Editor’s Note This issue begins with an article by David Patrick Houghton analyzing U.S. decision-making during the so-called Pueblo Crisis that erupted in January 1968 when North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel operating in international waters off North Korea’s coast. U.S. policymakers at the time mistakenly assumed that the Soviet Union had abetted the North Korean seizure, and thus the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/17/4/1/698753/jcws_e_00594.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 crisis took on a distinct Cold War dimension. Houghton seeks to understand why U.S. policymakers eschewed the use of military force to rescue the hostages and instead allowed the crisis to stretch out for nearly a year. In retrospect, many scholars and former officials have cited the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam (with more than 540,000 U.S. troops deployed there) as the main reason that President Lyndon B. Johnson did not want to embark on another armed conflict over the Pueblo,but Houghton shows that things were not so clear-cut at the time. He demonstrates that analogies with earlier hostage seizures and with recent shoot-downs of U.S. aircraft helped to shape the Johnson administration’s deliberations. Seeking to avoid the loss of any hostages while preserving national “honor,” U.S. officials gradually pieced together a face-saving compromise. The next article, by TommasoPiffer, discusses the relationship between the British and U.S. clandestine operations agencies that were active during World War II—the United Kingdom’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Because previous studies of the SOE-OSS relationship have focused on operations in the Balkan campaigns, Piffer looks instead at the campaign in Italy, showing how the SOE and OSS worked with Italian partisans, albeit in a faltering manner. During the initial years of the war the SOE was clearly the senior partner, but the relationship changed steadily during the war as the OSS gradually attained clear ascendance. Piffer shows that several factors hindered the agencies’ cooperation in Italy: the U.S. government’s insistence on maintaining the independence of the OSS and other U.S. intelligence agencies (e.g., the Counter Intelligence Corps, the Military Intelligence Service, the Signal Intelligence Service, and the Signal Security Agency), the inability of the Allied Force Headquarters to overcome resistance from OSS in setting up an integrated control headquarters, and the relatively low priority given to the Italian campaign in the larger context of World War II. The next article, by Kevin W. Martin, presents a case study of Cold War–era public diplomacy: the U.S. government’s role in the First Damascus International Exposition, held in September 1954. Both the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as rivalries and tensions within the Arab world, were crucial backdrops for the exposition, which took place during a lull in East-West tensions after the death of Iosif Stalin. Martin discusses how the United States Information Service (USIS, the name Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall 2015, pp. 1–3, doi:10.1162/JCWS_e_00594 C 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1 Editor’s Note used overseas for the United States Information Agency, the government body chiefly responsible for public diplomacy) arranged U.S. participation in the exposition, with an emphasis on the technological marvel of Cinerama’s panoramic widescreen projection and surround-sound technology. In giving pride of place to this new technology, USIS officials were mindful of the Cold War and regional dimensions of the exposition amid deepening ferment in the Arab world. Martin draws on declassified documents, the Syrian press, and the film This Is Cinerama to assess differing U.S. and Syrian perceptions of the exposition and to evaluate the effectiveness of U.S. public diplomacy in Syria. The article traces the links between technology, politics, and rival superpower Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/17/4/1/698753/jcws_e_00594.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 efforts to exercise “soft power”—a pattern that recurred many times during the Cold War. The next article, by Zachary Shore, explores the important role of Le Duan, the First Secretary of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), in the war against the United States. Whereas most scholars have tended to focus on the personality and activities of Ho Chi Minh, Shore contends that Le Duan was at least as important a figure in shaping North Vietnam’s strategy, not only because he commanded the greatest influence within the VWP as First Secretary, but also because he was the dominant liaison with the southern Communist fighters. Shore examines Le Duan’s rise to power and then looks in-depth at his impact in shaping the protracted-war strategy. Drawing on formerly classified Vietnamese sources, Shore explores key aspects of Le Duan’s formulation of strategies to defeat the United States, particularly his thinking about the nature of protracted war, the significance of casualties, and the global standing of the United States. As he consolidated his power, he was increasingly able to implement his strategies. The portrait of Le Duan that emerges is of a leader deeply committed to winning the war decisively on the battlefield. The next article, by Thomas K. Robb and David James Gill, discusses how and why the Australia, New Zealand, United States (ANZUS) Security Treaty was signed in 1951, amid acute East-West tensions sparked by the Korean War. Most accounts of ANZUS have attributed the pact to skillful diplomacy by antipodean leaders who wanted a solid guarantee against possible Soviet or Chinese expansion in the Asia- Pacific region. These sentiments did exist, but Robb and Gill show that, in fact, the treaty came about primarily because U.S. policymakers had a clear interest in achieving it and were willing to push it through. U.S. officials saw economic benefits in ANZUS insofar as a U.S. security commitment to Australia and New Zealand would allay the two countries’ potential concerns about Japan’s economic revival, which the United States by this point was eagerly promoting. Moreover, U.S. officials believed the treaty would advance the key U.S. goal of curbing British influence in the region—a goal they sought to facilitate by ensuring that ANZUS remained a strictly tripartite pact. Robb and Gill show that U.S. policymakers even went so far as to warn the Australians and New Zealanders that they must not give the impression that ANZUS was a “White Man’s Club”—something that officials in Washington claimed would happen if Britain joined the treaty. These warnings may have been disingenuous, but the invocation of race in the ANZUS context is an intriguing example of how the U.S. government, 2 Editor’s Note which was being criticized in the 1950s both at home and abroad over segregation, tried to demonstrate a certain sensitivity toward racial issues in this instance. Even if that sensitivity was not fully sincere and was put forth in the service of a larger economic aim, this does not mean it was wholly invalid. The issue then includes two review essays, the first by Archie Brown, who provides an assessment of a recent book by my colleague Serhii Plokhii on the collapse of the USSR, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union. A vast literature now exists on this topic, and Plokhii covers much of the same ground, but, unlike many earlier analysts, he focuses predominantly on the weeks after the failure of the August 1991 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/17/4/1/698753/jcws_e_00594.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 coup. Brown finds some faults in Plokhii’s book, but overall he regards it as a valuable analysis and especially welcomes Plokhii’s debunking of persistent myths about the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The other review essay, by Gary Kern, discusses the recently published Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage. The author, Boria Sax, is the son of Saville Sax, whose roommate at Harvard University was a young, ex- traordinarily gifted physics student named Theodore Hall. Saville Sax never amounted to anything as a student and was generally a failure in most things he tried, but he succeeded in one important task, a task that haunted him for the rest of his life and ravaged his family. When Hall was recruited to leave Harvard as a sophomore and work for the highly secretive Manhattan Project, Sax persuaded him to join him in spying for the Soviet Union. The two young men shared an affinity for Soviet Communism, and they wanted to ensure that the United States would not enjoy a monopoly on nuclear weapons. At Sax’s suggestion, Hall spirited extremely sensitive information to Soviet foreign intelligence handlers. The memoir recounts the destructive impact that Sax’s and Hall’s actions had on the entire Sax family. Kern praises Boria Sax for his painfully candid, insightful, and fascinating memoir of life with a tragically flawed father. The issue ends with 22 book reviews. 3.