A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  For some time I had sensed that Dulles considered me a specialist in FI—foreign intelligence collection—and I suspected that he thought I lacked a full measure of his own deep interest in political action, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, black propaganda, economic warfare, paramilitary operations, and all the other aspects of clandestine subversive activity.

  “Mind,” he said, “I know full well that intelligence collection can be vital.”

  For a moment I suspected that he was preparing to serve me a second helping of the same bone, something along the line, “Bully for FI … but … ” with the important part of the message coming after the conjunction. Whatever might follow, Dulles was right in assuming that I considered intelligence collection the bedrock operational activity.

  “What I’m getting down to, Dick, is that no matter how important collection is, in the short and even the long run, it just doesn’t cost very much.”

  This really was a surprise. In what I was now beginning to perceive as my innocence, I’d always thought that the nickel-and-dime costs involved in running spies were a very large plus. The Pentagon had recently informed CIA that the recruitment and exploitation of Soviet military intelligence officer Major Pyotr Popov in Austria had already saved the Department of Defense an estimated half-billion dollars in research funds. Popov was costing us less than $4000 a year. Even in those early days, it was electronic operations, support to various liaison services, global radio intercept systems, and other monitoring activity that consumed the bulk of the intelligence budgets. Half a decade of spy wages and the combined expense of all the associated espionage paraphernalia would easily be covered by the cost of a single up-to-snuff Air Force bomber.

  “Let me make this clear,” Dulles continued. “We have to face the fact that because espionage is relatively cheap it will probably always seem inconsequential to some of our less informed friends on the Hill—in both houses of Congress. They’re accustomed to dealing in billions. What kind of impression can it make when I come along and ask for a few hundred thousand dollars and a bag of pennies? Believe me, I know the way they think up there. If there’s no real money involved, it can’t be important, and they just won’t pay much attention to us.”

  I let this pass as a rhetorical observation, but my expression must have struck Dulles.

  “For all the responsibility we’ve been given, we’re still living on a shoestring. Just look at our real estate. You operations people are working in those shacks down by the Reflecting Pool.” Dulles was right about that—the buildings were in such rotten shape that the repairs needed repairing.

  “And if that’s not enough,” Dulles continued, “you operations people spend more time getting to and from my office than it takes to deal with the problems you’ve come to discuss.”

  It was easy to agree. The DCI, his immediate staff, and various administrative offices were still housed in the former OSS premises at 2230 E Street, a fifteen-minute trip from the Directorate for Plans offices stretched out along the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As our responsibilities increased, the distance between the DCI and the operations offices became more of a problem every week.

  “Make no mistake,” Dulles said. “The way we’re going, our responsibilities are running way ahead of our budget, and there’s a legitimate and growing market for covert action.”

  This observation came at what I have come to consider the high tide of covert action. In August 1953, Mohammed Mossadegh, who had undercut the authority of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, was ousted in a deft covert action. The following year in Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, the leftist president, opted to abandon his post rather than risk what we had led him to believe would be an armed invasion by opposing Guatemalan dissidents. This transpired a few weeks after Czechoslovakia had delivered some 2000 tons of arms Arbenz had solicited. U.S. operations, both authorized and initiated by President Eisenhower, were conducted with relatively little cost and a minimum of violence. Although the Eisenhower administration was in a position to deny its role in these actions, it could scarcely have done so in a convincing manner. At the time the USSR was so clearly recognized as an aggressive and dangerous antagonist, the plausibility of such a denial did not seem to matter.

  I did not need Allen Dulles to convince me of the emphasis being placed on the Agency’s covert action capability. It was obvious to me that the impact of the back-to-back operations in Iran and Guatemala—and another earlier and relatively unsung success in thwarting communist influence in the 1948 election in Italy—had registered heavily in the White House and with John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state. Our extensive support of the non-communist labor movements in France and Italy, and quiet underwriting of the non-communist, intellectual left were also impressive. In a very short time, and in my view with perhaps too little reflection, covert action had become a favored instrument. Diplomacy had its uses, but in those years the impatient Eisenhower administration had convinced itself that even the most effective diplomacy took too much time and the result was often uncertain.

  I had little quarrel with the scores of proposed covert action activities that I had approved as they crossed my desk. Some of the published total numbers of CA operations the Agency ran in those years are misleading. Most were inconsequential: a few dollars to a democratic political party outfunded by a local communist front; an editor on an influential newspaper cultivated by a respected left-wing but anti-communist intellectual he might otherwise never have met; enough money to permit a feminist group to finance a campaign to increase the women’s vote in a close upcoming election; and relatively small funds allocated to encourage editorial and news coverage of issues that some of the foreign press might have ignored. In many small countries without extensive foreign intelligence services, this level of activity is quietly conducted by diplomats stationed in embassies and consulates. This is low-key, unexceptionable stuff in comparison with a handful of heavier, more nearly strategic CA operations.

