A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  My outfit, Foreign Branch M (FBM), one of the several SSU geographical branches, had 228 personnel abroad and a headquarters staff of thirty-five. The other branches covered the Far East, the Near East, Africa, Western Europe, and the USSR and Baltic states. It quickly became apparent that FBM had fallen heir to a rich share of the operations personnel in SSU. With the collapse of the Third Reich, experienced OSS operatives, as well as technical and support people, surged into Germany and Austria with the occupation forces. Throughout these areas and in the Eastern European capitals, those who thought it might be possible to make a career in intelligence, or who were in no rush to get home, had hung on. One young officer remained in Switzerland for no more profound reason than to spend his weekends skiing. During the war Allen Dulles had outlawed skiing—there was no time for sport, and absolutely no excuse for a broken leg. The winter’s experience of postwar intelligence work was just enough to hook the skier: he retired from a senior CIA position twenty-five years later.

  Pleased as I was by the legacy, my fellow branch chiefs were already foraging for exactly the type of experienced people FBM had inherited, and I had no choice but to fend them off at every turn.

  One bit of fortune was a chance encounter with Elizabeth Dunlevy, one of the first employees enlisted by General Donovan when he began to assemble the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), the OSS predecessor organization in 1941. Elizabeth, who had married one of the two survivors of an OSS team parachuted into Czechoslovakia late in World War II, agreed to come to FBM as my secretary and administrative assistant, beginning a working relationship which lasted until my final day in office. Elizabeth was unique. She took dictation as fast and as accurately as a tape recorder, could spell every word in the dictionary, and punctuate as deftly as H. W. Fowler himself. Elizabeth was a canny judge of people, and her knack of treating everyone, irrespective of his position, with absolute equality was exceptional. For the first year and more of our work together, she also functioned as the branch administrative officer. When a new table of organization was established, and Foreign Branch M was reorganized as Foreign Division M, Elizabeth surrendered her administrative duties to an office of seven employees. Her tenure stretched from the COI in 1941 through OSS, SSU, CIG to CIA—and from an entrance-level clerical job to the director of Central Intelligence’s executive secretary. Elizabeth’s performance speaks for itself.

  One vexing aspect of my responsibilities was greeting employees returning to Washington from the FBM field stations. After sorting out the most likely prospects—ranging from station chiefs to clerks—it was necessary to urge them to stay on with SSU, an apparently bastard organization with an unpredictable life expectancy. The path between attempting to retain the best people without giving too sanguine a picture of what they might be getting into was indeed narrow.

  Recruiting new personnel was a different problem. The moment of truth came with the inevitable question, “Just what job is it that you’re offering?”

  At that point I had no choice but to say that nothing could be offered before a background investigation had been completed, and that this would take at least three months. If the prospective recruit appeared flummoxed by the prospect of gambling a few months’ unemployment against an unspecified position in an outfit that might vanish before any job materialized, I was authorized to say that we would try to put him or her on a temporary payroll doing odd jobs—that is, unclassified work—until the clearance problem was solved.

  “Odd jobs, unclassified work?”

  “There’s a lot of research to be done at the Library of Congress … all that sort of thing,” I’d say cheerfully. As well as being a useful pis-aller, this was perfectly true. It seems unbelievable these days, when the foreign policy establishment is in danger of being smothered with information, that in 1946 the government-wide dearth of data on the USSR and the Eastern European countries mandated hundreds of hours to be spent ransacking the Library of Congress and other open sources for essential background material.

  The former OSS premises—four masonry and two temporary wooden structures—that CIG and SSU had taken over were atop a slight knoll in the Foggy Bottom area. Our neighbors were a local brewery, a faded roller rink, an abandoned gasworks, and, just beyond walking distance, the new State Department premises. My office was in Q building, one of the wooden structures built early during World War II. When the building had to be given up, we moved to a string of temporary buildings ranged along the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In some ways these shabby, essentially inconspicuous but centrally located buildings seemed appropriate for a secret intelligence organization. There was one problem. When President Franklin Roosevelt authorized construction of the buildings, he underlined the provision that they were not to be built to last. He had no intention of destroying the handsome vista stretching from Lincoln’s brooding figure to the Reflecting Pool and along to the Washington Monument. Roosevelt’s wishes had certainly been respected. The construction work was rough and manifestly not meant for the ages. The buildings were cold in winter, wet in rain, soggy and stifling in summer. The heat absorbed by the tin roof of my second-floor office taught me the difference between perspiration and sweat. When the temperature and humidity reached a certain point—we called it “fission”—civil service regulations required us to send the staff home. Though we worked in shirtsleeves, carbon copies seemed to melt in our hands. Without air conditioning, the soggy summer in Foggy Bottom meant that like the Dead Sea Scrolls, some files had to be peeled apart.

