A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Care was taken lest any of the writers and editors confuse the Eisenhower administration’s political campaign oratory and slogans—“rollback” and “liberation”—with actual foreign policy for Eastern Europe and the USSR. The strictly enforced standing injunction was that the radios were never in any way to provoke internal revolt by suggesting or implying that assistance would be given the rebels. The White House, State Department, and Agency were of one mind on this issue.

  One of the early decisions was to concentrate the news broadcasts on internal developments within the target countries, and to leave the big-picture, world news coverage to the Voice of America and the BBC. Security-cleared American staff personnel had access to classified intelligence reports. This material was reinforced by the questioning of refugees, still fleeing across the borders, access to defectors, and close contact with key figures in the emigration. The straight news and perceptive comments on local developments within the Communist bloc were the basis of the reputation RFE was able to maintain with its audiences.

  Staffing and broadcast content were but part of the undertaking. Sites which would offer optimum radio reception throughout Eastern Europe had to be researched. At times it seemed that the dickering for permission to build powerful radio stations anywhere but in West Germany would exceed the life span of the most dedicated negotiators. Radio transmitters were not all that had to be arranged. Office space and housing had to be found or constructed; once selected, personnel—some one thousand in Munich—were to be security vetted, and employment contracts had to be written. Aside from the negotiations at the diplomatic level, CIA was responsible for the entire activity, and for masking the covert funding.

  Within the Agency, Frank Wisner’s relentless dedication to his duty was a primary factor in pulling it all together. Tom Braden, a newspaperman and OSS veteran, joined the Agency as Frank’s chief for this activity. Others, without compensation, spent hundreds of hours pushing the program into being and nurturing it through the difficult early months. John Richardson, who gave up an important investment banking career to become RFE president, was highly effective. He went on in government to serve as an assistant secretary of state. Peter Miro, a skilled radio engineer, was equally effective. Among others were Frank Altschul, Howard Chapin, Frederic Dolbeare, John Hughes, Robert E. Lang, Allen Phenix, DeWitte C. Poole, Charles Spofford, and H. Gregory Thomas. None has been given the recognition he deserves.

  At the time these projects were undertaken, CIA operations were still divided between the Office of Special Operations (OSO), responsible for intelligence operations, and the newly formed Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), charged with covert action. In 1951, I stepped up from my job as chief of Foreign Division M (FDM) with responsibility for Central Europe to the Office of Special Operations. At the time, Allen Dulles, who had left his New York law practice to join CIA, was chief of OSO. Lyman Kirkpatrick, another OSS veteran, was Dulles’s chief of operations, and I was Kirk’s deputy.

  As RFE got under way, Frank Wisner tried more than once to lure me across the line into OPC. I was still digging into the operations in areas beyond my earlier beat and getting to know the people, many of whom were new to me. I had no wish to leave that job unfinished in order to assume a completely new and extremely ambitious effort. Frank and I finally agreed that I should stay put.

  I’ve always thought that the people who were to be charged with specific responsibilities were more important than the often elegant bureaucratic wiring diagrams that are assumed will fit any individual into an organization. Nevertheless, as Willy Loman’s widow observed, “attention must be paid.” In August 1952, General Bedell Smith, the director of Central Intelligence, merged the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations into a single unit, the Directorate for Plans. Allen Dulles moved up to become General Smith’s deputy. Frank Wisner became deputy director for plans (DDP), and Lyman Kirkpatrick was named Frank’s chief of operations. I was promoted to be Kirkpatrick’s deputy.

  I first met Cord Meyer when he succeeded Tom Braden as the Agency man responsible for our International Organizations branch. He was one of the most memorable of my colleagues. Cord’s parents had married in France during World War I—his father a fighter pilot, his mother a Red Cross nurse. Cord was graduated from Yale in three years. A month later, he volunteered for the Marines, and by February 1944 he had fought his way ashore on Eniwetok Atoll, and later Guam. In July 1944 a War Departaient telegram informed his parents that Marine Lieutenant Cord Meyer had been killed in action. In fact, Cord had suffered a near-fatal head wound. While still on the battlefield, a Marine doctor assumed his patient had but a few seconds to live, and had made what Cord later called “a premature diagnosis.” After bouts of plastic surgery and the loss of an eye, Cord faced a serious decision. Fragments of metal were still embedded in his remaining eye. In time, these might corrode and destroy his vision. The alternative, another operation, might also cost him his sight if it failed. Cord refused the additional operation and was discharged in New York City.

  As a junior member of the U.S. delegation, Cord attended the San Francisco convention which established the structure of the new United Nations organization. He served two years as chairman of the United World Federalists before enrolling at Harvard with plans to complete a Ph.D. and to finish a book-length manuscript. Cord’s experience with the Soviets in San Francisco had sparked his interest in Soviet propaganda and communist front activity. By the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Cord had tired of academe and thought of a diplomatic career. Friends at State were discouraging—Cord was so publicly identified with the World Federalist movement that he would be too controversial for the department. Cord turned to Allen Dulles, whom he had known socially in New York. He accepted Allen’s job offer at the moment Frank Wisner was establishing the Office of Policy Coordination.

