Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  To get advance information on Soviet intentions, the CIA began a program of overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Big, lumbering C-47s would parachute agents behind the enemy lines. The agents were political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere, men willing to risk their lives to fight communism. Their main function was to provide information on Soviet troop movements, mobilization activities, and other military intelligence. This program, according to the agent in charge, “was never cleared with the Department of State, though presumably it was with the President, and only in the early fifties was the Secretary of State informed.”17 Of course, the Russians knew about the illegal overflights, which were monitered by Soviet ground crews. Occasionally they shot at some, but the C-47s survived every flight.

  To almost everyone’s surprise, the Communist offensive, when it came in June 1950, was not in central Europe but in Asia, and was not mounted by the Russians but by the North Koreans. The CIA failed to predict the attack, but its excuse was unassailable—General Douglas MacArthur, commanding American forces in the Far East, refused to allow the CIA to operate in his theater, just as he had shut out the OSS during World War II. When the war started, MacArthur reluctantly gave the CIA permission to operate in Korea, and agents were air-dropped behind enemy lines, mainly Koreans but including some Americans. One such agent was a former high-ranking Chinese Nationalist officer who parachuted onto the mainland in the late summer of 1950. His detailed reports on the number and distribution of Chinese Communist troops along the Manchurian-North Korean border gave a fair warning of the imminent Communist crossing of the Yalu River in November 1950.

  Nevertheless, MacArthur was caught by surprise again. His own overconfidence was the major reason, but he later denied having seen any CIA reports of a Chinese buildup along the Yalu. Truman contradicted the general. He stated publicly that he had seen and read CIA reports on Chinese troop concentrations along the Yalu.18

  MacArthur was by no means the CIA’S only foe within the American power structure. J. Edgar Hoover was predictably unhappy with the newly created agency. When the CIA exercised its rights and replaced the FBI network in Latin America, Hoover told his men there to destroy their intelligence files rather than bequeath them to the CIA. It was a real “scorched earth” policy, according to Howard Hunt, who had to pick up the pieces in Mexico City.19 Hoover also promoted charges that the Communists had penetrated the CIA, with old do-gooders and one-worlders from the OSS leading the way.

  Partly to counter such charges, in 1950 Truman appointed Walter Bedell Smith, Ike’s wartime chief of staff, as DCI. Smith was about as right-wing as a professional army officer was ever likely to get. “I know you won’t believe this,” an ex-CIA agent later declared, “but Smith once warned Eisenhower that [Nelson] Rockefeller was a Communist.”20

  Precisely because he was so extreme on the Communist issue, Smith was a brilliant choice as DCI. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had launched his anti-Communist crusade earlier in 1950, and had indicateci in a number of ways that when he had finished with the State Department he intended to turn his attention to the CIA. Smith’s appointment helped pacify McCarthy, as did the appointment of other right-wingers, such as Charles Black, husband of former child movie star Shirley Temple, and James Burnham, later an editor on William Buckley’s National Review. Buckley himself was McCarthy’s chief intellectual defender, co-author of McCarthy and His Enemies.21

  Smith brought more to the job than an ability to appease McCarthy. Blunt, curt, outspoken, a strong and heavy user of curse words, Smith was a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat. He knew precisely when to make a decision, when to say no, when to say maybe, when to buck the decision on up to his boss. Although he was almost unknown outside the top military and governmental circles, where it counted his reputation was almost as high as that of Eisenhower himself.

  Smith did not suffer fools gladly, nor delays, nor excuses, nor shoddy performance. He did suffer from ulcers that produced almost continuous and nearly unbearable pain, which helped explain why his face seemed always to be pinched together in a crabby grimace. Physically small and too thin, he nevertheless terrified his subordinates and associates. The overall impression was of a very sour, very aggressive, very self-confident, very intelligent man. Summing up Smith’s personality, Ike once told this writer, referring to Smith’s ethnic stock, “You have to always keep in mind that Beetle is a Prussian.”22 As President, Ike took great delight in seeing Beetle go to Moscow as the American ambassador. “It served those bastards right,” Ike commented, as he grinned at the idea of the Kremlin having to put up with Smith.23

  The CIA, under Smith, became more aggressive in collecting information, in pressing its views on the President, and in conceiving and conducting covert operations. It was not, however, given over completely to the right-wing, or otherwise surrendered to McCarthy and his friends. This was primarily because of Allen Dulles, who Smith selected in 1951 as his deputy director.

