>Morning, frenz
May 9 2019, Potus invites the World"Cup"Series champion"Red Socks"to the White House
1 Month Later, Jun 9 David Ortiz shot in the back
Operation Red Sox
The Covert Operation to Back Ukrainian Independence that Haunts the CIA
After WWII, officials in Washington sent scores of agents to their deaths in a misguided effort to create an uprising against Moscow.
In late 1949, a series of unmarked flights began launching from central Europe. Gargantuan C-47s, flown by Hungarian or Czech pilots, barreled toward Turkey, and then turned north over the Black Sea, evading radar by flying barely above the ground. As the planes flew over Lviv a string of parachutes opened, a handful of commandos tumbling into the sky over Soviet Ukraine. On the ground, they linked up with Ukrainian resistance fighters trying to beat back Soviet expansionism.
Operation Red Sox, as it was known,was one of the first covert missions of the still new Cold War. The American-trained commandos would feed intelligence back to their handlers using new radio and communications equipment, stoking nascent nationalist movements in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Baltics. The goal was to provide the U.S. unprecedented insight into Moscow’s designs in Eastern Europe — and, if possible, to help crack apart the Soviet empire itself. Over half a decade, dozens of operatives took part in these flights, becoming one of the U.S.’s “biggest covert operations” in post-War Europe. Ukraine’s bloody insurgency was the operation’s centerpiece. And it was in Ukraine that, as one scholar wrote, the CIA saw one of its “most pronounced failures of the Cold War.”
Yet, back in Washington, concerns started to grow. On the one hand, there was the reality of who these Ukrainian emigres were actually linking up with. The main body of Ukrainian insurgents, and in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, had already been linked directly to Nazi atrocities in the region. “They were Nazis, pure and simple,” one CIA operations chief said. “Worse than that, because a lot of them did the Nazis’ dirty work for them.”
Beyond those concerns about enabling fascists, there was also increased understanding of how the Soviet secret police and counter-intelligence operations actually worked — and how little success an operation like Red Sox would likely have in a place like the USSR.
“You’re sending people into these Soviet-controlled areas — Poland or Ukraine or wherever — with the idea that they’re going to start resistance groups or meet up with the ones already there,” one CIA station chief remembered. “But it’s impossible that these resistance groups can exist under the Soviet security system…. It’s a dream. It can’t work. You’re just sending people to their deaths.” If anything, Anderson added, those supposed anti-Soviet resistance groups the CIA thought it was helping support were, in reality, “catchment basins in which the regimes’ enemies, both internal and external, could be concentrated and safely confined until the state was ready to scoop them up.”
PB
>>16289935 CIA's support for the Ukrainian "Nazi"/nationalist orgs after the WWII was part of the fight against communism (politico link)