ABSTRACT
Paramilitary operations are the "noisiest" of all covert actions. When they fail, they become public fiascoes, and no official denials are plausible. The history of American paramilitary operations as an element of America s containment policy is one of almost uniform failure. At the end of the Cold war in Europe anti-Soviet or anti-Communist resistance forces were most active in the Baltic states and in the Ukraine. In Lithuania the partisans, amounting at one time to perhaps thirty thousand, remained active from 1944 until 1952, and some CIA contact was maintained with them until they were totally suppressed in a large-scale mopping up in 1952. The most substantial and disastrous paramilitary effort inside the Soviet orbit was carried out in Poland. American support of anti-Communist resistance groups played a far smaller role in Asia. On two occasions the Eisenhower administration authorized paramilitary operations to subvert leftist regimes in Latin America, the first against Guatemala, the second against Cuba.
