This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

The First Session of the Fiscal Commission proceeds in a seemingly cooperative atmosphere with grand ambitions for the body’s future work. Behind the scenes, however, relations between the superpowers, and between the United States and Latin America, are fast unravelling.The United States presses for the promotion of double tax agreements to further free trade and private enterprise. The developing countries and the Fiscal Division begin to express discontentment with prevailing international tax rules and the League’s model tax conventions.

This chapter details the cracks in the consensus that began to emerge as tension boiled over in France with the expulsion of the PCF from the governing coalition and the communist-directed strikes that paralyzed the nation at the end of the year. Italian, Spanish and French intelligence, US embassy officials in Paris, U.S. military intelligence, and Central Intelligence Group current intelligence reports kept up the drumbeat, warning of growing anti-Americanism, communist power grabs and the PCF’s role in a larger, global communist conspiracy. Their analysis formed the core of the intelligence sent to President Truman and his senior advisors. However darkly uniform the analysis of the preceding year had been, some French officials, experts in the Office of Intelligence and Research (OIR) and a few mid-level analysts in the CIA expressed growing concern about the type and quality of intelligence. OIR analysts who complained that some CIA officials failed to account for French agency raised one of the most serious shortcomings of American analysis. Beyond their entreaties for American aid, French sources also played a role in the development of U.S. interference in France and its pro-colonial turn.