  Like Smith, Dulles had emerged from World War II with a reputation, among insiders, as one of the best men America produced in the struggle against the Nazis. Fifty-eight years old at the time of his selection, Dulles’ background was well-nigh perfect for his new job. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he had studied at Auburn, New York, Paris, and Princeton, where he graduated in 1914. After short stints teaching at missionary schools in India, China, and Japan, he joined the diplomatic service in 1916, serving in Vienna and Berne as an intelligence officer. He moved up rapidly, as did his older brother John Foster Dulles, in part no doubt because their grandfather had been Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of State, while an uncle had held the same post under Woodrow Wilson. The Dulles brothers were together in Paris in 1919 as members of the American delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.

  In 1920, Allen Dulles married Clover Todd, the daughter of a Columbia University professor. They had one son, who was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War. In 1926, after service in Berlin, Constantinople, and Washington, Dulles left the diplomatic service to join his brother in the famous Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, specialists in international law corporate practice. With Sullivan and Cromwell, Dulles worked on a daily, intimate basis with the political and industrial elite of Europe and the United States.

  In their work at Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers came to know the world and its commerce as well as any men living. Although they shared a common workload, they were not much alike. William Macomber, who worked for both, said that “Allen from the beginning was less intellectual and more outgoing. He had a more developed personality, a warm personality.” John Foster Dulles was more old-fashioned, a gentleman of the old school. “He always measured with a handkerchief on a globe, that’s how he measured the distance. He always sharpened his own pencils. Incredible. He always finished the job with a pocket knife. When he was a little boy his father or his grandfather would ask if he were carrying his knife; and if he was carrying it he got a penny, if he weren’t carrying it he owed a penny. He was brought up to think it important for a man to carry a pocket knife.”

  Both the Dulles brothers had gout, “terrible gout,” but John Foster never failed to take his pills on schedule, while Allen “was always having trouble, because he would forget to take his pills.… Allen Dulles didn’t have the brilliance of either his sister or his brother, but he had a perfectly good set of brains.”

  Both men were a little soft, dumpy, nonathletic. Huge, perfectly round eyeglasses gave them an owlish appearance. Allen had thinning hair, a large forehead, black bushy eyebrows, a prominent nose, and a strong, jutting chin. Allen’s pipe, which he was constantly lighting, peering over, or waving around to make a point, gave him the appearance of a Princeton professor, perhaps of history or political science. He had a gray mustache, twinkling gray eyes, a booming laugh, and an advanced sense of irony that added to the impression of a detached intellectual. John Foster had more of a giggle than a laugh. Where Allen te
nded toward tweedy, Ivy League clothes, John Foster favored severe, double-breasted, conservative suits, giving the appearance of a successful banker.

  Howard Hunt remembered Allen Dulles as “a man who was physically imposing. He had a very large head, almost white hair, a sort of a Teddy Roosevelt mustache.” Dulles inspired great loyalty and affection among all those who worked for him. To a man, they praised him almost to excess, even twenty years after he left the CIA. Hunt said, “He was one of the most thoughtful, kindly men that I have ever known. In fact, I can’t think, with the exception of my own father I can’t think of anybody more deserving of such a description.” Richard Bissell, who was in the CIA for over two decades, said, “I can’t think of anybody in the agency who didn’t like Allen. Everyone both liked and admired him. Which is quite a tribute over a period of years.”

