This chapter demonstrates the entrenchment of the dominant image of France as weak and poised to tip into revolution. Tensions with the State Department and between Secretary of State James Byrnes and President Harry Truman, the influence of Admiral William Leahy over the intelligence process, and Truman’s preference for military and current intelligence over more comprehensive analyses served to buttress alarmist assessments and legitimized a harder line, even as analysts in the nascent Central Intelligence Group began to question some of the more ominous reporting. In France, anti-communist elements encouraged American attention and aid by warning of secret communist plots involving weapons drops, arms caches, and covert preparations for insurrection, and they themselves as the resistance to these communist plots, willing to act once they received American assistance. Surprisingly, they also advocated for direct American intervention in French affairs, not only in shaping the electoral landscape but also in reestablishing military bases inside France. Meanwhile, other national intelligence services, in their exchanges with US intelligence, also sounded the alarm about communist activity in southern France and questioned the legitimacy and efficacy of the French government. These contacts only reinforced the American belief that France was a weak and unreliable ally.

The conclusion argues that U.S. analysis on France reveals the complex relationship between intelligence and the formulation of American foreign policy in the early Cold War. It contends that a transnational and at times transimperial web of French factions and informants was largely responsible for shaping these views through their frequent informal and formal exchanges with American diplomats and intelligence officials, and they did so with their own political agendas and interests in mind. Through their U.S. contacts, they directly contested images of France, demonstrated legitimacy and outmaneuvered rivals, and played a fundamental role in shaping American perceptions and policy. This chapter also shows that the narrative of French weakness and communist intrigue began to unravel under the scrutiny of analysts who understood its provenance and questioned its basis. In fact, there were a myriad of other explanations for seemingly nefarious communist activity in France, ones for which emotionally driven and depleted observers failed to account.

In this open letter to the World Peace Council’s 1953 meeting in Budapest, which Du Bois was unable to attend because the US government had revoked his passport, he laments the absence of any representation from his country and offers his insights as a “hereditary outcast.” While Du Bois describes the longstanding American strain of individualism that transformed that nation into a “money-mad people” and set the stage for imperial expansion, he argues that the enmity of the Cold War was a contingent historical development of the Truman era. For Du Bois, the gravest consequence of the county’s embrace of an existential struggle with the Soviet Union is a new “Reign of Terror” within the United States, which threatens to erode the foundations of American democracy. Despite the bleak state of affairs, Du Bois insists that appeal to conscience of America is still possible and that the Cold War can be transcended by marrying together Soviet and American ideals.