the European Economic Community, a precursor to the European Union—a tactical move meant to bolster support for the Moscow Treaty, détente, and Brandt. In February, the East German Politburo temporarily implemented its transit accord with West Germany; more than a million residents of West Berlin then visited the other side of the Iron Curtain. Such maneuvers, all meant to showcase the benefits of Brandt’s policies, intensified after Barzel told his colleagues, on April 19, that he would call for a vote of no confidence. Wolf referred to the subsequent week as the “Protect Brandt Week.” On April 25, the East German Politburo offered concessions in ongoing treaty discussions to enhance Brandt’s reputation as a negotiator. Barzel, by this point, had cried foul. “As Barzel complains, the numerous steps taken by the Soviets or East Germans in the last several weeks have cumulatively had effects on German opinion,” a U.S. embassy official in West Germany reported.³⁵

Washington watched closely. “This is the first time in the whole postwar history that anyone has attempted a vote of no confidence. It shows how weak [Brandt’s] government is,” Kissinger, still the national security adviser, told Nixon.³⁶ Just a year and a half earlier, these two men had attempted to interfere in another parliamentary electoral process, in Chile, to prevent Salvador Allende’s confirmation. But on this occasion, America’s puppeteers were reduced to spectators.

The Soviet Union, though, was at the center of this saga. Brandt believed that Brezhnev had “staked his entire reputation” on the treaties, while Kissinger predicted that “Brezhnev will be finished if the treaties don’t get ratified.” For Moscow, the stakes were indeed high—too high, in fact, to manipulate minds and hope for the best. Ballots had to be bought. “Everyone was buying votes,” Wolf said in 1996, with a touch of exaggeration and self-exoneration.³⁷

The KGB had tried to interfere directly in the vote. In a closed-door meeting, a Soviet representative had asked Egon Bahr, Brandt’s adviser, why he was not “buying parliamentarians,” and then signaled that Moscow could provide any needed funds. Bahr learned later that the KGB was ready to deliver a “suitcase full of money” for buying votes.³⁸ Presumably for a host of reasons—both ethical and practical—Bahr refused the advance.

Moscow, desperate to protect Brandt, also activated the Stasi. “We received a directive from Moscow … to do everything we could to keep Brandt in power,” Kopp explained, an account confirmed by Wolf and KGB archives.³⁹ The Soviet Union, lacking the relationships to approach conservative lawmakers directly, had to work through Bahr, a middleman. The Stasi, by contrast, had spent decades penetrating West German society. “The Stasi was everywhere,” said Bobby Inman, the former CIA deputy director. Porter Goss “feared the Stasi” while stationed in Europe as a CIA officer in the 1960s. “I would not have put anything past them,” he said. “They were thugs with files on everybody.”⁴⁰

Because Barzel called the motion just days before it was held, the Stasi had to move quickly. Manipulating an electoral process was not the norm for the Stasi, which focused on information gathering abroad and mass surveillance at home.⁴¹ Rigging the vote presented major risks, including detection. But to protect Brandt, East German officials could not just watch—they had to act.

The Stasi had two aces up its sleeve: Steiner and Wagner, the corrupted lawmakers.

As the vote approached, Horst Kopp and his colleagues concocted a plan: to offer both Steiner and Wagner 50,000 deutschemarks (roughly $97,000 in 2020 values) to abstain from the vote of no confidence. The final tally would be close, and robbing Barzel of two votes—Steiner and Wagner belonged to his coalition—could prove pivotal. Kopp, though, was worried about exposing Wagner. “I was partly against using Wagner because I did not want to burn him,” he said. But ultimately, he and his colleagues felt they had no choice. Moscow had issued an order, and sustaining Brandt’s government was “a question between war and peace,” Kopp told himself, because “if the Eastern contracts didn’t get ratified, then [Ostpolitik] is finished.”⁴²

The Stasi next moved to secure Steiner’s and Wagner’s cooperation. Both men had, by this point, already compromised their integrity, increasing the likelihood that they would accept the bribes. Steiner agreed almost immediately. When pressed by Fleissman, Wagner did as well. “His debts, his position, everything was on the line” in the vote, Kopp said, because “without the money from us, he would have already been bankrupted.” The pressure took a toll on Wagner. Ahead of the vote, he took “strong stimulants” to help him remain “above water,” according to Benedikt Schwarzer, his grandson.⁴³

The day of the vote, Wagner and Steiner joined their colleagues in the Bundestag. By all accounts, Brandt was prepared for his government to collapse. Later, he wrote that he had “accepted the possibility of defeat.”⁴⁴ But unbeknownst to him, when Wagner and Steiner cast their anonymous ballots, they abstained in service of a foreign power.

