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Dopuna: 18 Jan 2012 15:51
Was Churchill 'Hoodwinked' Over Tito?
If Only It Were So Simple
By David Stafford
Finest Hour 153
Professor Stafford is the author of Churchill and Secret Service and related books on wartime intelligence.
Hoodwinking Churchill: Tito's Great Confidence Trick, by Peter Batty. Shepheard-Wlawyn, hardbound, illus. 384 pages, $42.95, Amazon $32.64.
What is this book about? Simply that President Tito of Yugoslavia, who died in 1980, was "the man who, during World War II... hoodwinked Britain's staunchly anti-communist Prime Minister into giving his full backing to the communist Partisans and cutting all aid to the anti-communist forces resisting the Germans in Yugoslavia.... Churchill's decision was based on information provided by two trusted advisers, Fitzroy Maclean and William Deakin, who simply passed on without verification what Tito told them. The deception was compounded by a communist mole at SOE headquarters in Cairo who withheld or doctored information from liaison officers with the anti-communist leader, Draza Mihailovic." Without Churchill's support, the blurb tells us, Tito would not have overcome his political opponents to emerge as the country's leader, and Yugoslavs would have been spared over forty years of harsh communist rule.
If only it were so simple. Remove Churchill, and three more people from the complex situation that was wartime Yugoslavia, and all would have been radically different.
The author is a British journalist and TV producer. His motive for writing the book comes from a bust-up with the BBC over a documentary he made about Tito at the time of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s—which was, he claims, crudely and savagely re-edited behind his back in order to protect the received "myth" of Tito as the great Partisan hero, as well as the reputation of the late Sir Fitzroy Maclean.
As in most conspiracy theories, not all its facts are wrong. The influence of pro-Tito protagonists such as Deakin and Maclean on postwar historical interpretations of events is undeniably true. Both wrote hugely influential books about their experiences with the Partisans, and Deakin for example, as a distinguished historian who helped Churchill write his monumental memoir of the war, exercised considerable influence through his chairmanship of the British section of the International Committee for the History of the Second World War. It's also the case that several of the junior SOE officers who were parachuted in to serve with the Partisans were too uncritically swept away by the romance of it all and failed to ask some difficult questions.
But the same could be said for the author's own view of Mihailovic, an undoubtedly tragic and often sadly traduced figure whose patriotism was not in doubt but whose weaknesses and failures (at least from the British point of view, which is what counts here) were apparent long before Deakin and Maclean appeared on the scene and were vouched for by some senior and experienced British sources on the spot. Batty frequently quotes the official history of SOE by W.J. Mackenzie to support his case. Significantly, however, he fails to acknowledge Mackenzie's judgment that Mihailovic lived in a world that was passing, and that more British support in 1943-44 would have precipitated an even more intense and savage civil war.
As for the Soviet "mole" in SOE Cairo, here too a truth is elevated into something more important than it was. James Klugmann, the man concerned, was indeed a communist and certainly did all he could to influence reports from the field in Tito's favour. But many other sources, amongst them the Bletchley Park "Ultra" decrypts, demonstrated that Tito's Partisans were doing more to engage the enemy than Mihailovic, and SOE Cairo was hardly the deciding voice in the affair anyway.
Was Churchill hoodwinked? It's true that he intervened energetically to urge support for Tito, and his son Randolph, who was parachuted in to serve alongside Tito, sent back photographs of the Partisans that deeply affected his parents. Later on, too, Churchill admitted that his hopes in Tito had been disappointed. But his intervention was as much the result of realpolitik as of any deceit—a fact that the author appears to forget in his obsession with conspiracy.
Maintaining the Anglo-Soviet alliance was an absolute imperative for Britain in the campaign to defeat Hitler, and Stalin's support for Tito was firm—and perhaps regretted by Stalin when Tito chose an independent policy after the war. To continue supporting Mihailovic would have been to throw dust in Stalin's eyes. Yes, Churchill was an anti-communist, and so was Mihailovic. But that was no reason for the former to support the latter. War is a dirty and often cynical business. The author is undoubtedly right in most of what he says about the ruthless and dictatorial Tito. But in seeking to explain all by conspiracy, he seems curiously naïve.
What Fitzroy Maclean Told Churchill
It affronts the memory of Sir Fitzroy Maclean to suggest that he misled Churchill by passing along uncritical or ill-judged reports. The following are Sir Fitzroy's remarks to Churchill Centre members during their tour of Scotland at Strachur, Argyll, 12 September 1987:
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In 1942 the Prime Minister was beginning to have doubts about the rightness of British policy in Yugoslavia. Hitherto we had been backing the Chetniks of General Mihailovic. Now, from intercepted enemy signals, which I of course knew nothing about, it began to look as if Tito's Partisans might be a better bet. He wanted me to go in as Brigadier, commanding a British military mission to the Partisans, and as his personal representative, to find out, as he put it rather brutally, "Who was killing the most Germans. and how we could help them to kill more." My mission was to be first and foremost military; political considerations were to be secondary.