  There were other, more substantive problems. In the pressure of the hot war, OSS personnel security clearances had often been rushed to completion. The urgent need for qualified linguists and good area knowledge was such that recently arrived refugees offered one of the best and most readily available sources of supply. Because few refugees had been in the United States long enough to have established any sort of record, the usual background and neighborhood investigations were almost meaningless. For the same reason, the customary interviews with the candidate’s listed references were of little use. Few of the refugees had friends or even acquaintances who had not themselves recently arrived and were also without checkable backgrounds.

  Nazi Germany, its European allies, and Japan were the most obvious wartime security threats, but none of these intelligence services had been able to organize anything resembling penetration operations in this country. Attempts to foster sabotage and political activism had been readily detected and rolled up. The German efforts to land hopelessly ill prepared agents by submarine were doomed from the start.

  Ironically, the situation with our ally—more accurately co-belligerent—the USSR was entirely different. Despite the desperate pressure the Soviet Union was under during World War II, GRU (Soviet military intelligence) and NKVD activity against the Western Allies and the United States in particular was, if anything, intensified. OSS security screening presumably eliminated any known Communist Party members from sensitive government positions, but allegations and rumors of communist activity were less intensely pursued. The result was that some Communist Party members and many dedicated fellow travelers were taken into the armed services, civilian agencies, and OSS. In the months after the war when the chasm between Soviet objectives and those of the Western powers became more obvious, the problem of communist penetration of the government was recognized as serious. As the postwar turf battles smoldered and raged in Washington, self-serving leaks about SSU’s alleged security problems continued to surface.

  Early in Colonel Quinn’s tenure, an SSU operative had procured an impressive bundle of intelligence on the Soviet Baltic Fleet—the design, armaments, and characteristics of the important ships, and diagrams showing in detail the fleet’s organization and command structure. Quinn took the package directly to the Office of Naval Intelligence. The admiral in charge glanced at the documents and handed them back to Quinn with the comment that “the community” knew that the SSU, like OSS befo
re it, was riddled with communists, and that ONI could not possibly have any association with SSU. For good measure, the admiral added that the reports were most likely deception material straight from Moscow.

  A few weeks later, an SSU operation netted a foreign diplomatic code. Colonel Quinn tucked the code into his briefcase and arranged an urgent appointment with Colonel Carter Clarke of the Army Security Agency, a forerunner of the National Security Agency (NSA). After a long wait, he was admitted into the colonel’s office. He handed the package to Clarke and explained the contents. The ASA man refused it, saying in effect, “Surely, you know what everybody in town thinks about SSU.”

  Quinn acknowledged that he knew exactly what some people were saying, but suggested that the colonel have an expert take ten minutes to check out the data. The analysis took a bit longer, but the material was authentic.

  In 1946 there seemed to be as many colonels as there were lieutenants on the loose in the Washington bureaucracy, and J. Edgar Hoover’s carefully nurtured reputation was at its peak. It was common knowledge that Hoover had resented General Donovan and his relationship with President Roosevelt, and considered OSS a collection of amateur interlopers in the intelligence world. Although the FBI was responsible for domestic security and counterintelligence activity, odds seemed against Hoover’s agreeing to deal personally with SSU, and the more so with a mere colonel. To his surprise, Quinn was granted an interview.

  When he took over SSU, Quinn explained, there were some 12,000 employees. Now there were about 1600, scattered from Washington to Vietnam. Half the Washington establishment seemed to assume most of the SSU staff were fellow travelers, if not outright communist spies. This was nonsense, Quinn said, but it had to be proved. If the FBI agreed to check the political and criminal backgrounds of the SSU staff, Quinn would provide complete background data on all employees.

  Hoover, who was convinced that throughout the war he had been both ignored and upstaged by General Donovan, was obviously surprised by Quinn’s straightforward request for help, but immediately agreed to begin the investigations.

  Sensing that he was on a roll, Quinn suggested that if Director Hoover were to name one of his officers as liaison to SSU things might be speeded up. This was the beginning of what became the postwar relationship between the FBI and CIA. Despite occasional setbacks and interagency collisions, this essential relationship has continued to serve the country well.

  The FBI’s initial sorting out of the SSU staff background data revealed only one potentially serious security case. Shades of Martha Dodd in Berlin, a young supply clerk was discovered to be romantically involved with a Soviet diplomat. She was fired. There was, of course, more Soviet intelligence involvement with OSS than that, but the intensive security reviews had not ripened at this juncture. (It was at about this time that U.S. cryptologists began to break into Soviet intelligence cable traffic—code name VENONA—passing between Washington, New York, and Moscow. These often fragmented messages would eventually give a revealing picture of the strenuous efforts the NKVD and Soviet military intelligence made to break into OSS.)

