#1940s
18 entries tagged 1940s.
People (11)
- Allen Dulles Allen Dulles served as CIA Director from 1953 to 1961, overseeing Operation AJAX (Iran, 1953), Operation PBSUCCESS (Guatemala, 1954), and the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) that ended in catastrophic failure and his forced resignation.
- Dean Acheson Dean Acheson was Secretary of State under Truman from 1949 to 1953 who helped design the Truman Doctrine, NATO, and the Marshall Plan, pushed through NSC-68 which militarized containment over George Kennan's objections, and managed U.S. policy through the Korean War.
- Ernst Schulte-Strathaus Ernst Schulte-Strathaus was a German astrologer reportedly involved with Karl Krafft in constructing star charts that influenced Rudolf Hess's May 1941 flight to Scotland, after which he was arrested in the mass crackdown on astrologers and occultists ordered by Hitler following the incident.
- Frank Wisner Frank Wisner was the CIA officer who founded and directed the Office of Policy Coordination - the agency's political warfare arm - from 1948 to 1958, organized the stay-behind networks across Europe (Operation Gladio), and suffered a mental breakdown after the Hungarian Revolution's failure, eventually committing suicide with a shotgun at his Maryland farm on October 29, 1965.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin D. Roosevelt was the 32nd U.S. president, in office from 1933 to 1945, who led the country through the Depression and most of World War II and authorized the creation of the OSS and the Manhattan Project.
- George Kennan George Kennan was the U.S. diplomat and historian who originated the 'containment' doctrine for confronting Soviet power, articulated in his 1946 Long Telegram from Moscow and his 1947 X Article in Foreign Affairs, and spent his subsequent decades watching the doctrine distorted into forms he had never intended and repeatedly arguing against its militarized implementation.
- George Marshall George Marshall was the U.S. Army Chief of Staff during World War II and Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949 who proposed the European Recovery Program that bears his name, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, and was attacked by Senator Joseph McCarthy in one of the most reckless moments of the Red Scare.
- James Jesus Angleton James Jesus Angleton served as the CIA's chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, running the illegal HT/LINGUAL mail opening program, overseeing Operation CHAOS domestic surveillance, opening a 201 file on Lee Harvey Oswald in 1960 under a deliberately wrong name, maintaining the CIA's Israeli intelligence liaison under KK MOUNTAIN, and conducting a mole hunt triggered by his betrayal by Kim Philby that destroyed dozens of CIA officers' careers while the actual Soviet penetrations - Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen - operated undetected for years after his 1974 firing.
- Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death, building the totalitarian intelligence apparatus that shaped Soviet and Eastern bloc services for decades and establishing the Eastern European satellite system that triggered the Cold War.
- Junio Valerio Borghese Junio Valerio Borghese was the Italian naval commander of the Decima Mas commando unit, sheltered from war crimes prosecution by OSS officer James Angleton in 1945, who became the leading figure of Italian postwar neofascism and organized the December 7-8, 1970 Borghese coup attempt against the Italian government before dying in exile in Spain.
- Kim Philby Kim Philby was the most damaging member of the Cambridge Five, a KGB agent who penetrated MI6 to its anti-Soviet section chief and CIA liaison in Washington, directly causing the death or capture of hundreds of Western agents and precipitating James Angleton's decade-long mole hunt paranoia before defecting to Moscow in January 1963.
Organizations (4)
- Democrazia Cristiana Democrazia Cristiana (DC) was Italy's dominant postwar political party, governing continuously from 1945 to 1994 with CIA support during the Cold War, whose leading figures included Alcide De Gasperi, Aldo Moro, and Giulio Andreotti, and which dissolved in 1994 under the weight of the Tangentopoli corruption investigations.
- Gehlen Organization The Gehlen Organization was a CIA-funded intelligence network in West Germany from 1946 to 1956, built by Reinhard Gehlen from his Wehrmacht Eastern Front directorate to provide U.S. coverage of the Soviet bloc, before being reconstituted as the Bundesnachrichtendienst in April 1956.
- Italian Communist Party The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was Western Europe's largest communist party, achieving 34 percent of the Italian vote in 1976 under Enrico Berlinguer's Eurocommunist leadership, whose proposed historic compromise with the Democrazia Cristiana was ended by Aldo Moro's murder in 1978 and which dissolved in 1991 to become the Democratic Party of the Left.
- Italian Socialist Party The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was Italy's third major postwar political force, which ran a joint electoral front with the Communists in 1948 before gradually moving to center-left autonomy, reached its peak of influence under Bettino Craxi's prime ministership from 1983 to 1987, and was destroyed by the Tangentopoli corruption investigations in 1992-1994.
Programs (2)
- Marshall Plan The Marshall Plan was the U.S. economic aid program of 1948-1952 that provided $13 billion to rebuild Western European economies devastated by World War II, which George Kennan viewed as the correct application of his containment doctrine, and which the Soviet Union refused - deepening the division of Europe that defined the Cold War.
- Operation Paperclip Operation Paperclip was the postwar U.S. program that recruited over 1,600 German and Austrian scientists from the defeated Third Reich, falsifying Nazi party records to enable their employment, with key recruits Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph later directing major NASA programs.
Concepts (1)
- Hypnotism Hypnotism was a significant area of government research in the twentieth century, particularly in CIA MKUltra experiments exploring induced amnesia, personality alteration, and the creation of unwitting operatives through hypnotic suggestion.