Re-evaluating the émigrés: intelligence collection and policy-making in the early Cold War

ABSTRACT Starting from 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Office of Policy Coordination tried to harness and utilise the talents of recent émigrés from the Soviet Union, more specifically, to dispatch them in secret operations behind the Iron Curtain. The purpose of this article is to revise the commonly accepted narrative on two American-sponsored émigré operations, showing how they should be assessed as intelligence collection ventures rather than covert operations, and to demonstrate how these émigrés played a key role in providing intelligence on the Soviet target. The study will also investigate how this kind of covert action tied into US policy-making, and how the perceived needs of the US administration – chiefly creating an ‘early warning’ system for a Soviet attack on Europe and the need of information on the Soviet target – shaped intelligence collection in the early Cold War.