  The tangled backgrounds of some of the anti-fascist refugees who served OSS well and bravely were at the least murky and at the best might have taken a long time to clarify. In fairness it seemed wiser to refuse the applications of those who were unlikely ever to receive full security-clearance status rather than risk having to dismiss them after they had invested months or more in their intelligence career. With the help of SSU’s security officer, Peer de Silva, a West Pointer who had served in personnel security with the Manhattan Project, we dropped those whom we were certain would have subsequent problems. To avoid any possibly unwarranted black mark in anyone’s record, we found non-security reasons for failing to continue to employ them.

  Throughout the civil service there was a common practice against employing homosexuals. This reflected the prevailing practice in state and local governments, but was most rigidly enforced in agencies envolved with classified information.* This prohibition was based primarily on the assumption that homosexuals were more subject to blackmail than their straight colleagues. Whatever truth there may have been in this, the world’s security services had been highly sensitized to homosexual security problems by an agent who had been uncovered a year before World War I.

  The Redl case is so bald an example of a successful spy that even a century later it is worth a moment’s reflection. Alfred Redl, the son of a railway clerk, grew up in Galicia, an impoverished Austro-Hungarian province. Redl chose the army as an escape from poverty, and qualified for military cadet school. In time, he was admitted to the Imperial War College—an accomplishment for an officer with none of the social credentials and financial support typical of the Austro-Hungarian officer corps. After a sabbatical year in Russia, with no responsibility other than to keep his eyes open and to learn the language, Captain Redl was appointed to the elite, four hundred-man General Staff Corps. He had fashioned an exemplary career in the caste-ridden Austro-Hungarian army, but was a less perfect soldier than his role-playing suggested.

  Redl had spun hopelessly into debt keeping up with the swank that came easily to the well-funded aristocrats with whom he served. The costs involved in supporting his hidden homosexual life added to the financial burden.

  The young officer’s first General Staff assignment was to the intelligence bureau, the Kundschafts Stelle. In 1900 most ambitious officers would have considered it a ticket to oblivion. Redl reasoned that he could rouse the somnolent office and exploit it for his own advancement.

  In Russia, the chief of intelligence regarded the young captain’s assignment as a gift. Redl had attracted the attention of Russian intelligence during his sabbatical year. His homosexual activity was monitored, and his debts were uncovered. On form, there could be no better recruitment target than the officer with de facto responsibility for all espionage and counterintelligence activity of the Imperial General Staff. And who might be more likely to succumb to an approach than a closeted but aggressive homosexual whose combined salary and allowances for three years would not cover his current debts?

  The Russians were blunt. Redl would be well paid for military and political information. If he refused, the General Staff would be alerted to the extent of his debt, and shown that the underlying reason was the blackmail payments, the consequence of his hidden sex life. Along with the military data, Redl would also identify Austrian agents operating in Russia and, more important, report on German and Italian military and political relations with the Dual Monarchy. To bolster Redl’s reputation, the Russian case officer would feed him information on expendable Russian agents operating against Austria-Hungary.

  After five successful and well-publicized years in the intelligence bureau, Redl was appointed chief of staff of a military corps, a step toward further promotion. In 1911 he received his last decoration, the “Expression of Supreme Satisfaction”—an award of such distinction that it could only be presented by Emperor Franz Josef.

  In May 1913 a glitch in the communications system—perhaps the most common weakness in espionage operations—closed the Redl case. Caught in a trap set for an unidentified agent, Redl asked permission to commit suicide. In the manner of a penny dreadful—and perhaps an effort to protect Franz Josef’s government from scandal—Redl was obliged with a pistol and a single bullet. One of the most productive spies in history died without any interrogation.

  The inventory of Redl’s effects gives a measure of his motivation. A hundred sixty cases of champagne were cellared at his posh Vienna quarters. His wardrobe contained more than a hundred dress shirts, a score of uniforms, and a dozen fur-trimmed greatcoats. A locked closet held ball gowns, lingerie, makeup, and other transvestite fixings.

  Critics who dispute the value of spies should remember Redl. During his years as a Russian spy, he disclosed every detail of the Austro-Hungarian military forces, he blinded the General Staff—and to a degree the German military as well—to the existence
of some seventy-five Russian divisions. In the months before the outbreak of war, it would have been impossible to revise the mass of these plans, or to create an entirely new family of codes and ciphers. Redl’s treason gave the empire’s enemies every military and political advantage. With good reason, the Austrian press referred to Redl as “the hangman of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

  Homosexual activity was a criminal offense in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was not necessarily at the root of his recruitment. Redl’s career-long record shows a voracious appetite for money and suggests that even without the threat of blackmail, the Russians might simply have bought him.

  When first on the General Staff, Redl worked with another young officer, Theodor Koerner. Fifty years later, Koerner, then president of the Austrian Republic, told a young American writer that he remembered Redl well. They often met for coffee. “Like everyone else who knew him, I liked Alfred very much. He was always dignified—entirely the gentleman—but in a very friendly way.… He knew a great deal about military and international affairs, but more than that, his knowledge of human behavior was startling.”* And so it must have been for this prototypical penetration agent.