Enemies Within
Page 37
MI5 continued to hold Smolka in suspicion after Russia had joined the western allies to fight the Axis powers, and its officer Roger Fulford asked Brooman-White to consult the latter’s SIS colleague Philby about the London Continental News Agency which he and Smolka had formed together. Philby characterized Smolka as ‘extremely clever’, Brooman-White reported. ‘Commercially he is rather a pusher but has nevertheless rather a timid character and a feeling of inferiority largely due to his somewhat repulsive appearance. He is a physical coward and was petrified when the air-raids began. Philby considered his politics to be mildly left-wing but had no knowledge of the C.P. link-up. His personal opinion is that SMOLLETT is clever and harmless. He adds that in any case the man would be far too scared to become involved in anything really sinister.’ Philby’s comments fed the racial prejudice against his former associate: his suggestion that Smolka, who had gone by aircraft to the North Pole and explored the freezing wastes of Siberia, was too self-concerned and nervy for risks worked with Brooman-White and Fulford only because of general assumptions about Jewish milksops.13
The United States
Evaluations must have a supra-national comparative element if they are not to be hopelessly insular. How did Britain’s chief western ally perform in the wartime rush to recruit expert advisers and versatile freelances? Were the choices of recruits, the security checks and the receptivity to warning signs better or worse in Washington than in London?
The United States had not been a primary adversary of Moscow in the 1930s. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was excitable about communist infiltration of factory workers, but otherwise Washington was lax in its attitude to Soviet agents. Perhaps the most significant operative was the journalist Whittaker Chambers, who had been instructed to break overt contact with CPUSA in 1932, went to Moscow for intelligence-training in 1933 and thereafter acted as a courier between underground cells and Soviet intelligence. The leading figure among the Washington officials run by Chambers was Alger Hiss, who progressed from harrying armaments manufacturers as legal assistant to Senator Gerald Nye’s investigation to posts at the Justice Department and State Department. In 1935 Chambers told Hiss to start another intelligence apparatus, which was joined by further well-placed Washington officials including Harry Dexter White @ JURIST of the Treasury Department. By the late 1930s Washington was riddled with penetration agents in the Treasury, State Department, Justice Department, Labor Department and other federal bodies. The infiltration was more extensive than in Whitehall.
In 1937 Moscow threatened the security of its penetration agents in Washington by summoning Chambers to Moscow. He realized that he had been targeted for purging, prevaricated about making the journey and in 1938 broke with the NKVD and went into hiding. After meeting Krivitsky in 1939, he tried to denounce the Soviet penetration of Washington, but the FBI took no interest in his stories, which were also discounted by the Roosevelt administration. Every democratic state had grave security failures caused by inexperience rather than by complacence. Washington was exposed to security breaches after it entered the war in 1941, alongside Russia and Britain, against Germany and Japan, because of the hectic, urgent improvisations of wartime recruitment and by the traditional assumptions of trust that were integral to the departmental culture of democracies.
Until 1938 the CPUSA ran a secret apparatus for procuring phoney American passports for the use of American communists travelling abroad and for Soviet espionage agents. US passports were prized by Moscow’s illegals because the heavy migration to America from central and eastern Europe and from tsarist Russia meant that a US citizen with broken English or an obtrusive accent was not necessarily suspect. The former Oxford communist Peter Rhodes lent his US passport to a fugitive German, who had fought with the International Brigades in Spain and was on Nazi death-lists, so as to enable him to gain safety by entering the USA illegally. Rhodes was a war correspondent in Norway during 1940, and then served as an officer of the Foreign Broadcasting Monitoring Service in Washington. This brought a posting to London, where he had a desk in the US embassy and liaised with the BBC. He was a regular contact of Jacob Golos @ Yakov Raisin @ ZVUK @ SOUND, a Ukrainian who had been naturalized as a US citizen in 1915 and was the NKVD’s chief contact at the CPUSA; but, among Rhodes’s falsehoods when interviewed by the FBI in 1947, he denied having met him. Rhodes remained a sufficiently loyal Stalinist to give a stout defence of the Nazi–Soviet pact during this interrogation. There were strong suspicions, including references to him in intercepted and deciphered Soviet wireless messages, but no evidence that was usable in court.14
In July 1941 President Roosevelt – alias CAPTAIN in NKVD secret messages – appointed William (‘Bill’) Donovan, a Wall Street attorney who had been a military hero in the European fighting of 1917–18, to head the Office of Co-ordination of Information (COI) with the remit to bring order and qualitative consistency to the chaos of American intelligence-gathering, subversive activities and political warfare. In June 1942 the COI was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Donovan was forbidden to poach staff from the FBI, the Military Intelligence Division and the Office of Naval Intelligence, but this did not incommode him, for he preferred to fill his department from unofficial sources. He approached men whom he knew and trusted, or who had been recommended by people whom he knew and trusted. Lawyers, bankers, manufacturers, amateur sportsmen, university professors and the former commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, which had fought for the Reds in the Spanish civil war, joined COI and then OSS. Donovan’s approach seemed admirably direct, informal and pragmatic at the time, but with hindsight resembles careless innocence. David Bruce, wartime chief of OSS in London, later said of Donovan: ‘His country right or wrong was his primary impulse, but his boys right or wrong came a close second.’15
