Cold War humanitarian program had covert side

[Adsos Letter]

Source: AP

By ARTHUR MAX and RANDY HERSCHAFT
Associated Press Writers

BAD AROLSEN, Germany (AP) -- In the locked attic of a German archive is a dusty file that harks back to a long forgotten chapter of the Cold War - a humanitarian endeavor that, it now emerges, also had a covert side.

Marked "Escapee Program," it contains a list of thousands of names of people who, through cunning, bravery and luck, slipped through the Iron Curtain that divided Europe after World War II and found freedom in the West.

President Harry Truman's administration launched the program in 1952 to rehabilitate and resettle refugees from Eastern Europe, feting them as heroes who defied communist tyranny.

Recently declassified U.S. documents disclose that, from the start, the program went beyond giving them new lives and sought to use them for intelligence and propaganda. Some were offered money to be smuggled back to their home countries to gather information on Soviet military defenses and public attitudes toward the communist regimes that had replaced Hitler's Nazi occupiers.




Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_ESCAPING_THE_COMMUNISTS?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=HOME

[davidinalameda]

1. this is a surprise?

I'm not being facetious but this makes sense that we'd do this

what better sources of intelligence than the people who lived under these repressive regimes

[Fovea]

2. All I can say is

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley.

[Javaman]

3. In other breaking news: water is wet.

this is nothing new, this has been long known.