A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Once home, I went to William Hawkins. He suggested I get out of New York, where newspaper departments were large and relatively compartmented, and go to a paper where the entire operation was under one roof. He recommended the Indianapolis Times, a Scripps-Howard property, and the smallest of the three local dailies, as the sort of paper I should seek out. He must have put in a good word, for a job soon opened in the paper’s retail advertising staff.

  There was much more than the few thousand miles of travel involved in the change from the foreboding atmosphere of Nazi Germany, and the opportunity to observe and mingle with the people who were soon to unleash the most catastrophic war in history, to six weeks as a messenger, trundling advertising material between the more important accounts and the advertising department in downtown Indianapolis. The full significance of the move was underlined when I learned that my wages had plummeted from twenty-five bucks a week in Berlin to a cool twenty-two fifty in Indianapolis. Life has its ways of puncturing one’s balloon.

  The sweat and shoe leather spent in the first few months on my new job were enough to convince me that news reporting was relatively easy compared to the advertising side of publishing. My first step up what was beginning to seem like a very long ladder was the assignment to manage a rubble of small accounts ranging from chicken merchants to funeral homes. I was also charged with the responsibility for luring other such accounts away from the competing papers. In the blistering summer heat, my funeral home accounts were a blessing. Air conditioning was by no means universal at the time, but even the most modest undertaking parlors were frigid. Although my calls on these potential clients were heavily influenced by the weather, the owners appeared to find me a welcome change from the usual run of bereaved patrons. Unfortunately, the more amiable undertakers were proud of their techniques, and I learned to cut our interviews just short of the inevitable invitation, “Come on downstairs and have a look at a really up-to-date shop.” At the critical point I would check my watch, claim intense pressure, and bolt, preserving forever my innocence of embalming techniques.

  By the time of my promotion to national advertising manager, I’d learned exactly how hard it was to earn a dollar. Having my knuckles rapped for failure to hustle enough new business was a new experience for me, and incidentally a lesson from which the taxpayers would eventually profit. The notion that secret intelligence budgets are bound only by the occasional need to break open another crate of money is pure Hollywood. Because some intelligence funds are unvouchered, there is stricter budgetary control in CIA than in any government agency I know, and throughout my tenure I remained tightfisted with the taxpayers’ money.

  In September 1939, in Indianapolis, I married Julia B. Shields, a divorcée with two children, James and Judith. I was introduced to Julia soon after I arrived in Indianapolis, by her lawyer, Bates Johnson, the friend of a friend. Julia had been raised and educated in Indianapolis and was recently divorced from Frank Shields, an entrepreneur who had built the Barbasol Company from a local venture to a nationwide business. Julia’s brother, Noble Bretzman, was Indiana’s leading portrait photographer.

  After a brief honeymoon, actually a long weekend, on a lake in southern Michigan, I settled in with what I suddenly realized was a whole family. The children took the change in stride. I was the one who needed to be housebroken. Julia’s connections in the city created a new social life, a welcome change from my bachelor existence. In fact, we saw nothing but a promising future.

  Some two years later, on a Sunday, warm for that time of year, we were invited for lunch with Hubert Hickam, a well-known Indianapolis lawyer, and his family. We had left the table and were settling down to listen to the New York Philharmonic concert on the radio when the announcement came. Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Although I had followed the war in Europe closely, I had not considered the possibility of a Japanese attack.

  Later, as we moved toward the door, Hubert said softly, “This reminds me of my brother Horace. He was a lieutenant colonel, and killed practicing night landings in Texas seven years ago. I’ve been told he was one of the coming guys in the Army Air Force. They named that airdrome in Hawaii for him … Hickam Field.”

  We drove home in silence.

  —

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought five hard years’ work to an end. I resigned from the Indianapolis Times, and in January 1942, volunteered for the U.S. Naval Reserve. In anticipation of my being called up, we moved to South Orange, New Jersey, so that Julia and the children could be near my parents when I left the country. During the early months of that year, I worked for the Navy Relief Society in New York, raising money for the survivors of naval personnel killed at Pearl Harbor. My application for a commission dragged on until, in despair, I asked a friend to see if he could trace it at naval headquarters. The papers had been so wildly misfiled that without this intervention I might have missed World War II entirely.

  On July 1, twenty-four hours after a first glimpse of my son Dennis, I reported to the Harvard Naval Training School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of our instructors was a lively young ensign who must have come to the school a few hours after the graduation ceremonies at Annapolis. We were all older and outranked Ensign Holloway, but he was very much on the ball. The next time our paths crossed, Admiral James Holloway was chief of naval operations at the Pentagon.

  With two months’ intensive indoctrination under my belt, I was assigned to the Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York City.

  When I volunteered for the Navy, my language qualifications, two years of digging for news in the Third Reich and living in Berlin surrounded by Germans of every stripe might have suggested an intelligence assignment. Apparently they did not. I didn’t pursue this because I had the impression that to qualify for assignment to naval intelligence, one had to be a third-generation American. My paternal grandfather had emigrated from Germany, and I assumed this ruled me out. But sixty days’ orientation at Harvard had at least officially qualified me as a naval officer with the assignment of helping to plot the positions of Allied ships as they attempted to avoid German submarine wolf packs ravaging the convoys to England.

