100 secret arms caches in the Austrian Alps. These were designed to be activated by Austrian “guerilla forces” in the event of a Communist attack on Austria. Western military planning included a withdrawal of Western occupation forces in Austria from the Alpine region into Northern Italy in case of a Soviet attack. By the time the Austrian State Treaty was concluded in 1955, some 9,000 Austrian policemen had been trained in the “B-Gendarmerie” to constitute the core of the Austrian Army launched in 1956. Austria had become a “secret ally” of the West.29 Even though through the American occupation element the Austrians came to liaise closely with NATO and NATO planning for Central Europe, the Austrian leaders never seriously considered joining NATO since the Soviets would never have evacuated their Austrian zone had Austria become a NATO member. NATO defense planning moved from a peripheral strategy on the European continent (withdrawal behind the Pyrenees and to England) in the early phase toward an eventual forward defense on the Rhine and then on the GDR border. Austrian defense planners seemed to have operated with the tacit assumption that in the event of nuclear war NATO would cover Austria too in case of a Soviet attack.30
As a result of both unreasonable Soviet demands in State Treaty negotiations in 1950 (the unrelated Trieste issue and the Austrian “dried peas” debt from 1945) and an ice age in East-West relations as a result of the Korean War, Austrian State Treaty negotiations likewise entered an “ice age” of no progress. The Austrian political elites and public opinion were extremely frustrated over this lack of treaty progress and demanded an end to the occupation (“to be liberated from the liberators”).31 The US State Department launched the “abbreviated treaty” initiative in the winter of 1952 in order to signal to the Austrians that they had not been forgotten. In early March 1952 the “short treaty” draft was presented in a diplomatic note in Moscow. The Americans hoped that with a much shorter and simplified treaty draft the Soviets could be persuaded to sign. But given that the “short treaty” contained no provisions any more to compensate the Soviets for the “German assets” (including the vast oil industry assets) they had seized in 1945/1946, this treaty initiative was stillborn. The Soviets simply ignored the Western abbreviated treaty proposal, and the Eisenhower administration elected to office in the fall of 1952 quietly withdrew the short treaty draft in 1953 to jump-start Austrian treaty negotiations again.32 The presentation of the Austrian short treaty draft was also overshadowed by Stalin’s German initiative in March 1952 (“Stalin notes”) that promised to unify and neutralize Germany. The Austrian question was still linked willy-nilly to the resolution of the larger post-war German issues.33
In the summer and fall of 1952 the United States experienced a very contentious presidential campaign. The Republican Party made a desperate effort to regain the White House after twenty years of presidents from the Democratic Party. The Republicans crowned the moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower as their standard bearer. Eisenhower had just returned from Europe, where he had served as NATO commander, turning NATO into an effective military alliance during his two-year tenure in Europe. In order to pacify the Republican stalwarts and anti-Communist hardliners, Eisenhower picked Richard Nixon as his running mate and John Foster Dulles as his foreign policy adviser and prospective Secretary of State. Nixon was supposed to act as the go-between with Senator Joseph McCarthy and get his anti-Communist crusade under control; McCarthy and his supporters in Congress were looking for communists inside the US government. Dulles also had a reputation as a tough ideological hardliner. During the 1952 campaign he announced a campaign to “roll back” communism and promised the “liberation of the captive peoples” in Eastern Europe. Eisenhower promised to end the war in Korea. Eisenhower was elected president in November 1952 and assumed control of the White House on January 20, 1953.34
EISENHOWER AND AUSTRIA
Eisenhower’s assumption of the presidency almost coincided with the surprising death of Iosif Stalin in early March 1953. Early on in office he had to deal with the new Soviet leader, Georgii Malenkov, who announced the new Soviet foreign policy initiative of “peaceful coexistence.” Was it typical Kremlin propaganda, or was it a serious policy departure to improve relations with the West? Eisenhower’s staff was divided. Secretary of State J. F. Dulles strongly advocated not negotiating with the new Kremlin leaders. Eisenhower responded in mid-April with one of the most important speeches of his career before the Society of American Newspaper Editors. Eisenhower told the Kremlin that he expected “deeds not words.” The Kremlin could prove its seriousness for better relations by signing the German and the Austrian peace treaties, by entering into an armistice and ending the Korean War, and by initiating nuclear disarmament. This was a tall order. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill strongly advocated that the American President negotiate with Moscow. Churchill wanted to meet Malenkov and the new Kremlin leaders in a summit meeting to personally test their intentions toward “peaceful coexistence.” Both the American leadership and the British Foreign Office opposed Churchill’s plans for summitry since the Kremlin leaders first needed to demonstrate their will to ease tensions with the West.35 On June 17, the Red Army intervened against an uprising of workers in the German Democratic Republic and squashed it with tanks. The Soviet wolves shed their sheep’s clothing.
Domestically, Eisenhower also faced a tall order to meet the onslaught of the stalwarts in his own party. In spite of a Republican in the White House, Wisconsin Senator McCarthy continued his attacks against “communists in governmental institutions.” The anti-communist crusader McCarthy suspected communists in the State Department, the CIA, and the Army. For weeks he held up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the confirmation of the distinguished Soviet expert Charles Bohlen as ambassador to the Soviet Union (precisely during the weeks when an experienced hand would have been needed in Moscow to help the Eisenhower administration make sense of the Kremlin’s “peaceful coexistence” initiative). McCarthy also opposed the confirmation of former Harvard President James B. Conant as Control Commissioner to Germany. In a gesture to the Republican hardliners, the Eisenhower administration continued with its rhetorical crusade of “rolling back” communism in the Soviet bloc and “liberating the captive peoples” of Eastern Europe. Dulles called for full independence for Eastern European nations no fewer than three times, charging that: “under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”36
Yet at the same time the Eisenhower administration was reviewing basic US national security strategy and its nuclear posture. In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower gathered the top national security experts to reconsider the basic American approach to dealing with the Soviet Union in the so-called “Solarium exercises.” Should Truman’s containment policy written down in the iconic document NSC 68 be continued, or should the United States embark on a more aggressive policy of rolling back communism? The experts pleaded for a continuation of containment and an end to all the dangerous talk about “rollback.” “Rollback” threatened to provoke nuclear war. Yet the Joint Chiefs of Staff with their truculent chairman Admiral Arthur Radford kept pushing for “aggressive actions involving force against Soviet bloc territory.” But Eisenhower personally ruled out any and all “preventive war” options. As two of the foremost experts on Eisenhower’s national security strategy put it: “for Eisenhower preventive war of aggressive rollback would be a reckless and self-defeating gamble.”37
The massive review process of basic national security strategy in the Eisenhower White House resulted in what would become known as his “new look” strategy, formalized in the basic National Security Council directive NSC 162/2. For one, to save on defense spending, Eisenhower wanted to reduce the conventional force structure and increase the nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons were cheaper than divisions in the field. Eisenhower wanted “more bang for the buck,” and John Foster Dulles threatened “massive retaliation” in case of a Soviet attack. Eisenhower put it all down in the formula “in the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be available for use as other munitions.” Such statements seemed to indicate that the threshold to using nuclear weapons had been reduced dramatically. In the Third World, where the Cold War was beginning to move after the massive wave of decolonization, the Eisenhower administration now put a premium on all forms of psychological warfare and cover operations. CIA covert operations pacified Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954)