I found Tito to be a rough, alert, sensible man of about 50, at the head of a far more formidable resistance movement than anyone outside Yugoslavia could possibly have imagined. By his skill as a guerrilla leader he was containing a score or more of enemy divisions and thus making a major contribution to the Allied war effort. He made no bones about being a communist, but for a communist (and I'd just spent three years in Moscow so I knew all about them), he showed a surprising independence of mind, and above all an intense national pride which did not at all fit in with my idea of a Russian agent.
All this I reported to Mr. Churchill, first by radio and then, once I could get out of the country, in person in Cairo. On the strength of my reports a decision had been taken to give all-out support to Tito and the Partisans.
I thought it right to remind him that the Partisans were communist-led. "Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?" he asked. "No," I replied. "Neither do I," he said. "That being so, don't you think we had better leave it to the Yugoslavs to work out their own form of government? What concerns us most now is who is doing the most damage to the Germans."
Thinking our conversation over afterwards, I felt convinced, and still feel convinced, that this was the right decision.
Dopuna: 18 Jan 2012 15:52
Communist Subversion From Within: Linn Farish and the Draza Mihailovich Case
November 22, 2010 – 12:34 pm
During World War II, the OSS liaison officer to Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans was American agent Major Linn “Slim” Farish. Farish’s accounts helped decisively to switch Allied support away from Draza Mihailovich and to Tito. But who was Linn Farish, known as “Lawrence of Yugoslavia”, and how credible were his reports? New evidence from the Venona decrypts reveals that he may have been an agent allegedly working for Soviet intelligence. British Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean of the Special Air Services (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, referred to him in Eastern Approaches (1949) as “my American chief of staff”. Was Linn Farish, like James Klugmann, a committed Communist in SOE in Cairo, a suspected KGB agent with possible links to the Cambridge Five, an instance of Communist subversion from within? Was Farish merely manipulated and duped by the Communists or was he a Communist or Soviet agent himself?
Linn Markley Farish was born on October 3, 1901 in Rumsey, Yolo County, California. He died on September 11, 1944 on a mission in Yugoslavia in a plane crash over Greece.
He attended Stanford University in California where he played football and rugby, majoring in geology. He was a member of the U.S. Olympic team which won a gold medal in rugby at the 1924 Olympic Summer Games in Paris, the Games of the VIII Olympiad. By profession he was a geologist and petroleum consultant. Before the U.S. entry into World War II, he joined the Canadian Army, serving in Iran with the Royal Engineers. He was later a member of a British commando unit. As an engineer and pilot, Major Farish was sent into Yugoslavia as a secret agent as part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, replacing U.S. Captain Melvin Benson. The OSS was the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was selected as the OSS representative to the SOE mission to Tito. His American colleague Colonel Albert Seitz, an engineer, was chosen as the OSS representative to the guerrilla forces of General Draza Mihailovich. His role was to map out landing strips for U.S. aircraft to rescue downed U.S. airmen. He was part of several rescue operations, rescuing hundreds of airmen shot down over Yugoslavia. He spent three 90-day periods in Yugoslavia, parachuting into territory controlled by the Communist guerrillas under Josip Broz Tito in Bosnia. He was serving with Company B, 2677th Regiment, OSS, when he left Yugoslavia for the last time on June 16, 1944. Killed on his third mission in 1944, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.
The Venona decrypts were part of a clandestine joint intelligence operation between the US and UK intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union during World War II. Venona was created in 1943 by Carter W. Clarke, the deputy chief of U.S. Military Intelligence or G-2. Code breakers of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service analyzed intercepted Soviet intelligence messages. Most of the messages were intercepted between 1943-1945. The list of Americans with possible ties to Soviet intelligence based on the Venona decrypts included not only Linn Farish, the senior OSS liaison officer with Tito’s Communist and Soviet-backed Partisans, but also Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, FDR adviser Harry Hopkins, Duncan C. Lee, William Donovan’s assistant who had the Soviet code name “Koch”, and Robert G. Minor, Office of Strategic Services, Belgrade. Minor was one of the twenty suspected members of OSS with possible ties to Soviet intelligence.
After the Venona decrypts were published, new information about Linn Farish emerged. In these records, Farish is identified under the code name “Atilla”, a KGB contact. He is shown meeting with an unnamed Soviet controller named “Khazar”. He also met with a high-ranking member of the Yugoslav Communist hierarchy named “KOLO”. KOLO was Sava Kosanovic, who was the Yugoslav Ambassador to the U.S. from 1946-1950 under the Tito Communist regime. In the decrypts, Kosanovic is shown receiving instructions from Pavel Fitin, the KGB chief. In 1946, the FBI had Kosanovic under surveillance when he met with Soviet agent Nathan Silvermaster, who was part of the Elizabeth Bentley espionage ring.
