This is the second of my two short articles based on the papers
of a former CIA officer Edward Ellis Smith (1921-1982) deposited in the Hoover Institution
Library and Archives at Stanford University.[1]
The First
Attempt
In 1954, Roderic L. O’Connor, then a special assistant to
the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, assembled the representatives of top
U.S. national security agencies and departments in Dulles’s private conference
room for “a special seminar” on a 1939 military fiction novel by Soviet writer
Nikolai Shpanov (1896-1961).[2] The
idea for the seminar came from Captain Dwight M. Bradford Williams.
Williams was a long-time Navy officer, a World War Two
veteran, who also worked for the CIA (where, incidentally, he got acquainted
with O’Connor).[3] As a
practitioner in the CIA and a student and friend of Paul Linebarger, a
professor at John Hopkins University’s Advanced International Studies and a
leading expert on psychological operations, Williams was strongly interested in
the psychological warfare aspect of the emerging Cold War. His main concern was
how to inspire and amplify American anti-Communist patriotism, the subject of
his 1955 essay “Patriotism Through Knowledge” for which he won honorable
mention in the U.S. Naval Institute’s annual essay contest.[4]
Williams believed that Shpanov’s novel The First Blow [Первый удар]
provided a quintessential example of Communist mass-level propaganda designed
to glorify the achievements of Soviet state and its security and military
apparatus. According to Williams, novels like Shpanov were “sharp weapons in
the psychological battle for control of men’s minds… Their psychological
motivation sustained the Communist man’s faith in the 1920s and 1930s [and
during World War Two].”[5] In
contrast to Western literature which emphasized individual freedom of choice
and critical independence of the mind, Soviet literature, Williams argued, was
intentionally designed to “increase [the Soviet reader’s] faith in Communism by
presenting him with an utterly distorted image of the outside world.”[6] As a
result, Williams claimed that The First
Blow held “a significant educational value” for the American reading public
because it could enable ordinary Americans to understand “what makes the
Communist man run.”[7]
Williams also thought that Shpanov’s plot, fictionalizing
the German attack on the Soviet Union, would by itself be of interest to the
American readers, especially because, in Shpanov’s novel, the Soviet air force
successfully repelled the German planes and even went into a rapid
counter-offensive. The fact that the novel was published more than two years
before the actual German attack on June 22, 1941, which, in stark contrast to
Shpanov’s plot, catastrophically devastated the Soviet military forces, was a
part of its subsequent notoriety. In this context, Williams claimed that he had
learned from a member of Hitler’s staff, recruited by the CIA after WWII, that
Hitler knew about the novel and was angered by its content.[8] Williams speculated that the
novel might have strengthened Hitler’s determination to attack the Soviet
Union. While his speculation has never been substantiated with documents,
recent Russian researchers have confirmed that Shpanov’s novel disappeared from
open access in the Soviet Union after the signing of the German-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939 and that Shpanov himself was heavily
criticized by his peers for his exaggerations of the Soviet air force
potential.[9]
However, even though the influential figures at the State
Department, such as O’Connor, supported Williams’s translation project, he was
unable to find a major U.S. publisher willing to offer him a contract. In an
effort to help his project along, O’Connor introduced Williams to C.D. Jackson,
another significant figure in the field of U.S. psychological warfare who had
strong connections in the print media business. O’Connor wrote to Jackson: “I
would appreciate anything you can do for Brad, for whom I have a great liking
and respect and who has been a tireless worker in this cause.”[10] Yet, it turned out that even Jackson could not do much. Williams’s project went
nowhere.
As the last resort, Williams contacted Isaac Don Levine, a
highly influential journalist known for his anti-Communist writings and close
cooperation with the U.S. intelligence community. Levine sympathized with
Williams’s efforts but advised him that the timing might not be right. “A turn
in the American-Soviet relations away from the present appeasement trend may
very well give your Shpanov opus an opportunity in the future,” he told
Williams.[11] As
to when this “turn” might take place, Levine predicted: “in the next 10-12
years.”
And so, it seemed to Williams that he had no choice but to
shelve his translation for a decade. Not surprisingly, he soon lost enthusiasm
for doing it and stopped after translating about a half of the book.
The Second
Attempt
However, Levine’s prediction turned out to be accurate. The
early 1960s brought a sharp escalation in the tensions between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union and a Soviet novel which, at its core, had an exercise of
Communist duplicity appeared very likely to get a second look from U.S.
publishers. Williams decided to bring the yellowed papers out of his garage in
Miami Shores, Florida.
