Pisani, Sallie. The CIA and the Marshall Plan. Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991. 188 pages.

In 1983, Sallie Pisani was a graduate student in history at Rutgers University. She approached Richard Bissell at the Bach Festival that year and asked him a question. This led to extensive interviews with Bissell, and through him with John Bross, Lawrence Houston, Kermit Roosevelt, and Franklin Lindsay. Pisani turned it into a doctoral dissertation, and by 1991 was assistant professor of history at Monmouth College in New Jersey.

The covert-action arm of the early post-war U.S. intelligence establishment was called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which was later absorbed into the CIA. The program of U.S. aid to Europe following the war was broadly called the Marshall Plan, one aspect of which was the appropriation under the Economic Cooperation Administration. ECA included secret funding for OPC activities in Europe. This book is a behind-the- scenes look at policymaking during the early Cold War years. Ex-OSS elites, such as those interviewed by Pisani, played an active role in making sure that U.S. aid came with political strings attached, often in the form of secretly-funded propaganda fronts that pushed the correct line. We beat the Communists at their own game. But victory came at a price: covert action in peacetime is now institutionalized, and it won't go away.
ISBN 0-7006-0502-9

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