Memorandum from Rear Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter to President Harry S. Truman

5877 SECRET CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE GROUP 2430 E STREET NW. WASHINGTON 25, D.C. WDL 7 November 1947 MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT During recent weeks there have been signs of a marked deterioration in the Communist political position in Western Europe. The process apparently began with the announcement of the "Truman Doctrine. It has been accelerated by Soviet- Communist efforts to defeat the European recovery program. In tacit recognition of the trend, the Kremlin appears to have abandoned its once promising attempt to bring Communist parties to power in Western Europe by conventional political processes, and to be reverting to pre-war techniques for the creation and exploitation of an eventual "revolutionary situation." This reversion will further antagonize the people of Western Europe and ultimately reduce the Communist following there to the hard core of militants. It implies Soviet recognition that the post- TRUMAN war opportunity to win Western Europe by political action has 5° to now been lost. AND SERVICE sevent b The announcement of a US policy. of aid to free Europe stiffened wavering European resistance to Communism and le d notably to the expulsion of the Communists from the go vernments of France and Italy. Soviet-Communist countermeasures have served to accelerate rather than to retard the trend. The execution of Petkov showed what those who collaborate with Communism might ultimately expect. The culminating act was the establishment of the Cominform, with its clear dentification of European Communist Parties as the agents of a foreign power, its proscription of the non-Communist Left, and its threat to the best hope of European recovery. The adverse European reaction has been made manifest in various forms, but particularly in recent ele ctions in Rome, France, Denmark, and Norway, all of which were decidedly anti- Communist in their implications. Although this reaction of the electorate was in large part caused by the establishment of the Cominform, that event was itself an acknowledgment by the Kremlin that the Communist political program in Western Europe had already failed and that new methods were required. The Party militants in the West were already being reorganized for revolutionary activity in the pre- DECLASSIFIED Authority NLT- 76.15 By HC NLT Date 10-4-77 SECRET