A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  By 1940 the first breaks were being made in messages encrypted on a cipher machine the Germans named ENIGMA. With increasing success, the British continued throughout the war to intercept and decipher the classified radio transmissions of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, and the intelligence services, the Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst. To my knowledge, X-2 was the only OSS unit that had daily access to the ULTRA product, and even this was restricted to the German intelligence communications.

  The importance of this cipher breakthrough can scarcely be overvalued. The collapse of Hitler’s Reich and the unconditional surrender of the German forces in 1945 has overshadowed the memory of just how convincingly the British were defeated in France in 1940, and that the remnants of the army evacuated from Dunkirk and the relatively weak RAF were all that stood between a cross-Channel invasion by the powerful Wehrmacht and the well-equipped Luftwaffe. The plight of British forces in the Mediterranean and Far East was no less desperate.

  In the course of the intensive security briefing and indoctrination of X-2 personnel, Churchill was quoted as saying that in 1941, when the British forces were stressed to the breakpoint, he would have sacrificed an entire, fully equipped army corps to preserve the secrecy of the ULTRA data. The ability to unbutton the most secret communications from the German high command, and Hitler personally, to the distant Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine commanders was without question a key element in the Allied victory over Germany. In the more narrow CI and security field, access to the German intelligence traffic was of equal importance. Without ULTRA it might have been a different war.

  No one has caught the essence of counterespionage better than Churchill, when in 1943 he remarked, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” The extremely sensitive exploitation of captured German agents who were turned, and continued to operate under British (and later joint British-American) control, rendered essential support to the deception operations protecting every important military initiative in Europe and the Near East.

  Because of ULTRA the British were able to neutralize and control all German intelligence sources in England, and many of the German agents in other areas. In the final preparation for Operation Overlord, when the estimate of German preparedness to face the cross-Channel invasion was critical, General Eisenhower’s G-2 was able to report that the German General Staff had no independent intelligence sources in the UK, and that the deception operations had not been compromised.

  Hours after the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches, the German high command delayed reinforcing the Normandy defense force, while dithering as to whether the landing was the real thing or a deception intended to cover an all-out attack in another area. When the V-1 buzz bombs and V-2 rockets were harassing London, the UK-based double agents reported that the bombs were falling some distance from the intended target. Berlin obligingly shifted the range, with the result that the weapons fell on sparsely inhabited and less strategic areas some distance from the intended London targets.

  It was one thing to protect ULTRA, and to blind and then deceive the enemy. It proved more of a problem to keep the ULTRA secret from an ally, even from an ally that had but recently cooperated with and signed a nonaggression treaty with Hitler. From very early on, Soviet intelligence had knowledge of the ULTRA breakthrough, and continuing access to as much of the deciphered traffic as its agents could slip to their Soviet masters. One agent in place in MI-6 had access to the deciphered German intelligence traffic. Others were securely situated at Bletchley Park, where the codebreakers, translators, editors, and clerical staffs worked on the deciphered material.

  Breaking into the ULTRA secret was not the only significant success of the Soviet intelligence services whose staff and senior agents had barely survived Stalin’s purges. Another chapter of operational success was disclosed in September 1945 when Igor Gouzenko, a GRU cipher clerk, walked out of the military intelligence offices in the Ottawa embassy with scores of highly classified GRU messages strapped to his midriff. His escape and desperate approach to Canadian authorities was a near thing, but successful. The documents he carried exposed a network of Soviet spies ranging from Canada to the United States and Britain.

  In Canada, twenty-two people were arrested and a trail uncovered that in the ensuing years would lead to the Rosenbergs in New York, to Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May, the British nuclear scientists, and provide positive proof that the Soviets had thoroughly penetrated the Top Secret Manhattan Project. This evidence of the extent and depth of Soviet espionage would finally unleash an overdue American and British counterintelligence attack.

