A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  But international secret intelligence is a twenty-four-hour-a-day activity. It may be 3 a.m. in Washington, but somewhere on earth it is high noon and a crisis may be on the boil. Some of the late-night problems were resolved in cryptic telephone calls to a watch officer; others required a return to the office. In the days before electronic beepers, this meant being tied night and day to a telephone. It also put a premium on having the right people serving as watch officers. To be avoided were both the bold souls and the nervous nellies. The first were all too prone to make important decisions on their own; the nervous nellies were unwilling to resolve—or even to postpone until dawn—the least significant problems.

  There is an element involved in secret intelligence management that writers have neglected. I doubt very much that there is any government activity encompassing the mix of personnel as that in OSS and CIA. As a division chief I might in an average week deal substantively with a high school graduate who had learned two languages while working on a Mediterranean tramp steamer, a history major too bored to remain an academic until given tenure, a young newsman who insisted on interesting work but whose family needed the security of a civil service job, a professional ballplayer with an M.A. and a bad knee, a clutch of bright graduates of state universities and a few from the Ivy League. I doubt that any manager can come to know and evaluate such a variegated collection of people by studying personnel records and doing business across an office desk. In my case it took a measure of after-hours association to develop the necessary understanding of my colleagues. In retrospect, these relationships remain some of my most valued career memories.

  Frank Wisner routinely worked somewhat longer office hours and devoted more of his private time to work-related social activity than I did. In saying this, I neither boast nor complain. We were younger in those days, we were fascinated with our work, and we recognized its importance. Frank knew the Agency people with whom he worked personally very well, but much of his after-hours social life involved key people in other agencies. Dinner chez Wisner was always an intellectual workout with the brightest Washington had to offer. Sadly, Frank was to pay dearly for his deep dedication to his responsibilities.

  By the mid-fifties our postwar operations had taken shape. Aggressive personnel recruitment netted an excellent crop of young officers. The training courses, which were initially based on the wartime curriculum, improved radically as our early postwar efforts were studied and brought into the classrooms. At all levels, in the field and at headquarters, our supervisors profited from their increasing experience.

  The postwar operating rules were much the same as those established during the war. The difference was improved communication, the easing of travel, and a less frantic peacetime pace. This meant that our Washington headquarters was kept informed in detail, and was in position to approve and supervise every significant operational activity. In most cases senior and mid-level headquarters personnel had served in the field, and many of those in the field had done time in Washington. This helped dampen the generic conflict between the field operatives—who considered themselves front-line, twenty-four-hour-a-day activists, making do from foxholes, and who pictured the headquarters staff as forty-hour-a-week second-guessing bureaucrats. For their part, the headquarters personnel enjoyed imagining themselves fighting endless bureaucratic battles in defense of the field operatives who were battening on their overseas cost-of-living allowances while not handling agents exactly as the desk officers would have done if they were in the field.

  In the early days, balancing the equation between stifling initiative by attempting to micromanage operations from the headquarters desk and allowing field operatives a free hand in making high-risk decisions required constant monitoring. The possible consequences—intended and otherwise—of most operations are best judged by senior headquarters personnel who have a broader and more current view of policy and security implications.

  Our initial approaches to intelligence collection in the USSR and Eastern Europe were heavily freighted with the high-priority requirement to provide what was called early warning. This was another manifestation of the Pearl Harbor syndrome—never again. The simple solution—seen ever so clearly by the intelligence consumers in Washington—was for CIA to establish agents in Moscow and in position to uncover any Politburo plan for the Red Army to march to the English Channel. This was a logical requirement, but at the time the possibility of recruiting and running any such sources was as improbable as placing resident spies on the planet Mars. Throughout this period the urgent demand for intelligence—not to say information—on the USSR and its satellites was intense and relentless. All of our most ambitious operations were undertaken on the assumption of the policymakers that war might come at any time. The pressure for results ranged from repeated instructions to do “something” to exasperated demands to try “anything.”

  The most practical, if least dramatic, response to this requirement was radio intercept, aerial reconnaissance along the periphery of the communist states, and the de visu activity of CIA personnel and military attachés under official cover in the target areas. There were two exceptions. Because travel was relatively free from Vienna and Berlin we were able to recruit and run agents throughout the Soviet zones of occupation in Austria and Germany.

  The first two decades of the Cold War were marked by an intense concern about Soviet policy on Berlin. Were the Russians going to provoke a crisis and attempt to oust the British, French, and American occupying forces from their legal positions in West Berlin? In March 1948, General Lucius D. Clay, the senior American official in Berlin, sent an alarming cable to Washington stating that war might “come with dramatic suddenness.” The Agency was more reserved: our estimate said there was no “reliable evidence” that the USSR would resort to military action within the next sixty days. So far, so good, but the Soviets continued to harass Western access to and from Berlin by road and the railway. On June 20 the Soviets took the final step and closed the rail and road connections between Berlin and the Western-occupied areas of Germany. Electrical power was cut off, and food supplies from East Germany were stopped. The blockade was complete. President Truman responded with an airlift that supplied the necessities for the West Berliners to sustain life and was designed to convince the USSR that we had every intention of remaining in Berlin.

  Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949, but throughout my tenure it seemed that every foreign policy issue, from the establishment of NATO to the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, was to resonate in Berlin. The Berlin base, subordinate to the Agency chief in West Germany, was to prove itself again and again by the intelligence reporting it garnered in East Berlin and the Soviet-occupied areas of East Germany.

  In Washington, our intelligence consumers became fixed upon a second-best solution to the early warning problem. CIA was to infiltrate agents into the western border areas of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The notion was that when the agents we called line crossers—either professional smugglers, or émigrés and refugees familiar with the target area—had transited the Soviet-occupied areas in Germany and Austria, the problem was half solved. All that remained was to nip across the eastern border into Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. Which is to say that all the agent had to do was skip through the minefields, dodge the electronic detection devices, and vault the electrified wire fences while avoiding the patrols and observation towers.

  Once beyond the sparsely populated and heavily policed border areas, the agent was to make his way to a village where he would recruit a relative or friend who, with eyes peeled for alarming troop movements, might serve as a resident agent. Except for the facts that without the motivation fueled by the hot war, and that any agent intelligent enough to function efficiently once across the border would be far too well informed to undertake any such mission, these notions were a replay of the Allen Dulles and General Donovan wartime positions.

  In peacetime, professional smugglers, usually simple souls at the lower edge
of the criminal world, were accustomed to working with the connivance of the border guards. By the late forties, an activity based on bribing communist border guards offered no future whatsoever for any entrepreneur. In Europe, we were saddled with this cross-border responsibility until the mid-1950s. There may have been exceptions, but I do not recall any significant results from any of these time-consuming operations. We squandered hundreds of man-hours proving the truth of this.

  Our most dramatic approach involved inserting agents—recent refugees, or deserters, usually Red Army enlisted men—into the USSR by parachute or small boat landings along the Baltic coast. As one cynical case officer expressed it, parachute operations into the USSR proved two things. Because no aircraft were lost, the USSR’s defense of its airspace was but a fraction as effective as its near 100 percent control of its borders and its pervasive internal security measures. The second proof, he said, was that the law of gravity was as strong in the Ukraine as it was in our parachute training areas. Some brief radio contact was maintained with a handful of the inserted agents, but the effort was as much a failure as the cross-border operations.

  None of the cross-border operations produced any significant intelligence, but the backup programs which involved us in an intensive study of life in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were highly profitable. Documents of all varieties were collected, and refugees were extensively questioned on local conditions and daily life. A wealth of current political and economic information flowed from the refugees making their way west through the relatively open doors in Vienna and Berlin into the refugee reception centers. As useful as this was, it did not provide the strategic intelligence it was our responsibility to uncover. It did, however, give us an up-to-date understanding of the communist world’s internal security controls and everyday life in our target areas. Those of us who were familiar with the Nazi Gestapo soon learned that Hitler’s secret police had not been in the same league as Stalin’s. This should not have come as a surprise—the Soviet secret police had the advantage of some two decades’ more experience than the Gestapo. In time, we were to learn that Stalin envied Hitler’s security services, and prodded his own secret police to ape them. This was but one of Stalin’s many dead-wrong judgments. There was nothing the KGB could have learned from the Nazis.

  By far the most ambitious, and in the end successful, of our operational efforts was the recruitment of Soviet and Eastern European officials stationed abroad. This activity ran alongside a campaign to encourage and solicit the defection of communist officials who for security reasons were unable to remain in place, or who simply were not willing to run the risk of staying on the job as an agent.

  As a division chief in the early fifties, I always budgeted time for a final interview with operations officers leaving for field assignments. It was my last chance to underline our priorities, and to insist that we risked becoming complacent running agents who at best were only in position to peek over the security fences the Communist countries had constructed around their policymaking and military headquarters at home, and the embassies and other installations abroad. There was no way the Agency could provide the White House and other intelligence consumers with the strategic intelligence they demanded as long as our sources were on the outside, looking in. The only way to fulfill our mission was to develop inside sources—spies who could sit beside the policymakers, listen to their debates, and read their mail.

  I would point out that defectors were important—certainly the next best thing to penetration. But defector information was finite: it ceased the moment the defector stepped out of his office and crossed to our side. Because many of our officers had been briefed by defectors, it was not necessary to stress the fact that even after months of interrogation and resettlement, defectors were still valuable—to be consulted like a shelf of fine reference books.

