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It is the early Cold War. The Soviet Union appears to be in irresistible ascendance and moves to exploit the Olympic Games as a vehicle for promoting international communism. In response, the United States conceives a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. Drawing on newly declassified materials and archives, this book chronicles how the U.S. government used the Olympics to promote democracy and its own policy aims during the tense early phase of the Cold War. The book shows how the government, though constrained by traditions against interference in the Games, eluded detection by cooperating with private groups, including secretly funded émigré organizations bent on liberating their home countries from Soviet control. At the same time, the United States appropriated Olympic host cities to hype the American economic and political system while, behind the scenes, the government attempted clandestine manipulation of the International Olympic Committee. The book also details the campaigns that sent propaganda materials around the globe as the United States mobilized culture in general, and sports in particular, to fight the communist threat.

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On March 31, 1962, the Rand Daily Mail headlined its front page: 'Whites Only at Olympics'. 1 The newspaper alerted the South African public to the fact that the Minister of the Interior, Jan de Klerk, had issued a statement on sport: the government would not allow South African teams comprised of black and white athletes to compete in world events outside the country. 2 He also declared that direct competition between white and black athletes within South Africa, whether amongst local participants or teams visiting from abroad, was prohibited. This ban, readers were told, would keep Maori rugby players from touring South Africa with the New Zealand All Blacks. It would also preclude black and white South Africans from competing on the same team at the next summer Olympic Games, scheduled for Tokyo in 1964. To one commentator, de Klerk's decree destined South Africa for the 'sporting wilderness'. 3 Yet de Klerk's statement brooked no departure from long established South African sporting tradition, a tradition rooted in strict racial segregation. Before the National Party (NP) claimed victory in the elections of 1948 and institutionalized an extreme form of racial discrimination, race, as historian Saul Dubow explains, 'formed part of the sediment of daily life'. 4 Sport also settled in the dregs. 5 Taking football as an example, the first documented matches in South Africa in 1862 were contests between white men. 6 Thirty years later, football enthusiasts formed the South African Football Association (SAFA), as a governing body catering exclusively for white players. 7 From the late nineteenth century, tours to and from South Africa routinely took placein 1899, an African team competed in Britain and in 1906, allwhite sides travelled to play against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguaywith the squads consistently selected on racial lines. 8 Historians Peter Alegi and Chris Bolsmann attest that the game remained segregated between white and black players. 9 Black South African athletes also competed separately as Africans, Indians, and 'coloureds', with ethnicity and religion creating additional divisions.The early-1960s witnessed South Africa's deepening descent into sporting isolation even as ministers such as de Klerk demonstrated their commitment to ensuring that sport fulfilled apartheid prescripts. In 1961, the governing body of world football, the CONTACT Michelle M. Sikes