  From the late 1920s the Soviet intelligence services had operated in the United States as if our open society were a well-stocked hunting preserve. As Hedda Massing remarked to a friend, “I could have walked into most of the government offices in Washington wearing a sandwich board saying ‘Soviet spy on the prowl,’ without attracting the least attention.” The hunting was so effortless that the Russian operatives failed to compartment many of their operations. By the time the FBI finished questioning Elizabeth Bentley, a Soviet operational bonne à tout faire who bolted out of the apparat in 1945, she had named more than one hundred agents and sympathizers of the two Soviet services. Whittaker Chambers was even more closely informed. The photograph of Alger Hiss standing a few feet behind President Roosevelt, who is seated across the conference table from Stalin at Yalta, catches the essence of the early CI problem.

  An exception to the sloppy handling of many of the American agents was the highly professional exploitation of Donald Maclean, who for much of World War II was first secretary in the British embassy in Washington. Maclean had a “Q” clearance and was responsible for liaison on atomic matters. He was one of the most important Soviet agents in the atomic field, and was in a position to keep Moscow thoroughly informed on British and American policy developments. He was unearthed through a break in the Soviet cipher system.

  Soviet intelligence did not limit its targets to officials; high-ranking, well-informed establishment figures were equally sought out as agents. The KGB’s peacetime effort to recruit Joseph Alsop, then one of the most prominent and respected American journalists, is a sour example of the techniques the Soviets had perfected over decades. When Alsop decided to make his first trip to the Soviet Union, he applied to the Soviet ambassador in Washington for a visa that would allow him to spend two or three weeks moving freely in the post-Stalin USSR. The visa was granted, and Joe arrived in Moscow in January 1957. He was well received and more favorably impressed by the intellectual and political climate than he had expected to be. Along with an extended session with Nikita Khrushchev, interviews with factory managers, and a trip to Siberia, Alsop participated in the social mixing of the diplomatic, journalistic, and artistic worlds in Moscow.

  In the course of a late-night gathering of Moscow bohemians, Alsop, a scrupulously closeted homosexual, responded to the advances of one of the guests. When the party broke up, the young man accompanied Joe to his hotel room. The next day, two of Alsop’s Russian partying companions took him aside and told him politely that he was in a serious jam. In the Soviet Union, homosexual relations were a serious criminal offense. After showing Alsop the photographs of his tryst which the police would use in court, the Russians said they might be able to square things if, once back in Washington, Joe would agree to help in the Soviet effort to develop better working relations with the United States. He would, of course, be well compensated for the time involved in this cooperation. If Alsop did not agree, the Russian police would have no alternative but to advise U.S. officials of Alsop’s criminal activity while a guest of the USSR and to proceed with court action.

  For all of their experience in rigging such incidents—a spiked drink being part of the setup—the KGB had chosen the wrong target. Shaken by his own stupidity, Alsop refused any semblance of cooperation with the KGB.

  The following morning, Alsop went to the U.S. embassy. A
mbassador Chip Bohlen, an old friend, was not in. Joe handed a sealed envelope to Bohlen’s secretary and left for a scheduled trip to Leningrad. When Bohlen read Alsop’s account of the incident, he summoned Joe back to Moscow, hustled him onto a plane and out of the USSR.

  In Washington, Alsop told his story to Frank Wisner, another old friend. Frank advised Alsop that there was no practical alternative but to report the incident to J. Edgar Hoover. Alsop agreed. The FBI director had long considered Alsop a troublesome reporter, and according to his custom in such incidents, made sure that the secretary of state, the attorney general, the secretary of defense, and President Eisenhower were fully informed.

  As threatened, the KGB mailed the photographs to various journalists, officials, and friends of Alsop. Joe’s friends and colleagues stood firm, the photographs were destroyed, and no public reference was made to the incident.

  Sometime later the KGB attempted to revive the operation and once again circulated the photographs. At this point, Joe had had enough and was prepared to make the story public. When he asked me about it, I advised him to remain silent rather than burden his family and friends with this long-ago embarrassment. Joe agreed with my suggestion that I quietly tell the KGB to knock it off. An Agency man whose cover job brought him into frequent diplomatic contact with a high-ranking KGB officer carried the message. On my behalf our man told the KGB that unless it stopped attempting to peddle this sordid story, the Agency would respond in kind, and with enough data to compromise several KGB officers.