Farish’s report of October 29, 1943 based on his six-week stay with the Communist Partisans in Bosnia was rushed to FDR before the Teheran conference. His memo was decisive in the switch of Allied support to Tito. Farish reported that “the Partisans have always fought the Germans and are doing so now….They are a more potent striking force at this time than they have been before….Their present strength is given as 180,000 men.” He alleged: “Whereas the Partisans have fought steadfastly against the Axis occupying forces, other Yugoslav groups have not done so … Mihailovich ordered his Chetniks to attack the Partisan forces … the Chetnik forces have been fighting with the Germans and Italians against the Partisans.” He described the Partisans as a “free community” in which persons “of any religion or political belief can express an opinion”, comparing their movement to the American revolution: “It was in such an environment and under similar conditions that the beginnings of the United States were established.”
In a June 24, 2010 interview with author Stanton Evans about Communist and Marxist subversion within the United States during World War II, Glenn Beck discussed the Draza Mihailovich case. Beck discussed the Venona papers and how a smear campaign can be used to discredit anyone. Beck noted: “This is a system and they have done it to people in that entire timeline there.” Evans responded: “You’re so right. It’s happened both domestically and in foreign policy. Any anti-Communist leaders like Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and others were de-legitimized by this very same technique. A Soviet agent named James Klugmann was responsible for sending back to Churchill this information that Mihailovich, who was the anti-Communist in Yugoslavia, was no good, he was collaborating with the Nazis and only Tito was fighting against the Nazis. Completely false. Churchill cut off Mihailovich. They gave all their aid to Tito. Yugoslavia goes Communist. A Soviet agent named Solomon Adler sitting in Chungking, China, 1944, sending back similar reports about Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang Kai-Shek is not fighting the Japanese. He’s a collaborator. Only the Communists are fighting the Japanese. Well, then cut off Chiang Kai-Shek. Give the aid to the Communists. China falls to the Communists. It’s a pattern.”
Farish later grew suspicious of British reports in praise of Tito. He insisted on having American radio operators. Arthur Jibilian was one of the radiomen who accompanied Farish. In his final report filed on June 28, 1944, in Bari, Italy, Farish would file a more accurate, objective, realistic, and skeptical report on the situation in Yugoslavia. He indicated that his first report was based on British disinformation and Communist Partisan propaganda. He observed that “each side places the blame on the other.” He concluded: “It appears to me that there are indications in the past few months that there has been less emphasis placed on the fight against the enemy and more preparation for the political struggle to follow the ending of the war.”
In a June 16, 1952 letter in Life magazine, “Case for the Chetniks”, David Martin explained how Farish had retracted his earlier claims about Tito:
The total evidence from a score of liaison officers and 600 rescued Allied airmen makes nonsense of the charges of collaboration. Major Linn Farish, senior American assigned to Tito’s headquarters in 1944, was at first inclined to believe the charges against the Chetniks; indeed it was he who brought out the first Partisan ”documentation” against Mihajlovich. But after further experience in Yugoslavia he repudiated the significance of the “documents.” In a report written in May 1944 he castigated the folly of supporting the Partisans in a war of extermination against the Chetniks. Before he was killed, Farish’s opinion of the Partisan movement had evolved to the point of complete condemnation.
The damage, however, had been done. He had helped to discredit and to demonize Draza Mihailovich and the Chetnik guerrillas based on deceptions and lies. Was Farish “a credulous conduit for pro-Tito propaganda” or was he a Communist or KGB agent himself? Was he an example of Communist subversion from within?
Bibliography
Benson, Robert Louis (1996). Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957. Aegean Park Press.
Evans, Medford Stanton (2007). Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. NY: Crown Forum.
Freeman, Gregory A. (2007). The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II. New American Library.
Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (1999). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press.
Kurapovna, Marcia (2009). Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, The Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia. NY: John Wiley and Sons.
Lamphere, Robert J.; Shachtman, Tom (1995). The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story. Mercer University Press.
Roberts, Walter P. (1987). Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies, 1941-1945. Duke University Press.
Romerstein, Herbert and Breindel, Eric (2000). The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors. Regnery Publishing.
Romerstein, Herbert (Summer 2005). “Aspects of World War II History Revealed through ‘ISCOT’ Radio Intercepts.” The Journal of Intelligence History, 5, 1, pp. 15-28.
Smith, Richard Harris (1972). OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency. Berkeley: University of California Press.
West, Nigel (1999). Venona—The Greatest Secret of the Cold War. Harper Collins.
Dopuna: 18 Jan 2012 15:53
Lees combines his personal experience as British liaison officer with research in official declassified records to provide a revisionist account of the civil war in Yugoslavia at the end of World War II. The result is a fascinating investigation that effectively demolishes the reputation of Marshal Tito and blames his rise to power on the overt support of the Western allies. Lees indicts the British Secret Service for turning the tide toward Tito and against the non-Communist resistance leader General Draza Mihailovic, who was executed by Tito in 1946. Lees's involvement in some of these events adds an element of high drama to this study, and this unsettling work will cast serious doubt on all previous histories of this period, such as Walter Roberts's Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies ( LJ 2/1/73). Recommended for most academic and larger public libraries.
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