Once lawmakers had taken their seats, the president of the Bundestag announced the results: “Dr. Barzel, proposed by the conservatives, has not achieved the majority of the votes.” The motion had failed. Only 247 lawmakers had cast their ballots against Brandt—2 short of the 249 required. Members of Brandt’s coalition embraced. A few even attempted to hoist him into the air. Barzel, meanwhile, shook his head in disbelief. “Brandt Defeats Move to Oust Him,” read the front page of The New York Times.⁴⁵

Wagner’s and Steiner’s betrayals had cost Barzel the chancellorship. Covert electoral interference, sometimes used to generate change, had in this instance prevented change from taking place. While Brandt celebrated, so did the Stasi. “We were all very happy and proud,” recalled Kopp, who received a medal for his efforts. High-ranking politicians alluded to the operation privately. Just before the vote of no confidence, East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, had told Egon Bahr that Brandt would persist “not least with our support and thanks to our measures.”⁴⁶ Then, in May 1972, Honecker wrote to Nicolae Ceauşescu, the head of Romania, about the effectiveness of his government’s methods:

We took several measures to support the Brandt government shortly before the vote of no confidence that had been presented to the Bundestag by the CDU/CSU… . We proceeded because this government is obviously more convenient for all of us than a government under the leadership of Barzel and Strauss.⁴⁷

For Moscow, maintaining Brandt’s government came with immediate benefits. Three weeks after the vote failed, the Bundestag ratified the treaties with Warsaw and Moscow. Confidence in Barzel’s leadership plummeted. A year later, he resigned as the leader of the conservative bloc. “His stock dropped dramatically when he forced a no-confidence vote against Mr. Brandt in April 1972 and lost by two votes,” explained a New York Times feature titled “Exit Mr. Barzel.”⁴⁸

Brandt, meanwhile, rose to new heights. In the November 1972 election, his coalition secured 272 seats, compared with just 224 for the conservatives, giving Brandt a “firm mandate,” according to one press report, “to continue [his] bold Eastern policy of normalizing relations with the Communist states of Europe.”⁴⁹ The opportunity to reverse Ostpolitik had come and gone. “That second election confirmed the legitimacy of the former vote,” Joseph Wippl, the former CIA officer, said. “It re-stabilized the government, and it showed that the majority of Germans were on Brandt’s wavelength regarding Ostpolitik.”⁵⁰

Relatively simple covert electoral interference operations can alter the course of nations. Consider what would have happened had the Stasi done nothing. In the immediate term, Brandt would have fallen from power, and his treaties with Moscow and Warsaw would not have been ratified. Ostpolitik would have collapsed as a failed and radical foreign policy gambit. As time progressed, Barzel’s government would have isolated East Germany anew. The two superpowers, without the groundwork of Ostpolitik, would have struggled to achieve a period of détente. Brezhnev, as Kissinger predicted, might have been ousted as the Soviet leader. And in the long term, the reunification of Germany, precipitated by deepened ties between East and West Germany, would have unfolded entirely differently, as would the trajectory of Soviet history. The very arc of the Cold War, therefore, might have been transformed—if not for covert action.

Today, Brandt is rightly remembered as one of the Cold War’s pivotal leaders. “In Willy Brandt,” writes historian Timothy Garton Ash, “Germany has a historical figure at least touched with greatness.”⁵¹ And yet Brandt owes his legacy, at least in part, to a foreign intelligence service. Despite his talents as a diplomat, he needed the Stasi’s help to preserve his chancellorship and, ultimately, to change the world.