  All the same, on the way back to my office I had much to think about. However important as an activity standing between effective diplomatic pressure and open intervention, strategic CA operations were high-risk ventures, not to be lightly undertaken. I was convinced that as long as Frank Wisner was deputy director for plans, and the senior covert action operations authority, the two of us could maintain the right balance between espionage and covert action. Irrespective of any possible White House pressure, Frank was not likely to be stampeded into unwise CA activity. Dulles’s rather cynical approach to the Agency’s budget would soon vanish as the costs of developing the U-2 aircraft and other outerspace surveillance capabilities would in a sense go right through the roof. His concern for what he perceived as my failure to recognize strategic CA operations as a foreign policy panacea would remain throughout his tenure as DCI.

  Chapter 11

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  THE NOISY SIDE OF THE STREET

  However long it took the staff car to thread its way back to my office, it got there before I had fully digested Dulles’s briefing. In the years since AWD’s expression of his enthusiasm for covert action operations, I’ve had time, and certainly occasion enough, to reflect on it. One thing is certain. No aspect of CIA operations has attracted as much public comment or as many screams of outrage as the operations now categorized as covert action. In the years since the early Dulles era, my own views have matured and hardened.

  The term “covert action (CA)” slipped into the CIA intelligence lexicon sometime after the Agency was established in 1947. Although the various activities now encompassed by that coinage have been part of secret intelligence activity throughout history, the term was not used by OSS, nor do I recall seeing it in any of the wartime British documents. The genesis probably came in December 1947 when the National Security Council made CIA responsible for “Covert Psychological Operations.” The difference between “covert” (which my desk dictionary defines as “hidden”) and “secret” (defined as “kept from knowl
edge … or hidden”) is a nuance too subtle for me. A subsequent National Security Council document dropped “Psychological” from the expression, and simply authorized CIA to carry out “Covert Operations.” Because this term can be construed to embrace all manner of secret intelligence activity, it quickly evolved into the more accurate and restrictive expression “Covert Action (CA).” The word “action” is meant to distinguish CA from espionage. A colleague describes espionage as the “theft of secrets.” Most of the results of successful CA operations are clearly to be seen—an election won or lost, a shift in the editorial position of a newspaper, the increased activity of an opposition party. In contrast, successful espionage goes unnoticed, with the victim unaware that a secret has been compromised.

  In OSS, General Donovan had made a useful distinction between paramilitary operations and political and psychological activity. Paramilitary operations were conducted by small units of uniformed troops infiltrated into strategic areas to train and operate with armed indigenous resistance forces. In contrast to the uniformed personnel, subject by treaty to treatment as POWs if captured, the other OSS branches infiltrated agents into enemy territory to collect intelligence, conduct sabotage, and support clandestine resistance activity. If detected, agents disguised as civilians were subject to execution as spies. The aptly named OSS unit Morale Operations (MO) was responsible for clandestine political, psychological, propaganda, and economic warfare activities. In the field, these operations were conducted by agents.

  The 1948 National Security Council decision to bundle such diverse endeavors as paramilitary campaigns and the overthrow of foreign governments with more modest activities—many of which might accurately be described as clandestine public relations—under this new and ambiguous name may have created the impression that CA activity was an invention of CIA. Not so.

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  Covert action is as old as secret intelligence. George Washington was the first American president to make use of it, and he occasionally enlisted Benjamin Franklin’s help. Congress established the Committee of Secret Correspondence for “the sole purpose of corresponding with our friends in Great Britain” and elsewhere abroad in 1775. Funds were allocated to pay “such agents” as the committee might dispatch. The committee collected intelligence, initiated covert actions, devised ciphers, opened mail, and acquired foreign publications for use in analysis. In 1790, Congress granted the President a “Contingency Fund for Foreign Intercourse”—perhaps then a less ambiguous expression. The expenditures were neither accounted for nor audited by Congress. Money from this fund was used in a secret attempt to ransom the American seamen held hostage by “Arab terrorists” on the Barbary Coast.

  One of Ben Franklin’s CA operations, concocted in 1777, has always appealed to me. A letter purportedly from Frederick II of Hesse Kassel to King George III urging the British to make more aggressive use of the German mercenaries in battling the American insurgents was forged. The prince reminded King George that in addition to the fee he was being paid for the use of his troops, he was also due a comforting bonus for each soldier killed. As of the moment, the prince complained, too few of his troops were being killed to make the venture as profitable as he had been led to expect. He also suggested that it might be more humane to allow the German wounded to die rather than keep them alive to live wretchedly as cripples.

  The forgery added a wallop to the various open offers of amnesty and free farmland available to Hessian deserters. It was a well-targeted, inexpensive, self-contained covert action. Of the 30,000 German mercenaries employed by the British, more than 5000 are known to have deserted.

