Ike's Spies Read Online Free Page B

military potential of the Soviet Union. Thus by the early fifties, as Eisenhower and his friends saw it, Stalin had clearly demonstrated that he had the will to conquer, the ideology with which to do so, and the military strength to make world conquest conceivable.
    With the single exception of World War II, the United States, after her wars, has indulged in splendid isolationism. The immediate postwar generation—in 1784, in 1816, in 1900, and in 1920—has turned away from active involvement in the world, relying on the oceans for the nation’s defense. That did not happen after the Second World War. The isolationists were still there, to be sure, led by Senator Robert Taft. Ike’s fear that Taft would be the Republican nominee if he himself did not run was the major factorin convincing him that his duty required him to enter politics. For the Americans to withdraw from Europe and Asia would have been to abandon those ancient civilizations to communism; Ike felt he had to do what he could to prevent such a catastrophe.
    New weaponry magnified the Communist threat. World War II had brought great leaps forward in the arsenal of destruction and made America, for the first time, vulnerable to an attack launched from Europe. Most terrifying of all, of course, was the atomic bomb, which the Russians acquired in 1949. From that moment on, the Cold War was fought under the shadow of the mushroom-shaped cloud.
    If the bomb highlighted the threat, so did the method by which the Soviets acquired it. The United States and Great Britain had made a stupendous effort to build the first atomic weapons, an effort that involved billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man-hours of their best scientists, and a huge industrial commitment. The Russians, thanks to their spies, who were for the most part motivated by ideology, were able to avoid much of that effort. If the Russians could so easily penetrate the top-secret Manhattan Project, it appeared that no scientific breakthrough would be safe for long. * The Russians had a worldwide network of spies, much the largest in history.
    There were many obvious reasons to fear the Russians, not the least of which was the Red Army in Eastern Europe. Capable of mobilizing hundreds of divisions along the Elbe River, the dividing line in Germany between East and West, the Red Army could—according to estimates by the U. S. Army G-2—overrun all of Western Europe in two weeks. That was an exaggeration, Ike thought—he wrote on the margin of this 1948 estimate, “I don’t believe it. My God, we needed two months just to overrun Sicily” 5 —but the general point was certainly valid.
    Most frightening was what seemed most likely, a surprise attack. Pearl Harbor had burned itself into the minds of every American leader of the day. To a man they were determined that it would never happen again. A Russian-launched “Pearl Harbor” would involve a ground offensive by the Red Army in Europeand/or an atomic assault on the United States, and unlike the original Pearl Harbor, it would almost surely be decisive, at least in Europe. The Red Army, once entrenched in France, would be almost impossible to dislodge.
    Ike’s perception of these threats was keener than that of most leaders, partly because it was his business, mainly because he knew better than anyone else how close World War II had been.
    The dangers America faced in the Cold War were even greater because Stalin and the Russians were better than Hitler and the Germans, better in the sense that they had more spies, more troops, and a similar lack of scruples. In short, as Ike saw it, the life and death struggle that began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 did not come to an end in 1945 with Hitler’s death. Far from it—the struggle was now even more intense.
    Eisenhower expressed his private thoughts on the subject from time to time in his diary. On January 27, 1949, he