| Abstract: | This article uses recently declassified CIA documents to examine Soviet defectors of the 1950s, with a focus on US programs to court, receive, and utilize defectors against their homeland in espionage and psychological warfare operations. Eschewing the tendency at the time and in later scholarship to emphasize defectors’ ideological motivations, the piece argues that defectors often crossed over the Iron Curtain for reasons of self-preservation or self-advancement. Once in the West, defectors were mistrusted and badly assimilated into host societies. For these reasons, Soviet defectors rarely proved to be the committed anti-communists that American policy-makers expected them to be. |
