A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Heinz Felfe’s documented position in the Nazi intelligence/security organs should have barred him from sensitive postwar employment in West Germany. Instead, his record was set aside and Felfe, while using his KGB wages for luxuries beyond the limit of his earned income, burrowed into the heart of the BND, General Gehlen’s postwar intelligence service.

  More recently, Aldrich Ames’s record as an undisciplined, drunken, and indifferent CIA officer did not interfere with his continued access to highly classified data until shortly before his arrest. While on duty in Washington, Ames lived handsomely beyond the constraints of his civil service salary.

  Routine counterintelligence and security housekeeping, conducted with reasonable diligence, would have felled these and other less well-known traitors long before they touched any real treasure.

  It was in Washington when we were putting our postwar house in order that we fully grasped the fact that throughout the war, the intelligence services of our co-belligerent, the USSR, had actually intensified espionage against the United States. In the Western world, the widespread respect for the Red Army’s resistance to the Nazi invasion and the tremendous sacrifices of the civilian population reinforced the motives of Communist Party members and their fellow travelers, and created an optimum operational atmosphere for Soviet espionage.

  By wartime standards, OSS background checks on native-born citizens and immigrants of a few years’ standing were adequate to rule out possible Axis sympathizers, criminals, and most undesirables. Recently arrived immigrants—refugees from around the globe and with no track record in the United States—and persons hired abroad were more of a problem. The urgent need for area knowledge and language competence meant that many such qualified recruits were taken on at face value. Ironically, the most serious known breaches in OSS security were made by native-born citizens. Although OSS avoided Communist Party members, a few slipped through the security barricade. By the war’s end, the NKVD and GRU had established a baker’s dozen agents and a fistful of enthusiastic contacts in the OSS Washington offices. As viewed from the NKVD headquarters in Moscow, Duncan Lee was the best-placed agent.

  With a Rhodes scholarship and a Yale Law School diploma in his briefcase, Lee, a descendant of the Civil War general Robert E. Lee, joined the Donovan & Leisure law firm in 1939. General Donovan took a shine to Lee and brought him along as a personal assistant when OSS was established. However admirably placed to service his NKVD masters, Lee was not among the bravest of OSS men. He valued his own safety to the point that he refused to deliver documents, and insisted on reporting orally to his NKVD controllers. When pressed to deliver, Lee—delicately—advised his Soviet controller that he considered it “inexpedient” to remove documents from Donovan’s office.

  Granted our mutual intention to defeat Nazi Germany, and the brief tenure of the known Soviet spies within OSS, these penetration agents caused marginal damage to the United States. To my knowledge, all were ousted in the OSS closedown.

  By late 1945, a thorough security reevaluation of the OSS carryover staff was under way. While striving to keep valuable employees on the roster, I worked closely with the Office of Security in weeding out the relatively few people who wished to stay on but whose background might not have passed the new security rules. Within the Agency the most dramatic incident, and one that forever should have convinced us all of the absolute necessity of a strong counterintelligence capability, occurred in 1949 when Harold Adrian Russell Philby, universally known as Kim, was posted to the British embassy in Washington. As a career SIS* officer, he was responsible for both SIS and MI-5 (the British internal security service, roughly the equivalent of the FBI) liaison with CIA and the FBI. At the time, the Washington assignment was the most important foreign post in the British intelligence services.

  Philby was more qualified for an intelligence assignment than SIS realized when he was recruited in 1940. Having signed on with the NKVD in 1934, Philby came to SIS with some six years’ experience as a Soviet spy tucked beneath his résumé. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, Philby became an enthusiastic Marxist, a political orientation he shared with many of his wellborn classmates who were anti-Nazi, pro-labor, and opposed to the conservative British foreign policies. The NKVD harvested a remarkable crop of agents at Cambridge. Among them were Donald Maclean, who was to become a successful British diplomat; Guy Burgess, a gadfly on the fringes of wartime intelligence in London, and first secretary at the Washington embassy when he decamped for Moscow with his friend Maclean; and Sir Anthony Blunt, a wartime MI-5 officer, subsequently “Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures” at Buckingham Palace. The tangled social relations of this foursome were eventually to prove an element in their exposure.

