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Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and US Foreign Policy Toby C. Rider. University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Many viewers of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are unaware of the tense Cold War Games that played out after World War II between 1948 and the fall of Communism in the early 1990s. Much of the drama of the Games themselves were generated by how many medals the "free world" countries would win as to how many the Communist Bloc countries would bring home.
Early in the Cold War, the Soviet Union exploited the Olympic Games to promote international communism. In response, the United States conceived a subtle, far-reaching psychological warfare campaign to blunt the Soviet advance. According to Toby Rider, an assistant professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, during this tense early phase of the Cold War, the US government countered this Soviet strategy by promoting democracy and its own policy aims through covert operations. Through the US government's cooperation with private groups, such as secretly funded emigre' organizations...