  Supervisor by supervisor, officer by officer, this approach began to take hold. There remained problems aplenty. As in headquarters, so it was in the field—there was always more than enough work to go around. Abroad, it was essential that everyone maintain some level of cover. As long as Austria and Germany remained under military occupation, relatively large offices could be maintained inexpensively under nominal military cover. Elsewhere, cover came more dearly and demanded some percentage of each officer’s working day. In high-risk areas, operatives working under “deep cover” were sometimes required to spend more than forty hours a week at the cover job. In some areas this meant that the time spent on operations was no more than what might otherwise have been spent on a weekend hobby.

  There was also the operational support structure—we called it “plumbing”—to be dealt with. In the occupied areas of Germany and Austria, the operational plumbing was comprehensive, and included safe meeting places, surveillance agents, operational vehicles, letter drops, and technicians trained to make quick audio installations, handle clandestine photography, fashion short-range electronic communications, cope with secret inks, and rig simple versions of some of the gadgets James Bond always had at hand. Incidentally, it sometimes seemed that the more impressive a device appeared in the workshop, the more fragile it was and the more likely it was to fail in the field. It took some on-the-job experience before case officers learned not to fling these prima donna utensils into the back seat of an automobile, but to treat them with the delicate hand they required.

  Field offices were often saddled with a variety of peripheral responsibilities. In his persistent effort to prove the Agency’s value, Allen Dulles too often welcomed responsibility that belonged elsewhere. This “can do” attitude (Dulles would have hated this expression) was to plague us. In the early days, some complex visa applications had to be investigated. Illegal East-West trade was of some importance, but could often be as well covered by embassies as by CIA. Some national Communist Parties were valid targets, but only in areas where there were close ties to the USSR. The foreign policies of allied and neutral countries were of interest, but were the proper responsibility of embassy political officers who maintained the traditionally open relations with their foreign office opposite numbers.

  In NATO and neutral countries, an important CIA responsibility was to maintain effective liaison with the local intelligence and security organizations. With the exception of the obvious world powers, very few smaller nations maintained foreign intelligence services. Most were primarily concerned with internal security. Throughout the Cold War in Europe, these domestic security services were the front line of defense against Soviet espionage and political subversion. The ability of the indigenous services to maintain effective surveillance of illegal Soviet activity within their borders was critical. To varying degrees, the allied services were happy to provide local information in return for a steady supply of the intelligence and security data we collected worldwide. When, for example, a Soviet “diplomat” was transferred from Latin America to a European post, it might take months of surveillance before the local security service could determine whether the Russian was a diplomat or an intelligence officer. If the Agency had made a positive identification of the Russian in an earlier posting, hundreds of hours of street work might be saved or redirected. Today there is a similar identity of interest in the activity of the various terrorist organizations.

  It was tempting for our field offices to make a flashy showing against the peripheral objectives rather than continue to flail away at the hard targets that often seemed beyond our grasp, but we kept at it. The first break came in Vienna in 1952.

  Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, then a major in the Soviet military intelligence service (GRU), was born a peasant in an impoverished village along the Volga, far to the northeast of Moscow. He was thirteen and proudly wearing his first pair of leather shoes when his older brother insisted that at least one member of the peasant family have a bare-bones education at one of the special schools being established in the peasant areas throughout the USSR. Three years later, young Pyotr won acceptance at a middle school. In 1940,
after the USSR invaded Finland, and the Red Army was still desperately trying to replace the 35,000 officers eliminated in Stalin’s purges, Popov’s school was abruptly transformed into a military academy.

  Weeks after the German tanks rolled across the Soviet border in 1941, Popov, with six years of formal education and twelve months’ military training, was commissioned a lieutenant. In March 1945, Popov, by then a twenty-three-year-old battle-seasoned captain, was selected for the Frunze Military Academy. Assignment to this school was the first step in the education of promising Red Army officers. Popov, who never overestimated his abilities, would point out that this was less an honor than it seemed. Wily combat commanders preferred to keep their best officers at hand, and would select less promising candidates to fill any quota—no matter what honor might be involved—that included transfer out of the combat areas.

  A few weeks before his graduation, Popov’s dogged struggle to keep up with his classmates won him another opportunity. He was offered assignment to Glavnoe Razvedovatel’noe Upravlenie (GRU), the military intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Staff. This was another fluke. Popov’s most obvious qualification for assignment to the GRU was a manifestly clean security file—his peasant background was proof that he had never been exposed to unsuitable political influences or foreign entanglements of any kind. His combat career was undistinguished other than showing clearly that he followed orders and, like the qualities traditionally attributed to peasants, was able to take things as they came. Moreover, the GRU was desperate to replace the losses it had suffered during the war.

  If Popov accepted, he would face another three years of schooling at the Military Diplomatic Academy, the highest-level and most prestigious school in the Soviet system. The last thing he wanted was another round of academic work, and though he doubted his ability to complete it, he recognized the opportunity, and had recently married and was expecting a child. Once again Popov squeaked through to graduate in 1951. The Soviet Union had literally given this peasant the best it had to offer.