  Cord was one of our more easily recognized members—tall, prematurely gray, and, like a French cabdriver, rarely to be seen without a cigarette dangling from his lips. I did not understand how Cord tolerated the smoke drifting from the smoldering cigarette until I realized that it was always on the side of his reconstructed eye. It was not until 1953 when Cord was denounced to the FBI as a security risk that I got to know him well. I served as a middleman, helping Cord work his three months’ passage through the security bureaucracies. Even in the climate poisoned by Senator McCarthy, the charges against Cord were preposterous, unevaluated allegations made by untested sources. A year later, after another, this time mercifully minor organizational change, Cord was named staff chief for all covert action operations.

  In 1967, when the Ramparts charges were still front-page news, the New York Times published a biographical profile that attempted—rather unsuccessfully—to explain what made Cord change from an idealistic world federalist to a senior CIA official. The following day, a colleague received a call from Daniel Dodson, then a professor in the English department at Columbia University. Since 1947, the professor said, he had waited for a book by the young author of the Atlantic Monthly short story “Waves of Darkness.” It was, he said, one of the finest pieces of American writing to have come out of World War II. Until he recognized Cord’s name in the Times story, he had assumed that equally fine novels would be forthcoming. At the time I had not read the story—it is indeed an extraordinary literary achievement.*

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  Within weeks of its inception, Radio Free Europe became a primary target for each of the communist intelligence services. Operations ranged from penetration of the editorial staffs to sabotage of the facilities and attempted murder. Exiles were subject to blackmail threats against relatives still within reach of the communist security services. Eastern European agents posing as dissidents were inserted into the refugee flow with instructions to find work in RFE. Munich became a lively counterintelligence battlefield, replete with double agents, defectors, saboteurs, and assassins. It was in the sorting out of the security problems and defensive count
erintelligence operations that I moved closer to the staff engaged in this vital covert action activity.

  When the West German government agreed to the broadcasts, the first RFE transmitters were established in Bavaria. The day-to-day RFE programming was centered in Munich, with policymaking split between the offices in New York and Washington, and the political advisors in Munich. The distances between these offices, and the strong-minded personnel in each, made for intense, sometimes ear-splitting policy debates. Despite the wear and tear, the results seemed to me to be optimal.

  We soon learned that broadcasts from Germany were easily and quite effectively jammed from within the target countries, so the radio engineers went back to the drawing table. The best locations for transmission to Eastern Europe were found to be near Barcelona and a bit north of Lisbon. Strenuous negotiations bore fruit and the stations, employing some four hundred staff, were established.

  At about the time RFE was getting under way in 1951, the State and Defense Departments and the National Security Council agreed that Frank Wisner should rally another group of private citizens in New York. Their task would be to form an organization similar to but separate from RFE. The new corporation, the American Committee for Freedom for the Peoples of the USSR, was to enlist émigrés from the Soviet Union to “aid the worldwide Russian and nationalistic emigration in its effort to sustain the spirit of liberty among the peoples of the USSR.” The corporation would also “aid the emigration in seeking to extend understanding of the West within the USSR.” This was another towering order, which at best could be fulfilled by beaming news and sophisticated analysis programs into the Soviet Union. Broadcasts were to be offered in Russian and many of the national minority languages. As with RFE, financial support was ostensibly to come in part from interested private sources. In fact, CIA would provide cover for the substantial official U.S. funding.

  Howland Sargeant, a former assistant secretary of state in the Truman administration, was highly effective as chairman of Radio Liberty. Aside from the regular policy and operational meetings I attended with Agency and New York staff, there were semi-annual dinners. These New York occasions were a curious combination of serious policy discussions and, in a broad sense, a pep rally. It was perhaps a bit of luck that I always managed to sit beside Mrs. Sargeant, more widely known as the movie star Myrna Loy. There was no more lively dinner companion or effective antidote to long evenings of high policy talk than that polished actress.

  Keeping the various Eastern European political and ethnic groups from one another’s throat at RFE was a cinch in comparison to the complex relations separating the political particles spawned by the Soviet Union. Between the numerous non-Russian ethnic entities—ranging from the Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Belorussians, Georgians, North Caucasians, to the Turkmenistani—there sometimes seemed to be more bad blood than water coursing down the Volga. Aside from the ethnic groups were numerous political parties—the Nazi-tainted Vlassovites, the rightist NTS, and a dozen or more lesser phratries. The most common term used in discussing the exiles was “splinter faction.” As the splinters split into sub-splinters—the dozen or so Ukrainian elements never coalesced—a friend suggested that one more split might reduce the entire emigration to sawdust.

  In speaking lightly of the difficulties faced by the Agency staff struggling to fashion a semblance of unity in the emigration, it is easy to forget that the glue which eventually held some of these elements together was largely composed of the sweat of the activists who fashioned what became known as Radio Liberty.

  Allen Dulles kept himself closely informed on developments in Eastern Europe and the USSR. He did his best to stand as a buffer between the well-informed and heavy-hitting members of the New York committees and those of us responsible for the daily broadcast content and support activity. There were times when caught between a sizeable rock in New York and the hard place represented by the Washington-based policymakers that I understood Lucky Pierre’s problem. The senior members of the New York group were not accustomed to having to debate their decisions with anyone, least of all a handful of mere government employees some three hundred miles to the south, and a few score subordinates on the far side of the Atlantic.