  Macomber recalled that Allen was much more informal than John Foster. In 1951 he went to see Allen in his CIA office. “Allen Dulles in those days was number two, Beetle Smith was one, and Allen was deputy director. But he was eminent enough for me. I remember going in there, and my boss sat down, and the first thing I knew he put his feet up on Allen Dulles’ desk. The only person who seemed to notice it was me.”24

  Because of his vast experience and innumerable contacts, Allen Dulles was a natural choice for the job assigned to him by Donovan when World War II began, chief of the OSS mission in Switzerland. His diplomatic cover was as an assistant to the minister in the American Legation, but in fact he operated his intelligence group from a fifteenth-century house in Berne overlooking the Aar River.

  As a master spy, Dulles got more credit than he deserved. He was praised for two outstanding accomplishments—the penetration of the Abwehr, Hitler’s intelligence service, and as the man responsible for the surrender of German troops in Italy. In fact, in both cases, Dulles was merely convenient. The Abwehr hardly needed penetrating, as its head, the bumbling Admiral Canaris, all but shoved top-secret material into Dulles’ hands, and Field Marshal Kesselring turned to Dulles to arrange the surrender of his forces, not because Dulles was brilliant, but because he was there.

  Everyone knew he was there, according to Kenneth Strong, which would normally be regarded as a disaster to a spy, but which in Dulles’ case was a boon. The publicity he received helped him accomplish his task because, Strong points out, “often the difficulty with informants is that they have no idea where to take their information. What Switzerland needed during World War II was a well-known market for intelligence, and this is what Dulles provided.” Indeed, he was “beseiged by a multitude of informants,” which helped him add to his wide network of contacts and spies throughout Europe.

  Unlike Smith, Dulles was soft-spoken, polite, easygoing. He had, Strong recalled, “an infectious, gusty laugh, which always seemed to enter a room with him.” Where Smith was blunt and direct, Dulles seemed almost scatterbrained. “Even when I came to know him better in later years,” Strong wrote, “I was seldom able to penetrate beyond his laugh, or to conduct any serious professional conversation with him for more than a few sentences.”25

  But there was, Strong also noted, “a certain hardness in his character.” He was a great believer in the possibilities of covert operations. Robert Anderson, Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Navy, regarded him as “one of the great intelligence figures in the century. And I think largely because he loved it so.”26 Strong said he was “the last of the great Intelligence officers whose stock-in-trade consisted of secrets and mysteries. He might without disrespect be described as the last great Romantic of Intelligence.”27

  Dulles was Smith’s opposite in many ways, including politics. It usually comes as a surprise to Americans to learn that their most famous Director of Central Intelligence was a liberal—but he was. While Smith was bringing McCarthy’s friends into the CIA, Dulles was just as busy bringing liberals on board. One CIA newcomer recruited by Dulles was William Sloane Coffin, later chaplain of Yale University and a leading dove during the Vietnam War. Another liberal was a Dartmouth College professor of English, art museum director, and OSS veteran, Thomas Braden. Lyman Kirkpatrick was a third. Tracey Barnes and Richard Bissell were others.

  Under the influence of Dulles and his recruits, the CIA extended its financial support of foreign organizations to the non-Communist political left. Braden later recalled, “In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society’s approving Medicare. I remember, for example, the time I tried to bring my old friend Paul Henri-Spaak of Belgium to the U.S. to help out in one of the CIA operations.” Allen Dulles mentioned Spaak’s proposed journey to the Senate Majority Leader, William F. Knowland of California, one of McCarthy’s chief supporters.

  “Why,” the senator said, “the man’s a socialist.”

  “Yes,” Dulles replied, “and the head of his party. But you don’t know Europe the way I do, Bill. In many European countries, a socialist is roughly equivalent to a Republican.”

  “I don’t care,” Knowland growled. “We aren’t going to bring any socialists over here.”28

  Richard Bissell, a Ford Foundation official who joined the CIA, where he had a spectacular career, and who characterized himself as an eastern liberal, later remembered the agency in the early fifties as “a place where there was still intellectual ferment and challenge and things going on.” It was the one governmental agency that was not running scared from McCarthy, and as such it attracted some of America’s best and brightest young men.29 The CIA was the good way to fight communism. McCarthyism was the bad way.