Unfortunately, by this time, he began to be plagued by
another set of problems. His wartime injuries were causing him serious health
problems. He vividly described his daily difficulties: “Just try to imagine
yourself imprisoned in a small room wherein you hear nothing but a sharp,
piercing sound of approximately 1800 cycles per second… You wear a hearing aid
in order to raise the volume of one’s speech above the piercing ringing. It
helps a bit but the ringing never ceases.”[12] He knew that he was no
longer able to complete the translation without assistance. But who could he
turn to? Who could he trust to do a quality job just like he himself would have
done? A sudden insight must have flashed through his mind, and he suddenly
remembered his old friend from the “conspiratorial days,” a well-versed Russian
speaker and an expert on Soviet economy and culture, Edward Ellis Smith.
Through a mutual friend, Williams learned that Smith left
the East Coast to make his home in San Francisco. He appeared to have known
nothing of the scandal that made Smith leave government service, which of
course was not surprising considering that it concerned an internal CIA and
State Department matter. Williams’s first letter to Smith was dated February
10, 1962.
In this letter, Williams proposed to Smith to join him in
completing the translation of Shpanov’s novel.[13] “Ed, how would you like to make a bit of cash on the side?” he asked Smith. He
then provided the background on the novel and chronicled his
earlier efforts.
Smith responded with a very cordial letter on February 18,
1962.[14] He
updated Williams on what occurred in his life since their joint work at the
CIA, which Smith metaphorically referred to as “the pickle factory,” while
Williams - for an unknown reason - called it “the condom combine.” However, he
did not say why he was no longer employed by the government. Williams had not
really cared to ask, especially since Smith enthusiastically accepted his
proposal. He wrote to Williams: “The proposition which you suggest interests me
greatly. First, I am in agreement that with the partial, albeit continuing,
awakening of the country to the duplicity of the Soviets, a book such as the
one you describe could very well become widely read. Secondly, the entire
history of that period in the Soviet-German relations has always titillated me
and I think that insufficient attention had been given the phenomena around
Hitler’s and Stalin’s attempts to screw each other."[15]
Soon afterwards, Smith began his translation work in earnest
and was able to complete the entire untranslated portion of the novel by the
end of August 1962.[16] In
the meantime, he and Williams exchanged about a dozen letters, addressing
various aspects of the translation process and encouraging each other to
complete the project as soon as possible. Williams took upon himself to edit
and type the handwritten portions of the translated novel sent to him by Smith
on a bi-monthly basis.
During the summer of 1962, Smith fell a bit behind the
agreed schedule because he got married. His wife, Olga Bayne, the daughter of
Olga Roosevelt and Dr. Joseph Breckinridge Bayne, was a member of the
politically highly connected and wealthy Roosevelt clan. As Smith confessed to
Williams, revealing his conservative political allegiances (also shared by
Williams): “My Olga is a Roosevelt from the Teddy side, thank God.”[17]
Significantly, Smith’s marriage to Olga also led to his
change of residence. Smith left behind his shabby, bachelor’s apartment on San
Francisco’s Bush Street, a few blocks from the Union Square, to move to a
4-bedroom, 6-bathroom mansion in Palo Alto, today worth close to $12 million.[18] Presumably, he no longer needed to make “a bit of cash on the side” translating
Shpanov. And yet, he did not quit but kept going until he finished the
translation. On a lighter note, he joked to Williams that after getting
married, he also acquired a dog named Parky who distracted him from work so
much that he called him “Parky the Basset hound of the Lubianka Baskervilles
[referring to the KGB HQ in Moscow].[19]
With the translation fully completed in September 1962,
Williams and Smith thought that the hardest part was behind them and that their valiant efforts
to make ordinary Americans aware of the Soviet threat via a work of military fiction would soon
be handsomely rewarded.