  Several histories of Kim Philby’s treason have been published, as well as his own skillfully poisoned autobiography.† He was born in 1912, graduated from Cambridge University in 1933, and recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1934, at the time Stalin’s purges were at full blast. After a brief hitch as a foreign correspondent for the London Times in Spain with Franco’s forces, and with the British army in France, Philby was recruited by SIS after the Dunkirk evacuation. His career flourished, and by 1944 he was recognized as one of the most promising young SIS officers.

  In late 1944 when the defeat of the Axis powers in Europe appeared certain, SIS—presumably prompted by Churchill—quietly began to turn some of its attention to the USSR. After engineering a series of office intrigues, Philby was appointed chief of Section IX with responsibility for all SIS operations against the USSR. As in Colonel Redl’s day in Vienna, the henhouse was once again in the trust of a Russian fox. By 1946, Philby was so well established that he was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire—steps short of a knighthood, but an ironic prize for a Soviet spy.*

  When Philby was named SIS chief in Washington in 1949, his reputation as an outstanding officer preceded him. Bill Harvey, who professed a dim view of almost everything British, was moved to tell a colleague, “At last the Limeys have sent someone over here that I can talk business with.” Angleton, who had met Philby in London, also welcomed him.

  Several writers have assumed that Philby and Angleton had become close friends in London before Jim’s posting to Italy. Philby has even been described as “one of Angleton’s instructors, his prime tutor in counter-intelligence.”† In fact, no such tutorial relationships existed in London at that time. Moreover, Philby worked in the SIS offices some distance from the Ryder Street premises occupied by X-2. Although they met a few times, Philby was very much senior to Angleton, who arrived in London as a recently commissioned second lieutenant, in civilian clothes, but a junior member of X-2 nevertheless. Those were busy days, and Philby was occupied with the double task of nurturing his reputation within SIS while also servicing the NKVD. The hours he could spend cultivating the OSS staff might most profitably have been devoted to the senior X-2 officers rather than the most recent junior newcomers. It was in Washington that the Angleton-Philby relationship developed, and was to sour.

  It can only have been a fluke, but as it happened I had no reason to have any professional contact with Philby in Washington. I did see him socially, usually at a reception or dinner party. He was an amiable host and a personable guest: his liaison colleagues recognized him as a brilliant and indefatigable intelligence officer. Philby had a well-developed knack for getting on with Americans. He tried to come across as a “typical Englishman,” Hollywood style. Kim moved easily in most situations but was not entirely able to conceal the fact that he was always on the prowl. I was never sure whether his occasional stammer was an affected version of the false diffidence of his upper-class pals or simply a tool to give him an extra moment to frame a response. There is no doubt that he served his British and Soviet masters to great effect.

  Philby’s cover, which provided the best possible access to the highlevel secrets that most interested Moscow, began to unravel when American cryptographers broke into a
series of Soviet intelligence cables between Moscow and the NKVD posts in Washington and New York. The VENONA intercepts, as they were known, allowed American and British CI officers enough of a glimpse at a Soviet spy, code name HOMER, to identify him as Donald Maclean, wartime first secretary at the British embassy in Washington. Philby, who had represented the British in these investigations, allegedly used Guy Burgess to warn Maclean, by then chief of the American desk at the British Foreign Office, that he was about to be exposed. It now appears that the KGB asked Burgess, who had been living with Philby and his wife in Washington, to accompany Maclean on at least part of his escape to the USSR. Burgess made the mistake of going all the way to Moscow, where he would reluctantly remain for the rest of his life.

  This hand-in-hand escape prompted Harvey, whose opinion of Philby had thoroughly eroded, and Jim Angleton to begin, independently I believe, to examine Philby’s background. Harvey forwarded a memorandum to General Bedell Smith, then DCI, analyzing Philby’s background and activity, and concluding that he was undoubtedly a Soviet agent. A bit later, Jim Angleton, whose staff responsibilities included supervision of foreign liaison, came to a similar if more guarded conclusion. At General Smith’s request, Philby was recalled.