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  In 1946 when we were struggling to keep SSU up and running, no one gave a thought to the fact that most of the operations people who had opted to stay in the service were specialists in espionage or counterintelligence. The OSS political and psychological warfare operatives seemed spontaneously to have scattered at the end of the war. The fact that covert action had not figured in the discussions on how secret intelligence was to be organized and who would control it may have convinced the OSS Morale Operations specialists that there would be no role for them in the new organization. When Steve Penrose briefed me on my responsibilities in Central Europe, he made no reference to any covert action.

  This was unfortunate. The political and psychological warfare veterans were well qualified for peacetime secret intelligence work. Those I knew were intellectually oriented and might have provided a useful counterweight to some of the enthusiastic young activists who did remain. I suspect that another reason so few of the MO veterans chose to remain with the outfit was that many were older and had more of a stake in resuming their established careers than risking a commitment to something as chancy as SSU seemed to be.

  Lothar Metzl, an Austrian who had emigrated to the United States sometime after Hitler’s Anschluss, was an exception to the exodus of OSS Morale Operations veterans. From the day I met him until his retirement, Lothar looked as if he had just stepped out of a Vienna coffeehouse—rumpled, quizzical, and slightly preoccupied. He had begun his career in musical theater in Vienna, and in this country worked on the Broadway production Vienna Sings. In OSS, Lothar wrote and recorded a series of songs by Marlene Dietrich that were used to spice the OSS broadcasts to the Wehrmacht. Dietrich’s OSS records were never put on the open market. Years later, Ernest Hemingway, a friend of the singer, rashly offered a considerable price for a set of the recordings. Lothar wrote Hemingway’s publisher offering to swap a collection for the manuscript of a Hemingway short story. There was no response.

  Lothar weathered the CIA growing pains and turned his lifelong study of the Comintern and various national Communist Party organizations to professional use. For some twenty-five years, he served as the Counterintelligence Staff’s expert on international communist activity. Lothar monitored every slight shift in Communist Party policy or doctrine as accurately as a seismograph. He also could retain the attention of congressional committees while enlightening them on what he slyly referred to as the “broader aspects of the movement.”

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  If Stalin had intended to force the United States and its allies to rearm and rally to contain Soviet expansionism, he could not have created policies more calculated to achieve that end than those he implemented. While the Allies were disarming, Stalin’s three-million-man army had hunkered down and then began rapidly to embed itself in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. The USSR’s 1940 annexation of the Baltic countries—Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—was scarcely subject for further discussion. The prospects for open elections in most of Eastern Europe were nil. Rather than aid in the economic reconstruction of the Soviet-occupied areas, Stalin’s policy was one of outright exploitation. His support of guerrilla activities in Greece and China was masked but was as blatantly obvious as the Soviet support to subversive elements throughout Western Europe.

  In February 1946 an eight-thousand-word cable from George F. Kennan, U.S. chargé d’affaires in the USSR, jolted Washington policymakers into recognizing the Soviet Union as a tangible enemy and an aggressive threat to this country and the Western democracies. This resulted in the Truman Doctrine—a defense line, this far and no farther, drawn on the political landscape—and the Marshall Plan, a uniquely generous offer to fund the reconstruction of the European economies of both victors and vanquished.

  By July 1947, Frank Wisner had had enough of sitting on the sidelines. He left his law firm to accept a post as number two in the State Department’s Office of Occupied Territories. His immediate responsibility was to serve as State’s representative on an interagency group studying the role of psychological warfare in combating the USSR’s global political aggression. It was soon apparent to the White House, Department of State, and Pentagon that a more active response to the subversive aspects of Soviet foreign policy than could be made by the overt agencies was required. A choice had to be made between giving the responsibility fo
r clandestine political, psychological, and paramilitary warfare to a new agency or to a component of an existing department. Secretary of State George Marshall insisted on controlling policy, but did not want to encumber, let alone stain, American diplomacy with secret activity. He would leave the covert response to Soviet subversion to another agency.

  CIA’s role in covert action actually began before the government had recognized a continuing need for such activity. In 1947 it was apparent that the impending elections in Italy and France might well deliver the governments of those countries into the hands of the Communist Party and thus Stalin. On a broad front, U.S. government and private support was organized to help the non-communist labor unions and democratic political parties in both countries. CIA slipped funds to the non-communist organizations, developed press campaigns, and helped rally public support abroad. This support and the electorate’s common sense carried the day: the communist parties lost the elections in Italy and France.

  In one important sense the success of these efforts was a mixed blessing—it alerted policymakers to the existence of an all-but-forgotten tool. It was thought that covert action, properly executed, meant never having to wait in the hope that diplomatic activity might resolve a snarled foreign-policy problem. A CA operation might solve the problem in weeks. There was another important consideration: if, as unlikely as it seemed, an operation were ever to go awry, the failed effort could be plausibly denied. It was in this sanguine atmosphere that the new covert action organization and programs were established.