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.
NOTES
[1] See
“Inventory of the Edward Ellis Smith Papers,” Hoover Institution Library and
Archives, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt8p303667/entire_text/ (12 manuscript boxes). Accessed on July 10, 2024.
[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.
[6] Ibid.,
p. 5.
[7] Ibid.
[8] “A
Letter of Williams to Smith,” October 29, 1962, The Edward Ellis Smith Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution
Library and Archives.
[9] Dmitry
Nikolaev, “Первый удар [The First Blow],” Совершенно
Секретно [Magazine Top Secret], June 18, 2015, https://www.sovsekretno.ru/articles/istoriya/pervyy-udar/. Accessed on July 11, 2024.
[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.
[15] Ibid.
[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.
[18] Ibid.
[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.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] “Draft
Preface,” p. 6, The Edward Ellis Smith
Papers, Folder 19, Box 7, Hoover Institution Library and Archives.
[25] Ibid.
[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.
