ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1948 the White House saw war with the Soviet Union as imminent. Soviet-American tensions had been mounting steadily since the Yalta conference in 1945. Even before the war with Hitler ended, the Russians had moved rapidly to integrate both the Allied and enemy states of Eastern Europe into their bloc. One by one, most brutally in Poland, these states were russified, then communized. The Italian and French Communist parties led a wave of strikes in 1946, and the Italian Communists were threatening to achieve power by the ballot box. What the White House and the Pentagon wanted to know were the precise capabilities and actual intentions of the Soviet military forces in northeastern Europe. With the target areas effectively sealed off from normal Western observation, the only recourse was to send in agents.