  I had been on the job for only a few weeks when Frederick Oechsner, my boss in the UP bureau in Berlin, asked me to meet him for a drink at the Overseas Press Club. It didn’t take long for him to get to the point. After a stiff lecture on the secrecy of what he was about to say, Fred said he had been asked by General William J. Donovan, the head of the recently established Office of Strategic Services, to build a new section, Morale Operations, or MO. I had never heard of General Donovan or his organization, but promised to keep the secret.

  “MO,” Oechsner whispered, “will be responsible for black propaganda.” It was a new term, and my blank expression prompted Fred to explain a bit more loudly, “Black propaganda—misinformation! Stuff that will deceive and confuse the enemy.”

  After a prudent nod, and more to gain time than any additional Top Secret information, I asked what else General Donovan might be up to.

  “Sabotage,” Fred said softly. “Espionage, building paramilitary guerrilla armies, resistance operations.” Then, with a glance along the bar, he leaned closer. “Counterespionage,” he whispered. “But I want you to join us in black propaganda, MO—you’re a natural.”

  At the time it was vitally important to keep the shipping lanes open to England and I was still learning my job. It would be a long war, and if the promise of hoped-for sea duty did not materialize, there would be time enough to consider something as nebulous as MO seemed to be. As it turned out, Fred’s generous assessment of my “natural” talent for black propaganda had nothing to do with my eventual transfer.

  My career in what Kim Philby always—and in his case with good reason—referred to as “the racket” began on a Sunday morning in 1943 when my commanding officer in New York flipped a cable across his desk and growled, “What the hell is this? I’m the one who decides if you like it here, not you.” The se
cret order transferred me to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington. A Madison Avenue advertising mogul on duty with OSS in Washington required an assistant who spoke French and German, had lived in Europe and worked as a journalist. Of the three officers who qualified, I was the only one on duty in the United States.

  A few hours after reporting for duty, I was whisked out of Washington for two weeks’ training at OSS Area E—a farmhouse, garage, a few tents, and adjoining fields in nearby Maryland. My classmates varied in age, but were otherwise quite anonymous. We were told to conceal our last names and background, remove labels from clothing, and cache our driving licenses, checkbooks, and other identifying data with the camp commander. One enthusiastic and well-heeled potential operative went so far as to snip the monograms from the bosom of his custom-made shirts. We were also each privately instructed to ferret out the name and background of our fellow acolytes in preparation for a show-and-tell session at our graduation dinner.

  Some of the indoctrination intended to prepare newcomers for life in the secret world would have been of more use in a barroom dustup than in Nazi-occupied Europe. Major W. E. Fairbairn, who had organized the Shanghai police riot squad, an outnumbered constabulary that fought the local assassins and gangsters on their own terms, was one of the first instructors of the British commandos, and taught a much-touted OSS course in hand-to-hand combat. The fine points of knife fighting—never hold a knife pointed down, if you miss, you may gut yourself—and the uses of broken bottles were stressed. Targets for below-the-belt kicks were identified.

  “Grab my privates,” Fairbairn told me. I did so, but prudently. “Not good enough,” he commanded. “Go for me.” I did, and landed flat on my back. The major was short and spare but made up for it with technique.

  The rest of the training was more pertinent and gave a firsthand impression of the problems of keeping cover and gaining access to targets. My first test was to apply for a job under an assumed name and with no identification whatsoever in a war-related industry in Baltimore. This done, I was supposed to learn exactly what was going on.

  Getting into the personnel office of the target—a Baltimore shipping company—was not difficult. American industry had few if any functioning security precautions, and there was a growing need for warm bodies in the draft-depleted workforce. Despite a dry mouth and tight sphincter, I lied my way through the interview, asked a few questions, scooped up a handful of company stock reports and advertising brochures, and escaped with the promise of a job when I returned with the completed application forms. I was luckier than a member of an earlier class who attracted so much suspicion that he was thoroughly beaten with wet towels before he could convince the Baltimore police to call the emergency number we were given in lieu of the lethal “L” tablet, an optional item sometimes issued to real-life agents. As tame as this exercise was, it served to give us a slight, very slight, taste of the anxiety and stress that are endemic to espionage.

  The two weeks’ training was less than comprehensive, but in 1943 it was the best OSS had to offer in the Washington area, and some of it was sound enough eventually to be incorporated into the early CIA syllabus.

  Back in Washington, I was assigned to the planning staff. My office mate was John W. Gardner, a Marine officer who was handsome, gracious, and very intelligent. He went on to serve in President Johnson’s cabinet, to found Common Cause, and to write a number of books.

  Working with Gardner was a delight, although neither of us thought much of the dust-dry “plans” we were assigned to write. He managed to shake himself loose by helping Dr. Harry Murray, a Harvard professor, devise a series of tests intended to show a candidate’s aptitude for overseas service. Put into effect, the tests helped to identify individuals unlikely to stand the strain of living a double life abroad. After the war, an expanded version of these tests became common in industry and the government.