  In London, Philby weathered the security storm and was allowed politely to resign from SIS. It was not until 1963, after a confrontation with a senior SIS colleague in Beirut, Lebanon, that Philby realized he had come to the end of the road. He signaled his KGB controller and was smuggled aboard a Soviet ship. He died in Moscow in 1988.

  When CIA reorganized its operational headquarters in 1954, Frank Wisner, the director for operations, established three operational staffs to provide oversight of the principal operational activity: Foreign Intelligence Collection (FI), Covert Action (CA), and Counterintelligence (CI). Bill Harvey moved along to assignments that would lead him to Berlin and the tunnel project. Jim Angleton became chief of the CI Staff, the only Agency assignment he ever wanted. He remained in that post until his forced retirement in December 1974.

  *This interview occurred several years before security cases such as those of Aldrich Ames and Edward L. Howard were uncovered.

  *Ronald Hingley, The Russian Secret Police (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 166.

  *A Consumer’s Guide to Intelligence (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995); PAS 95-00010, p. 52.

  *F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974).

  *The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) was for decades known as MI-6, a World War I term that has been slow to die. The specific date of the change in terminology from MI-6 to SIS must be one of the best-kept secrets in British intelligence—I’ve yet to find a consensus on the date of the change.

  †Kim Philby, My Secret War (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968).

  *Sir Anthony Blunt’s knighthood was revoked after his role as a Soviet agent became public knowledge.

  †Phillip Knightley, The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby (New York: Knopf, 1989), p. 118.

  Chapter 15

  —

  SOLDIERING ON

  The events that led to a crisis in my career began in 1956, a time of relentless pressure on Frank Wisner and the rest of us. The year got off to a rolling start in February, when Nikita Khrushchev made his landmark secret speech to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. As soon as rumors spread that Khrushchev had signaled the end of the collective leadership that had existed since Stalin’s death, and given the party congress a candid view of the late dictator’s policy and practices, there was an international scramble to obtain the actual text. While we were groping through a shower of alleged bits and pieces of the speech, Jim Angleton picked up a copy of the text and we soon found another.

  By April, the KGB decided that George Blake would no longer be threatened if they exposed our Berlin tunnel and phone taps. As a byproduct the Russians planned to make a propaganda profit by inviting the entire Berlin press corps to inspect and photograph the installation. Rather than being “shocked, repeat shocked” to learn that espionage was going on in Berlin, the news media were thoroughly impressed by the scope of the operation and the technical wizardry involved. The Soviet spin-tyros scuttled back to Moscow with considerable egg on their faces.

  In June, labor unrest and riots in Poland brought the return of Wladyslaw Gomulka to office and a confrontation with Khrushchev. When Khrushchev backed off, ripples of discontent and hope for a loosening of the controls the USSR had imposed spread through much of Eastern Europe. At about this time it became apparent that Frank Wisner’s commitment to his work had begun seriously to affect his health. Frank was obviously tired when he left Washington on a long-planned visit to the key European offices. By coincidence the trip began on October 23, the day Budapest street demonstrations against the Soviet presence in Hungary flared into open revolt. Six days later Israeli forces unleashed an attack on Egypt and began the occupation of the Sinai Peninsula.

  The British and French presented Cairo with an ultimatum the Egyptians obviously could not accept. Within hours, the Anglo-French allies bombed Egyptian airfields and occupied both sides of the Suez Canal. In Budapest, Hungarians had seized Soviet small arms and were battling the local Red Army units to a standstill. On November 3, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles underwent surgery in Washington. Three days later, President Eisenhower, still recovering from a heart attack, won his second election.

  After a series of around-the-clock discussions in London, Paris, and Germany, Wisner reached Vienna on November 7, three days after elite, battle-ready Red Army combat units, 200,000 strong, crossed the border into Hungary. It had been an extraordinary confluence of events.

