Cold War crucible: United States foreign policy and the conflict in Romania, 1943-1952

Cold War Crucible is a study of the great-power conflict that erupted in Romania at the end of World War II. Using recently declassified military intelligence records, the State Department's correspondence with its legation in Bucharest, and the files of the Office of Strategic Services and Strategic Services Unit, the study focuses on United States foreign policy toward Romania. The dissertation examines the interplay of diplomatic initiatives and clandestine operations used by the Americans as they sought to assert political influence and counter Soviet power in the region.;Romania offers historians a particularly compelling case study of the Cold War's origins in Eastern Europe. That country was the first of the Axis satellites to be occupied by the Soviet Army and the first state in Eastern Europe in which representatives from the United States were able to observe the unfolding of postwar Soviet occupation policy. OSS officers and counterintelligence specialists entered Romania in August, 1944, after the coup d'etat that overthrew Marshal Ion Antonescu. The contacts that these people made and the networks they established shaped the thinking of U.S. policy makers in the early postwar period. The subsequent support extended by American intelligence officers, diplomats and military representatives to Romania's conservative and anti-Soviet elite--and the official commitment that the support implied--polarized the political situation in Romania exacerbating East-West tensions there. These operations indicate that the Roosevelt administration was engaged in a two-tiered policy that was ready to challenge Soviet interests in Eastern Europe even as it sought peaceful coexistence and cooperation at the war's end.;The study goes on to examine the ways in which the strategies adopted by U.S. representatives in Romania in 1944-1945 were expanded and incorporated into the containment policies of the Truman administration. While the bulk of CIA records on Eastern Europe still remains classified, State and Defense Department records and National Security Council directives indicate the extent to which the United States used diplomatic pressures, psychological warfare and covert operations in a dangerous--ultimately futile--effort to erode communist power in the Soviet sphere of influence.