American Intelligence and Belarusian Emigration against Soviet Byelorussia during the Cold War

Abstract

By the end of the Second World War, about 200 thousand Belarusians ended up as refugees in Western Europe. A significant part of them were repatriated to the Soviet Union, more than one thousand moved to the USA, another fifteen hundred — to other non-European countries. In 1951, the number of Belarusians remaining in Europe was sixty thousand people. Belarusian emigration, as well as the emigration from other Soviet Republics, immediately came to the attention of the US Central Intelligence Agency within the framework of a document developed in 1948 by the State Department entitled “Utilization of Refugees from the Soviet Union in U. S. National Interests”, which was supposed to “fill in the niches in our current intelligence, in public information, and in our politico-psychological operations”. The Central Intelligence Agency was supposed to develop and quite generously finance the intelligence and propaganda projects and programs important for the agency. The leadership of the Rada of the Belarusian People’s Republic (in exile) headed by its chairman Nikolai Abramchik was to be responsible for staffing the necessary number of agents from among the emigrant Belarusian youth to infiltrate into Belarus and for distributing information among the national European emigration. However, this did not cause any expected “resistance movement” within the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic contrary to the intended actions of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Rada. By the end of 1961, the projects of the Central Intelligence Agency in Belarus conducted since 1951, including the most famous AEQUOR, which involved infiltrating agents into the territory of the republic, were closed.