  By the time I was convinced that none of the plans I was composing were likely ever even to be read, Ferdinand Mayer, a former foreign service officer, came to my rescue by slipping me into his tiny section responsible for coordinating intelligence collection on Germany. Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, this assignment brought me face-to-face with two of the root problems of secret intelligence collection—establishing an agent’s bona fides, and the veracity and value of his reports.

  In Switzerland, Allen Dulles had made contact with Fritz Kolbe, a disaffected member of the Nazi foreign office in Berlin. With incredible pluck, Kolbe had arranged a trip to Bern, where he offered his services to British intelligence. The British head of station scented a provocation, and refused Kolbe’s offer. Despite the carbon copies of secret German foreign office cables and dispatches Kolbe had smuggled from Berlin to Bern, London headquarters concurred: Kolbe had probably been sent by German intelligence in a bold move to deceive the British. The gutsy German was shown the door.

  Here, as in so many other instances, Dulles’s network of contacts and collaborators functioned perfectly. In despair, the bewildered Kolbe turned to a Swiss acquaintance who within hours alerted one of the OSS staff. Allen Dulles immediately recognized the treasure Kolbe had smuggled into Switzerland, and flashed reports to Washington and London.

  But London stood firm. No German official would be foolhardy enough even to attempt to sneak such material out of the foreign ministry, let alone smuggle it through the security controls along the railway and at the German border. Kolbe was obviously an instrument of German intelligence, and his documents were probably the opening gambit in a deception scheme.

  Dulles was equally adamant. Kolbe was straight. His reports were valid, indeed priceless, copies of highly classified German documents.

  This confrontation came at a time when the British intelligence organizations were very much senior in experience and reputation to the fledgling OSS staff. The American cousins were politely tolerated by many of their British colleagues, but in some quarters there was a marked resentment of the open-faced, unsophisticated, and brash American operatives. The elegant British chief in Bern had an extensive wardrobe, and a title and attitude to match. The fact that he resented Dulles as an intruder may have affected local judgment, but London should have seen things more clearly. Unfortunately, Colonel Claude Dansey, the London headquarters officer directing espionage operations in Europe, had been badly stung by a German operation.

  Two British intelligence officers who thought they were dealing with German resistance representatives were kidnapped in Holland and hustled across the border to Germany. He was not about to be caught twice by the bloody Boche. Moreover, Dansey, whom another senior British intelligence officer described as “the kind of a shit that gives other shits a bad name,” had even less tolerance for upstart Americans than his man in Bern.

  On form, there was reason to doubt Kolbe. If German intelligence were to manufacture a gift horse calculated to appeal to Allied intelligence, Kolbe was if anything too perfect a figure. After ten years’ diplomatic service in Spain and South Africa, Kolbe returned to Berlin in 1939 to serve as an assistant to Ambassador Karl Ritter, who was the official liaison between the foreign office and the supreme military command. Kolbe’s job gave him access to all the Nazi diplomatic cable and dispatch traffic, and intimate insights into military planning. He was a profound anti-Nazi, but capable of concealing his views and adroit enough to avoid the almost mandatory membership in the party. Kolbe was a workaholic, able to make himself an indispensable assistant to his Nazi chief while devoting almost as many hours to his own intelligence activity. Along with these blessings, Kolbe came with a communications system which, with the help of some professional tinkering, remained secure for the duration of the war.

  However sound the early reports appeared to be, Kolbe had the aspect of a volunteer too good to be true. In Washington and London, counterintelligence staffs were consulted.

  In the years that followed I became convinced that no intelligence service can be more effective than its c
ounterintelligence component for very long. I also learned that although the best CI officers possess sound political judgment and insight, these qualities are by no means dominant at all levels in the counterintelligence world. The bona fides of a spy can best be determined by a combined effort, with experienced field operatives and counterintelligence staff evaluating the operation itself, and the substantive analysts concentrating on the intelligence content. Neither element can function effectively without the support of the other.

  Kolbe’s early reports ranged from the location of rendezvous points for Japanese and German submarines, data on a German cipher system, and proof that confirmed our fear that certain American ciphers had been broken. Subsequent reports detailed air raid damage to the vital Schweinfurt ball-bearing plant and the Ploegti oil fields, disclosed a German agent (code name CICERO) who had access to the British ambassador’s Top Secret cable traffic in the Ankara embassy, the development of a supersonic jet aircraft, and the research on yet other mysterious secret weapons—the self-propelled V-1 “buzz bomb” and the V-2 rocket.

  Despite the demonstrable quality of the Kolbe reports, the British remained convinced that the data were but a buildup for future deception. Norman Pearson, chief of the OSS X-2 (counterintelligence) component in London, was less convinced. He urged caution, but pointed out that the reports were of great value and contained no hint of deception. In Washington, OSS gave the Kolbe material a highly restricted circulation. Senior military intelligence officers in the Pentagon rejected Kolbe’s reports and refused to allow broader dissemination.

  Mayer and I were confounded. We did not see how German intelligence could hope to profit from eventually inserting deceptive data into such a flood of high-level intelligence.