In June 1962, Williams had contacted Howard Cady, General
Manager and Editor-in-Chief at Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, one of the most
distinguished U.S. publishing companies at the time.[20] Williams appeared to have
counted on the sponsorship of Steve Rinehart whom he knew personally, but it
turned out that Cady was much more interested in the commercial value of the
project. And, as he stated in his letter to Williams in October 1962 after he
had read the translation, from that perspective, Shpanov’s novel was a
non-starter.[21] According to Cady, “Book reviewers are cynical people, and book sellers are
more so… I doubt many people will have the patience to wade through a
semi-literate bit of claptrap of this sort. It seems so bad it seems incredible
that anyone would take it seriously.”[22] He recommended that
Williams and Smith document the purported historical significance of the book
and use that as the main selling point. “How can we prove that dr. Goebbels
forbade anyone to mention The First Blow to
Hitler? Where can we obtain [the] documentation of Hitler’s reaction to the
book when he finally learned about it? Did Hitler ever refer to the book, or
was it mentioned in any official papers during the year or so of preparation of
[the] attack on Russia?” he asked.[23]
Unfortunately, neither Williams nor Smith could answer these
and similar questions with any level of certainty. Williams thought that he
could sell the book by relying on the so-called negative advertising. In his
draft preface, he claimed that both he and Smith were well aware that the novel
was badly written. “Albeit Communist man’s motivating literature is ‘simply
dreadful’ by our literary judgment, it is extremely necessary and urgent for us
to examine it.”[24] The
reason for this “necessity and urgency” was, according to Williams, the
palpable perception that the U.S. was losing a psychological war against the
Soviet Union and that the only way to turn defeats into victories was by
understanding and acting upon the key formative factor of the Soviet worldview.
And that, Williams claimed, was “the steady diet of Communist literature -
mostly novels similar to The First Blow
- which [the Soviet reader] avidly devours.”[25]
However, neither this impassioned argument nor anything else
that Williams and Smith tried to do seemed to have carried any significant
weight with the “cynical” U.S publishers, and they reluctantly but inevitably
abandoned the whole thing. Their translation of Shpanov’s novel can be found
among Smith’s papers at Hoover.[26] It
just lies there unpublished even 60 years later.
[2] “A
Letter of D.M. Bradford Williams to Edward Ellis Smith,” October 29, 1962, The
Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and
Archives. I gratefully acknowledge the Hoover Institution Library &
Archives as an essential resource in the development of these materials. The
views expressed in this publication are entirely my own and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the fellows, staff, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover
Institution.
[3] “A
Letter of Williams to Smith,” October 29, 1962. It is unclear whether Williams
still worked for the CIA when the meeting took place. My educated guess is that
he had already retired. See also Williams’s obituary in the South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. “Dwight Williams, Hero
from WWII,” The Sun Sentinel, August
29, 1989, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/1989/08/29/dwight-williams-hero-from-wwii/. Accessed on July 10, 2024.
[4] In
the essay, Williams advocated setting up a voluntary, nation-wide TV lecture
course on all aspects of the Soviet system in order to increase and augment
U.S. national preparedness. His basic assumption was that “peaceful
coexistence” with the Soviet regime was not possible and that therefore the
U.S. needed to be prepared for an imminent Soviet attack. See Captain Dwight M.
Bradford Williams, U.S. Naval Reserve (Retired), “Patriotism Through
Knowledge,” Proceedings, Vol.
81/7/629, July 1955, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1955/july/patriotism-through-knowledge. Accessed on July 10, 2024.
[5] “Draft
Preface,” p. 4, The Edward Ellis Smith
Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[8] “A
Letter of Williams to Smith,” October 29, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[10] “A
Letter of Roderic L. O’Connor to C.D. Jackson,” August 20, 1954, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder
19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[11] “A
Letter of Isaac Don Levine to Brad Williams,” December 26, 1954, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder
19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[12] “A
Letter of Williams to Smith,” March 10, 1963, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[13] “A
Letter of Williams to Smith,” February 10, 1962, The
Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and
Archives.
[14] “A
Letter of Smith to Williams,” February 18, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[16] “A
Letter of Smith to Williams,” August 24, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[17] “A
Letter of Smith to Williams,” June 30, 1962,
The Edward Ellis Smith Papers,
Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[19] “A
Letter of Smith to Williams,” August 10, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[20] “A
Letter of Cady to Williams,” June 25, 1962, The
Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and
Archives.
[21] “A Letter of Cady to Williams,” October 25, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder
19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[24] “Draft
Preface,” p. 6, The Edward Ellis Smith
Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[26] “Shpanov,
Nikolai, First Blow, Completed
Translation, Part 1 of 2, 1939” and “Shpanov, Nikolai, First Blow, Completed Translation, Part 2 of 2, 1958,” The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folders
2-3, Box 1, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
