When I commented on the lack of supporting material for the Operation Splinter Factor thesis (in issue 22), I somehow managed to omit the account of it in William Blum’s The CIA: a forgotten history (Zed, London 1986) pp. 59-61. But that is taken entirely from Stewart Steven’s book and his sources.
To the latter’s account can be added the following.
(a) Michael Charlton’s, The Eagle and the Small Birds (BBC, London, 1984) contains a section, pp. 78-85, on the post-war show trials. But there appears to be no readily available full-scale study of them. Given the appetite for anti-Soviet stories in the Cold War years, I find this rather curious.
(b) Splinter Factor p. 163 says: ‘Meanwhile. the CIA had been working on the Clementis case. In October 1949 Clementis attended the U.N. General Assembly in New York and immediately a two-pronged attack, designed to persuade him to seek political asylum, was launched by the CIA through its State Department outlets and by SIS through the Foreign Office. Journalists were told by senior officials that Clementis was one of the few independently minded politicians of Eastern Europe, ‘fighting against the increasing Stalinist grip upon Czechoslovakia’, and ‘opposed to men like Gottwald’.
C.L. Sulzberger’s Long Row of Candles (Macdonald, London, 1969) has this on p. 415, his diary entry for Paris, October 22, 1949: ‘Cominform authorities have been tightening party discipline in several Eastern European states in an effort to eliminate all traces of ‘Titoist’ heresy. They have not yet quite decided what to so about Clementis, who is considered somewhat too independent-minded. (emphasis added)
Sulzberger’s family owned the New York Times at the time, and from the evidence of this and other volumes of Sulzberger’s diaries — among the most interesting memoirs of the post-war era — it is clear that Sulzberger shared the paper’s intimate relations with the CIA.20
.Hayden B. Peake sent me a photocopy of the review of Splinter Factor from Intelligence and Espionage; an Analytical Bibliography by George Constantinides (Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado). This includes ‘The story is quite unreliable… one of the worst books to appear in years in the field of intelligence; no time need be spent on it.’ Granted Stevens’ book isn’t reliable because not sourced, but maybe this is over-egging the pudding just a bit.