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In March of 1919, William Christian Bullitt, an attaché to the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and later the first Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1933-1936, visited Soviet Russia on a clandestine mission. Although Secretary of State Robert Lansing only authorized him to report on political and economic conditions, Bullitt’s actual objective was far more ambitious: to broker an agreement between the Allies and Russia’s Bolshevik government that would end the Russian Civil War, lift the Allied blockade of that country, and allow the Allies to withdraw the troops dispatched to Russia in 1918.  Bullitt eventually received a proposal from the Bolshevik government that would have realized these goals, but the Allied leaders at the Paris Peace Conference were unwilling to accept the offer.