  One of the least-remembered RFE achievements came in late summer 1956 when William Griffith, the Munich-based policy advisor, and his deputy, Paul Henze, spotted a changing mood in Eastern Europe, and gave warning of a likely confrontation between the indigenous populations and the Soviet forces in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. Cord Meyer briefed Allen Dulles on this speculation and attempted to get this impression across to the State Department and Agency analysts. Neither Dulles nor the reigning specialists were convinced by the RFE analysis, and were content to assume that as in the past, the communist authorities would maintain effective control of their Eastern European “allies.” When the outbreak of violence in Poland and open revolt in Hungary proved the RFE analysts were correct, Allen Dulles rebuked Cord for not having pressed the RFE position hard enough.

  When RFE and Radio Liberty got fully under way, they collected vast amounts of information on the communist countries. Monitoring stations maintained twenty-four-hour coverage of all broadcasts originating behind the Curtain. Local newspapers, journals, and other publications throughout the Soviet bloc were meticulously studied by highly qualified analysts. In addition, the radios maintained news bureaus throughout Western Europe, and were able to debrief travelers and question defectors and refugees from the target areas. Despite repeated charges that the radios were running agents and spies, no such activity was ever undertaken. It would have been foolhardy to risk the integrity of the radios by attempting to mix espionage with the overt activity. As the data and analysis gained strength, Western journalists became regular visitors to the research facilities in Munich.

  One incident that mandated my eating crow in respect to propaganda-bearing balloons came in 1954 when Colonel Josef Swiatlo, a senior officer in the Polish security service, defected to the CIA post in Berlin. Swiatlo was intimately well informed on the inner workings of the Polish government and its relationship with Moscow. In addition to radio programming, hundreds of thousands of pamphlets detailing Swiatlo’s inside data were strewn across Poland by balloons. By December 1954, Swiatlo’s information had blown General Stanislaw Radkiewicz, the Polish minister of security and one of the most powerful members of the Polish government, and three of his top aides out of their Warsaw offices. The security forces were reorganized but with diminished authority.

  The most serious test of the radios’ ability to hew to the agreed-upon policy of not encouraging futile resistance to the Soviet occupation forces came first in 1956 when CIA obtained copies of Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. The New York Times published his bold attack on Stalin in February. The full text and analysis were aired by both radios, and, to the degree possible, printed texts were circulated (yes, sometimes by balloon) throughout Eastern Europe. In May, Jakob Berman, a Stalinist, acting premier in Poland, was forced to quit. In June, a spontaneous worker uprising was put down by the heavy-handed Polish security police. This open revolt surprised the West as much as it did the Polish authorities.

  In the following weeks, the Polish government promised reform and improved living conditions for the workers. This fed the Polish appetite for more freedom and by October 19, Wladyslaw Gomulka, a relatively moderate communist, fresh from prison, was readmitted to the Polish Central Committee. The PCC promptly relieved Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky of his post as “Polish” defense minister and Polish army commanding officer, and expedited his return to Moscow. This was more than Khrushchev had bargained for, and with Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Lazar Kaganovich, enplaned for Warsaw and a confrontation with Gomulka. Unless Rokossovsky was reinstated, Khrushchev declared, the Red Army would put things straight. Gomulka refused, and pointed out that the Polish workers were already armed and prepared for a scrap. Khrushchev backed down.


  Throughout these tense hours, when open warfare was a strong possibility, RFE consistently cautioned the Polish people not to press the demands—free elections and the immediate withdrawal of the Red Army occupation force—that would force the USSR’s hand. Gomulka was elected first secretary and proposed a compromise which the Soviets accepted. In the midst of these negotiations, Gomulka suspended the internal jamming of RFE broadcasts—a strong indication that he welcomed the calming RFE programs.

  Jan Nowak, one of the surviving leaders of the 1944 Polish revolt against the German occupation, was chief of the RFE Polish desk in Munich. His firm hand ensured that RFE continued to counsel the Poles against what Cord Meyer referred to as “the suicidal romanticism that had marked earlier Polish revolts.” With the able help of Bill Griffith, the Munich political advisor, the Polish desk performance was brilliant.

  Things went less well in Budapest.

  In October, sparks like those which ignited the bloodless revolt in Poland set Hungary ablaze. Rallies organized by university students attracted enough popular support to force the replacement of the widely despised Mátyás Rákosi as first secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party and the granting of a few slight political concessions. This palliative worked no better in Hungary than in Poland, and by October 22, 300,000 protesters were in the Budapest streets, and Hungarian workers were arming themselves. Hungarian military units were soon to turn against their Soviet “comrades in arms,” and when security police posts were attacked, some of the survivors joined the protesters. The Communist government fled from Budapest, and Imre Nagy, a moderate reformer, took office as premier. On October 24, Soviet tanks, supported by elite combat troops, battled their way into Budapest. By late November, the Russians had captured Nagy and spirited him out of the country for trial and execution.