  This episode ended with a net loss to the KGB. The impact of the photographs on those who saw them was more convincing than any of the security briefings routinely offered to officials and others visiting the USSR. Security personnel were again reminded of how aggressively hostile intelligence agencies work on their home terrain. Joe Alsop’s well-known hostility to police states—communist or otherwise—was intensified, and he remained a staunchly independent political commentator until he retired from journalism in 1974.

  —

  The Agency’s counterintelligence effort was established and shaped by two men as different from one another as seemed possible. Bill Harvey collected guns. Jim Angleton bred orchids.

  William K. Harvey graduated from Indiana University with a law degree in 1937 and joined the FBI in 1940. After a falling-out with J. Edgar Hoover, Harvey left the FBI in 1947 and joined the Agency a few weeks later—a move that infuriated Hoover. Harvey was a conspicuous exception to the profile of many CIA senior officers. He had never been abroad, and had no foreign language or professional experience in foreign affairs or intelligence collection. Although there was a fair sprinkling of Ivy League graduates in OSS and among those who stayed on with the Agency, there was among most of the senior postwar staff an unmistakable patina not so much of Ivy, but of some experience abroad. Harvey made no accommodation to the office climate entirely new to him. If anything, he appeared deliberately to intensify the aspect and solid attitudes of his midwestern background.

  The first writer who characterized Bill as “CIA’s James Bond” had either never read Ian Fleming’s books, seen a Bond movie, or caught a glimpse of Harvey. It was always obvious that Bill would never win the battle with his waistline—he was much more than heavyset. A more pertinent description would have concentrated on his phenomenal memory, aggressive approach to business, and knowledge of Soviet espionage in the United States. I learned to have time at hand before asking him a question on any aspect of it.

  One of Bill’s most marked eccentricities was his enthusiasm for guns. No matter that his colleagues who had parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe or worked with guerrillas in the Far East would never again willingly choose to carry a weapon, Bill was rarely seen without a pistol stuffed into his belt. The professional persona he appeared to favor was that of a senior police officer, a master of the terrain assigned to him, wily, informed, perceptive, and deeply patriotic. He was also deliberately blunt and loudly outspoken, qualities that, with his heavy drinking, were eventually to catch up with him. Bill was not, and never pretended to be, a man for all seasons. But what he did best, he did very well.

  James Angleton projected an entirely different image. Although he was born in Boise, Idaho, in 1917, he lived with his family some years in Italy, where his father represented an American firm. Angleton attended Malvern, a British public school, and had worked in France on a summer vacation. After graduation from Yale, he spent a year at Harvard Law School before entering the Army as a private soldier in 1943. After twelve weeks of basic training, Angleton was offered a choice of adjutant general officer cadet school or assignment to OSS. The freshly minted corporal opted for OSS. Jim’s father, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Angleton, an early OSS recruit, was serving on General Donovan’s staff pending an assignment to Italy.

  Jim was assigned to the Italian desk in X-2 London and commissioned in 1944. He was transferred to X-2 Italy when an OSS station was established in Rome in 1944. A year later, he was named chief of X-2 Italy in 1945, and in 1946 became chief of station. Jim remained in Italy until 1947 and the signing of the peace treaty that ended the military occupation of that country.