Nearly everyone had expected Brandt to be ousted. When he wasn’t, suspicions immediately arose that someone had paid members of the opposition to abstain. “One or more Christian Democrats … obviously voted against Dr. Barzel,” read an article the morning after the vote of no confidence.⁵² Joseph Wippl encountered ceaseless speculation about interference in the contest. “I knew that a couple of people were bribed in the vote,” he recalled. “But I didn’t know where the money came from.”⁵³

The losing side, lacking evidence of foreign interference, was left paranoid and bitter. Franz Josef Strauss, a conservative leader, called the vote’s failure “one of the biggest scandals in the history of [West Germany].” In his memoirs, Barzel lamented that “vote buying and national treason were in the game when it got to the stalemate between Brandt and me in the German Bundestag on April 27, 1972. This is how politics was done. Without this illegality, German history, and also my personal life, would have taken a different course.” Even Brandt, who benefited from the Stasi’s operation, suspected foul play. “Since the ballot was secret, it will never be known how the voting went,” he wrote in 1976. “My conjecture that ‘corruption’ had been at work during the run-up to the vote could not be definitely substantiated, but the whole affair left an unpleasant aftertaste.”⁵⁴

Brandt, critically, knew nothing of the Stasi’s operation. A foreign power can—and often does—affect electoral processes without coordinating with the beneficiary. It would have been self-defeating to involve Brandt in the scheme. Had his participation been uncovered, his electoral legitimacy would have collapsed—the exact outcome that Moscow hoped to avoid. In 1972 at least, it was in Moscow’s interests to preserve the ignorance of its preferred candidate.

A weakness of the Stasi’s operation, then, was that its officers could not ensure the silence of Wagner and Steiner, whose self-destructive behavior made them useful before the vote but potential liabilities in its aftermath.

If the Stasi’s operation had a fall guy, it was Steiner, whose treasonous behavior was nearly uncovered a year after the vote of no confidence. What is now known as the Steiner Affair was sparked, rather predictably, by Steiner’s own indiscretion. During a May 1973 interview with Der Spiegel, he said that Barzel had been unfit to serve as chancellor—a scandalous statement from a member of Barzel’s coalition. Steiner then claimed that he had abstained from the vote of no confidence as a matter of conscience.⁵⁵

One of the two abstainers had unmasked himself. Days later, reports emerged that Steiner had actually been paid to abstain from the vote; right-wing papers like Rheinischer Merkur, Bild, and Die Welt proclaimed a “Watergate in Bonn.” Der Spiegel reported, “Once again, corruption seemed to be involved, this time in the coalition. A member of parliament who only a few insiders knew weeks ago had caused doubts and excitement, accusations and denials.”⁵⁶

Steiner covered up his lies with more lies. Abandoning his initial story, he next claimed that Karl Wienand, a lawmaker in Brandt’s Social Democratic Party, had given him 50,000 deutschemarks to abstain. Der Spiegel confirmed that the day after the vote of no confidence, Steiner had, in fact, deposited 50,000 deutschemarks into his personal bank account. In a June interview, Steiner insisted that he had received the bribe in Wienand’s office and that he regretted accepting it.⁵⁷

By this point, the Stasi had no more use for Steiner. His every move was now under scrutiny, his reputation tainted by scandal. Politicians who betray their country lack security; in the blink of an eye, Steiner was left to fend for himself. For the Stasi, his downfall amounted to perhaps the only cost of its interference operation. It was an acceptable loss. Wolf later called Steiner a “mediocre source of information.” Kopp, too, dismissed Steiner’s value: “No one cared for him anymore, in the West nor in the East.”⁵⁸

Of more serious concern for East Germany was whether the Steiner Affair would expose its broader operation. As the press scrutinized Steiner, the Stasi watched closely. The agency’s files include press reports alleging that Steiner was one of the two defectors from Barzel’s camp, as well as step-by-step coverage of the ensuing scandal.⁵⁹ On June 15, 1973, the Bundestag launched a formal inquiry into Steiner. This bipartisan committee aimed to determine “who bribed whom and by what means before Barzel’s vote of no confidence in Chancellor Brandt.” The Stasi noted in its files that the committee would investigate, in part, whether “foreign intelligence services played a role during the vote and before Steiner’s abstention.”⁶⁰

But the work of the committee soon stalled. Over the summer, its members struggled to make sense of conflicting witness accounts. “At no point has Mr. Steiner received any money from me,” Wienand said in July. Wienand’s colleagues came to his defense, testifying that he did not enter his office after the vote, as Steiner claimed. “First round of examination goes to Wienand,” reported the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.⁶¹ The committee presented its final report in March 1974. Its members had reached no firm conclusions. The Stasi’s file on Steiner notes specifically that the inquiry had “not determined whether there [were] any connections” between him and the Stasi.⁶²