  Isolated from the Washington policymakers and without access to his customary flow of informed comment, Wisner felt intense frustration. It was soon apparent that the Hungarian people had won their revolution and bested the Soviet occupation forces. But without artillery and tanks, the gutsy Hungarians could not hope to win a war—or even hold their own—against the invading Red Army. Despite the Eisenhower and Foster Dulles election campaign enthusiasm for rolling back the Iron Curtain, nothing short of armed intervention by NATO could hope to repel the Soviet forces as they swept across Hungary. As Eisenhower pointed out, it would be as difficult to move a fully equipped army to Hungary as it might be to transport such a force cross-country to Tibet. There was no significant NATO support for what would at best be a desperate military venture. Nothing could be done except to offer safe haven for the more than 200,000 Hungarians who were forced to flee.

  Rather than return to Washington, Wisner continued the trip, his nervous fatigue becoming more obvious each day. After stopping in Rome and Athens, where he ate a serving of spoiled clams, Wisner returned to Washington. He was exhausted, infected with hepatitis, and running a high fever. After a hospital stay, Frank returned to the office and resumed his heavy schedule. It was apparent to those of us closest to him that he was again demanding too much of himself, and that his conduct in the office was becoming erratic. Once again he went into the hospital. Frank suffered manic depression, a grim sickness now more readily diagnosed and treated than was possible in his day.

  Throughout the period of his absences, I acted in Wisner’s place as deputy director for plans.

  It was not until Frank formally left the job in the fall of 1958 that Allen Dulles invited me to his office for a sandwich lunch. Although I routinely saw Dulles several times a week, the luncheon invitation was out of the ordinary. To the extent I thought about it at all, I assumed that I knew what Allen had on his mind. As it turned out, I was half right. Dulles did use the occasion to announce that he had chosen a replacement for Wisner.

  Dulles began with a long review of Richard Bissell’s distinguished career in government. Almost without a pause, he recounted Bissell’s outstanding performance in bringing home the U-2 overhead reconnaissance program, short of the deadline, and $3 million under
budget. He then reminded me of OXCART, the exotic refinement of the U-2 aircraft, and CORONA, the first earth-orbiting photographic satellite, projects which Bissell had rammed through.

  After this recitation Dulles informed me that he had selected Richard Bissell to replace Frank Wisner and that I was to soldier on as Bissell’s deputy.

  That I was surprised and disappointed is to put it mildly. After seven years as Wisner’s deputy, and many months of acting in his place, I felt I had earned my spurs. Because Frank was never keen on organizational or personnel matters that did not impinge directly on activities in which he had a strong personal interest, I had had full sway over operational and other concerns fundamental to the clandestine services. In those seven years I accompanied Frank to the DCI’s senior staff meetings every morning, and had developed an understanding of activities and problems beyond the immediate concerns of the DDP. My disappointment and surprise were indeed genuine.

  No matter how gracefully Dulles presented his decision, this apparent vote of no confidence was reason enough to consider leaving the Agency. My reaction to the DCI’s decision was further soured by the fact that although Bissell succeeded brilliantly in every task he had taken on, he had almost no experience in operations, and a somewhat less than comprehensive grasp of our worldwide activity. Moreover, he had encountered and worked with no more than a score of the DDP personnel. In the next few days I put this obvious solution to my problem to one side. There was no rush; resignation could come at any time.

  As an alternative to leaving, I could have accepted an overseas assignment as chief of station. Such a post would have been much less stressful than my Washington job, and would have brought me closer to operations than was possible at headquarters. There was one serious professional problem inherent in this solution. Both Dulles and Bissell were known within the Agency—and in many quarters of the government as well as to our more informed foreign liaison contacts—as covert action enthusiasts. In thinking about Dulles’s decision, I concluded that my guarded reaction to some of the more ambitious covert action schemes was at the root of the decision against me. If I were to step down—and any foreign assignment would be seen within the Agency and by others in Washington and abroad as just such a move—it would almost certainly be read as an Agency decision to emphasize covert action over the traditional responsibility for espionage and counterintelligence abroad. Officers who planned to make their careers in these disciplines might be expected to feel that their work had been downgraded in importance, and that covert action was to be the flavor of choice for the next decade.