  As a young man, Jim was bone thin, gaunt, and aggressively intellectual in aspect. His not entirely coincidental resemblance to T. S. Eliot was intensified by a European wardrobe, studious manner, heavy glasses, and lifelong interest in poetry. Jim’s eccentricities were as pronounced as Harvey’s. To the degree possible in a bureaucracy, he kept his own hours, was not often in his office before nine-thirty, and even more rarely did he leave before 7 p.m. He loathed staff meetings and seldom spoke up. I suppose he must sometime have had lunch at his desk or conceivably in the senior officers’ mess, but I recall no such event. Good restaurants were his venue of choice. His lunch “hour” was a lengthy extension of his office time—devoted to liaison meetings with foreign colleagues, operational contacts, his office staff, other Agency officers, or someone selected from the incredible hotchpotch of friends that one of his colleagues described as being from “real life.” Like Frank Wisner’s, Jim’s professional responsibilities extended deeply into his after-hours time, with frequent late-night, work-related dinners.

  Harvey always seemed to me to be all of a piece—he was what he was, no bones about it, and with no apparent contradictions in his personality. Angleton was as many-faceted a man as anyone I’ve ever known. Along with his passion for orchids, Jim made gold jewelry, collected antique fly rods and reels, was a passionate fisherman, enthusiastic poker player, skilled investor, prizefight fan, and literary scholar. His range of friends who had no relation to his work was extraordinary. In contrast to Harvey, Jim affected an entirely romantic persona, preoccupied, mysterious, and not above implying that “if only you knew just one of the secrets I hold, you would know all you ever need to know about me.” It seemed to amuse Jim to present himself in the manner of the familiar caricature of a secret agent—floppy black hat and an outsized black overcoat, which, all in fun, presumably concealed a stiletto. Sadly, like Harvey’s, Jim’s heavy drinking worsened late in his life. In retirement, he was able to stop drinking overnight. He could not erase a lifetime of heavy smoking, and this contributed to his death.

  —

  Sometime after my retirement, and the day before I was slated for a session with the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff at the Agency, I was having lunch with a retired colleague, an OSS X-2 veteran. “Remind them that no intelligence service can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component,” he said. “And recommend that they chisel the words into the granite entrance out there.”

  He had a point. A quick glance in the rearview mirror shows that the most notorious traitors and successful spies in this century would have been barred from sensitive government work, or exposed early in their careers, had basic counterintelligence precautions been taken. Throughout his career Colonel Redl, of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, lived ostentatiously beyond his means, was heavily in debt, and
deeply involved in legally proscribed, and blackmail-prone homosexual activity. Some twenty-five years later, Kim Philby, the prototype of a KGB-sponsored penetration agent, was active in communist circles while at Cambridge University, and subsequently engaged in an ostensible flirtation with Nazi sympathizers. Philby’s first wife and Austrian in-laws were Communist Party members. His close friend Guy Burgess, a brilliant if drunken tosspot, was well known as a leftist.

  Of all the Western Allied leaders, Prime Minister Churchill had the keenest interest and most sophisticated grasp of intelligence operations. Yet, when Churchill arrived at the Big Three conference in Yalta in February 1945 for the discussion of postwar Germany and Eastern Europe, his secret negotiating positions had been plucked clean by Soviet agents in the British Foreign Office and intelligence services.

  President Roosevelt fared little better. It was not until Alger Hiss was chosen to accompany Roosevelt to Yalta that the promising young State Department officer came fully into his own as a Soviet GRU spy. From the time preparations for the conference began until Hiss returned to Washington via Moscow, he was astride every secret aspect of the U.S. negotiating tactics. In the United States, a thorough background check would have exposed Hiss as having been flagged as a Soviet agent in 1939 by French Premier Edouard Daladier to Ambassador William C. Bullitt. This information probably came to the French intelligence service from Walter Krivitsky, who defected from the Soviet NKVD in 1937. In September 1939, Whittaker Chambers informed an assistant secretary of state that Hiss, among others, was a GRU agent. Although the NKVD attempted to wrest Hiss from the GRU stable of agents, he remained a creature of the GRU throughout his active service.

  If Stalin’s self-confidence needed bolstering, the knowledge that he would arrive at the conference table almost as well briefed on the American and British negotiating positions as were Churchill and Roosevelt should have done the trick. If not, Stalin might have been encouraged by the fact that he was also well informed on the progress the Manhattan Project was making on the development of the atomic bomb.