Even with the powers of a special committee, the Bundestag failed to discover the hand of the Stasi, which had used untraceable tools like cash and in-person meetings. By blaming Wienand, Steiner had misdirected the investigation, which devolved into a partisan squabble. Brandt’s allies charged that the real agenda of the inquiry was to tarnish the chancellor’s electoral legitimacy. “The aim of the Steiner affair is to try to drag the Chancellor into it,” Horst Ehmke, one of Brandt’s advisers, said in September 1973.⁶³ In hindsight, the committee’s existence was more than justified—the vote had indeed been sabotaged—but when the prospect of electoral interference is raised, the parties that might have benefited naturally fear that investigating a vote’s legitimacy means risking their own.

It can take decades, not years, to uncover the full extent of a covert electoral interference operation. And sometimes, key participants in such operations face no consequences.

Wagner’s relationship with the Stasi persisted after the vote of no confidence. In 1975, when reports of his disastrous finances finally emerged, he stepped down as parliamentary managing director. He left the Bundestag late the next year.⁶⁴ Sometime before then, Wagner had approached Fleissman in search of money, and the relationship between the two men resumed. Between late 1975 and 1983, Wagner continued to work as an informant, leveraging his enduring access to conservative circles. The Stasi’s files, which list Kopp as Wagner’s handler, contain forty-one entries summarizing the materials Wagner provided in this period.⁶⁵

The information sharing between Wagner and Fleissman, unlike the 1972 operation, fit the Stasi mold. East German intelligence was uniquely positioned to penetrate West German society because of the two countries’ shared culture, language, and history. In the 1950s, Wolf had planted spies throughout West Germany, including one who advised Brandt closely and whose unmasking led to the chancellor’s resignation in 1974.⁶⁶ Because of his network and status, Wagner proved useful to the Stasi. “He delivered great information, information nobody else had about the developments within the party,” Kopp said. “He was an exceptional, top source.”⁶⁷ As Wagner’s supervisor, Kopp is not without bias, but it is indisputable that Wagner was a high-ranking and influential conservative lawmaker.

In 1980, Wagner appeared in court on fraud charges; prosecutors subsequently uncovered that he had received 50,000 deutschemarks from an unknown source in 1972, just around the time of the vote of no confidence.⁶⁸ Then the Berlin Wall fell, Germany reunified, and former intelligence officers started talking. In 1993, Markus Wolf revealed that his men had purchased Steiner’s vote. KGB archives likewise document that Steiner abstained from the vote “on instruction” from the Stasi.⁶⁹ In 1995, Fleissman was found guilty of spying for East Germany. He died soon after. And in 1996, Wolf disclosed that in addition to Steiner, the Stasi had bribed a second lawmaker.⁷⁰

Then came the biggest revelation of all: In 2000, Der Spiegel reported that Germany’s Office of the Federal Prosecutor believed Wagner was the other abstainer. By then eighty-one years old, Wagner announced that he would relinquish his remaining affiliations with the CSU. “I do not want the party to be burdened by these allegations,” he told the press. He denied the accusations until his death a few years later.⁷¹

Since then, German officials have concluded that the Stasi used Wagner to rig the vote of no confidence. A government report from 2013 found that Wolf’s team knew of Wagner’s financial troubles early and, through Fleissman, paid him to abstain. By bribing Wagner and Steiner, the report concludes, the Stasi caused the motion against Brandt to fail.⁷²

Few people ever knew the real Wagner, who kept his subversive activities secret until well after the Cold War had ended. His life underscores the range of characters who can participate in foreign interference operations. A leading conservative, Wagner was willing to betray his own party, even when the stakes were as high as deciding the leader of West Germany. In countries like Italy and Chile, the CIA had manipulated the masses. The Stasi, by contrast, studied and manipulated two parliamentary voters. Kopp’s life, meanwhile, illuminates what drove Eastern intelligence officers. He had one overriding motive: “to achieve something meaningful.”⁷³

Kopp called the 1972 operation, especially his oversight of Wagner, the greatest accomplishment of his life.

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