  Smith, the hard-boiled military man, was something of a McCarthyite, looking for Communists under his bed at night. At the height of the 1952 presidential election campaign, he told a congressional committee, “I believe there are Communists in my own organization. I do everything I can to detect them, but I am morally certain, since you are asking the question, that there are.”30

  Allen Dulles refused to join a witch hunt. John Foster Dulles was a great disappointment to many career Foreign Service officers because he failed to protect the State Department from McCarthy. Allen was a hero to cu agents precisely because he did stand up to McCarthy. After Ike made him the DCI, Allen warned his employees that he would fire anyone who went to McCarthy with leaks or accusations against agency employees. He also persuaded Eisenhower to have Vice President Richard Nixon go to McCarthy to pressure the senator to drop his plan for a public investigation of Communist infiltration into the CIA.* As one result, throughout Ike’s term in office morale in the CIA was excellent, in sharp contrast to the State Department. The relaxed, freethinking atmosphere Dulles created was deeply appreciated.31

  In summing up his impressions of the Dulles brothers, Bissell said, “They were quite different temperamentally.… Allen was a more open person.… He was a warmer, more outgoing individual, and I think he inspired much more loyalty. I admired certain aspects of Foster Dulles very much. He was a tough man, on occasion a very courageous person. He didn’t choose to deploy his courage much against McCarthy, and I never liked that aspect.”32

  With Allen Dulles in place in the CIA, young idealists joined the “Company,” underwent their training, and then sallied forth to save the world. It was all supersecret, superexciting, supernecessary. Professors at Yale, Harvard, and other prestigious institutions recommended their best students to the CIA, and the agency kept expanding.

  UNDER THE SMITH-DULLES TEAM, the CIA covert action capability skyrocketed. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the branch of the Agency in charge of such activities, leaped from a total personnel strength of 302 in 1949 to 2,812 in 1952, with an additional 3,142 overseas contract personnel. In 1949, OPC’S budget was $4.7 million; by 1952 it was $82 million, a nearly twentyfold increase. In 1949, OPC had seven foreign stations; by 1952 it had forty-seven such stations.33

  That was a lot of people turned loose with an awful lot of money.
And the attitude in OPC was an early version of the infamous “body count” in Vietnam—agents were judged by the number of projects they initiated and managed. There was vicious internal competition between agents over who could start the most projects. By 1952 there were forty different covert-action projects under way in one central European country alone.34

  Former agent Victor Marchetti points out that “one reason, perhaps the most important, that the agency tended to concentrate largely on covert-action operations was the fact that in the area of traditional espionage (the collection of intelligence through spies) the CIA was able to accomplish little against the principal enemy, the Soviet Union. With its closed society, the U.S.S.R. proved virtually impenetrable.”35

  The East European satellites were somewhat easier to penetrate, or so at least OPC liked to think. In the early Smith-Dulles years, the CIA set up a vast underground apparatus in Poland. Millions of dollars in gold were shipped there in installments. Agents inside Poland used radio, invisible ink, and other classic spy methods to get reports back to their controllers in West Berlin. These Polish operatives continually asked for additional agents and more gold; on occasion an agent would slip out to make a direct report on progress, and ask for even more agents and money.

  It was a great achievement, or so the CIA thought, until late in 1952 when to its chagrin the agency discovered that it was all a hoax. The Polish secret service had almost from the beginning co-opted the entire network. There was no real CIA underground in Poland. The Poles kept the operation going in order to lure anti-Communist Polish exiles back into their homeland, where they were promptly thrown into prison or else run by controllers, just as the British had run German spies in the Double-Cross System. In the process, Marchetti writes, “the Poles were able to bilk the CIA of millions of dollars in gold.”36