The Viennese Waltz: Kidnap, Murder, and the CIA’s secret plot to win the Cold War
Daniel Cowling

In January 1996, US Ambassador Swanee Hunt handed the Austrian government a tranche of documents detailing the location of seventy-nine underground arms caches across the country. The secret stores contained all kinds of military equipment, including thousands of American-made weapons and a metric tonne of plastic explosives. Who exactly had put them there? How long had these armaments been concealed? And what was their intended purpose? For the last three decades, the US State Department has refused to offer any further comment. The Viennese Waltz employs a vast array of original primary sources to answer these questions and brings to light an extraordinary true story of kidnap, murder and Cold War espionage audacious enough to rival any spy thriller.

In the summer of 1945, Vienna was placed under a four-power Allied military occupation, with Britain, France, America, and the Soviet Union each controlling a quarter of the war-torn metropolis. As international negotiations over Austria reached breaking point, the Soviets instigated a systematic programme of kidnapping and intimidation; on Halloween 1948, the brutal murder of US civilian attaché Irving Ross at the hands of Red Army troops threatened to destroy the delicate peace.

Enter Richard Helms, a clean-cut CIA man renowned for his unwillingness to back down from a fight. In the tense atmosphere of postwar Vienna, Helms directs a clandestine war against the Soviet Union. Alongside traditional espionage work of intelligence gathering and recruiting double agents, he oversees Operation Iceberg – the creation of a covert Austrian paramilitary army ready to wage a guerilla war on behalf of the CIA. Uncovering Helms’ daring programme of spycraft for the first time, The Viennese Waltz explains how Vienna became a nest of spies: a city famed for waltzes, palaces, and modernism was also a decisive, secret frontline in the Cold War where one wrong move threatened total disaster.

As we explore the shadowy world of Richard Helms, we get to know civilians, soldiers, and spies of all stripes. Former SOE agent Baroness Mary Miske is searching through the rubble for her husband when she is snatched at dawn and sent to a Soviet gulag. The eccentric Russian-born Countess Nathalie Benckendorff translates for the British Army by day, and dances with Soviet soldiers in the Hofburg Palace by night. Viennese librarian and former French Resistance fighter Selma Steinmetz seeks justice for the victims of Nazism, before finding herself cast out of public life as a suspected communist. Austrian Maestro Herbert von Karajan tries to escape his own Nazi past as he attempts to resurrect the former glories of the Vienna Philharmonic. Olympic skier turned MI6 agent Peter Lunn begins the construction of an underground tunnel to tap into Soviet telephone lines; his former colleague Graham Greene visits the city to research a new screenplay entitled The Third Man. Greene was far from the only espionage writer to find inspiration – and intelligence work – in postwar Vienna: John le Carré and Sarah Gainham both moved to the city as occupiers, with the worlds of fact and fiction becoming almost indistinguishable.

Following this remarkable cast of characters, The Viennese Waltz presents a new, exhilarating history of Vienna as the epicentre of a high-stakes espionage war and finally lays bare the astonishing story of the CIA’s cloak-and-dagger ‘stay-behind’ operations in postwar Europe. This 75,000-word original narrative history challenges our understanding of the early Cold War.

Key Ideas

• An atmospheric account of Richard Helms’ momentous early CIA career and the controversial secret European armies he helped to create
• The first book in English about postwar Vienna and its crucial importance in the Cold War
• Finally unravels the mystery of US weapons stores in Austria and explains how Vienna became a hotbed of international espionage
• An engaging, in-depth social, political and military history based on unpublished sources that document the lives of soldiers, civilians, and spies from Austria, Britain, the USA, and the USSR