Introduction

Summary

The introduction takes us to Paris in December 1947, where rumors of a communist uprising circulated amidst nationwide strikes fomented by the French Communist Party. President Harry Truman was deeply troubled by the unrest; journalists Joseph and Steward Alsop suggested it was because of the intelligence reports crossing his desk—"he was daily confronted with the facts.” This chapter explains the book’s focus on that intelligence and makes three interlocking arguments: that the intelligence on France was actually deeply contested by U.S. intelligence officers, that a vast web of informants in France and its empire influenced this intelligence to suit their interests, and finally, that the intelligence pointing to an imminent and existential communist threat was overblown, part of a campaign to encourage American intervention in French affairs, with implications for Franco-American relations for the rest of the century. This study seeks to internationalize intelligence and incorporate it into the study of U.S. foreign relations. In doing so, it deploys the diplomatic record alongside previously untapped intelligence reporting, thus illuminating new findings out of American and French archives. Likewise, it borrows key insights from recent interventions in U.S. foreign relations, namely the global, transimperial, and emotional turns in the field.