It was inconceivable to Donovan that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, from prosperous and socially secure backgrounds, would choose to betray the United States. ‘He built his new organization on trust,’ in the summary of a later CIA intelligence officer Mark Bradley, who quotes him saying, ‘I’d put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would defeat Hitler.’ Donovan thus kept Donald Wheeler (the NKGB agent IZRA) at OSS, despite an FBI warning in 1942 that the former Oxford Rhodes scholar was at best a communist sympathizer, because three OSS officers vouched for Wheeler’s assiduity in monitoring German manpower. The leading Soviet illegal in the USA, Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov @ Michael Greene @ Michael Adamec @ Bill Greinke @ YUNG @ MER @ ALBERT, who worked under cover as a New York furrier and had married Earl Browder’s niece, reported of Wheeler in 1944: ‘He says it makes no sense to be afraid: a man only dies once.’ Wheeler despised his OSS colleagues, Akhmerov continued, and regarded them as vacuous. Donovan similarly promised protection to his subordinate Maurice (‘Maury’) Halperin, who had been fired from an academic job on suspicions of communism. ‘You’re a brave soldier,’ Donovan told Halperin in 1942, ‘and if ever you get into trouble, remember that you’ve got one of the top lawyers of Wall Street to defend you.’ There was a nonchalance about departmental security in wartime Washington.16
COI and OSS were not complacent, clannish, self-protecting outposts of Ivy League fraternity. Woodrow Borah, an eminent historian of Mexico who served in OSS in 1942–7, was shocked by the personal and jurisdictional in-fighting within Donovan’s agency, and between Washington government agencies. The ‘Harvard-Yale-Princeton people’ were ruthless in their mutual disloyalty, Borah recalled; they played football together, but were smilers with knives under their cloaks, who ‘would cut each other’s throat … without a moment’s hesitation. A Harvard man would knife another Harvard man, his own bosom pal, for a little advantage. I came from California, and was really startled by it.’17
There were over fifty and perhaps as many as a hundred members of CPUSA within OSS. At least twenty-two of these supplied secrets to Moscow. Foremost among them was Duncan Lee, a young lawyer in Donovan’s firm Donovan, Leisure, Ne
wton and Lumbard. Born in 1913 in an American church mission in a remote port on the Yangtse river, Lee proved his academic and sporting prowess as a student at Yale. A testimonial from a professor there affirmed that he was a ‘thorough gentleman, earnest, high-minded, tactful, clean, and honorable’. He seemed politically quiescent, but may have been misled by the Oxford Union ‘King and Country’ vote of 1933 into thinking Oxford to be a hotbed of anti-militarism. He went as a Rhodes scholar to Christ Church, Oxford in 1935–8. At Oxford Lee began to doubt his Christian missionary upbringing, and like Blunt and Maclean sought a substitute secular faith. During 1936 he was moved by reports from the Spanish civil war, but above all was radicalized after meeting Ishbel Gibb, the daughter of a Scottish official in India, a history graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, who was then working in Selfridge’s department store in London. They became lovers, and in euphoric gratitude for sexual pleasure he emulated her radical activism. In August 1937 they went on a group tour to Russia led by Dudley Collard. The communist MP Willie Gallacher was another member of the touring party.18
Gibb and Lee married in 1938, and after leaving Europe joined the CPUSA in 1939. In Lee’s final year at Yale Law School, a New Haven neighbour denounced the couple to the FBI as communists; but at that time in 1940 the FBI was deluged with reports of suspected fifth columnists, whether communist or Nazis, and the brief report on this obscure law student was filed away. After the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941, he became legal adviser to Russian War Relief, and in 1942 joined the executive board of the communistic China Aid Council. In 1942 he was also recruited to OSS, where he became one of Donovan’s closest aides, and began spying for Moscow, after an approach from Mary Price @ DIR, an NKVD agent who was personal secretary to the pontifical Washington newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann and adept at rifling Lippmann’s desk for confidential material.
KOCH, as Lee was codenamed, controlled the risks that he took in ways that the ring of five never sought to impose on their handlers. He refused to purloin secret material overnight or photograph it in the office, but recited from memory the gist of documents to Price, who became his lover rather as Kitty Harris had become Maclean’s. He would give material only to US citizens, in the feeble self-deception that it would be passed to Earl Browder of CPUSA and not to Soviet Russia. Early in 1943 Lee was Donovan’s representative at secret meetings in Geneva and Berne between Prince Max Egon Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Himmler’s peace emissary, and the local OSS chief, Allen Dulles. As assistant chief of the OSS secretariat from 1943, and chief of OSS’s Japan–China section from 1944, Lee gained access to material of utmost secrecy. When Price broke down under the strain of her duplicity, she was replaced as Lee’s handler by Elizabeth Bentley @ Elizabeth Sherman @ CLEVER GIRL @ MISS WISE @ MYRNA.
Elizabeth Bentley deserves a corrective digression. She was an individual of considerable abilities, intelligence, initiative and courage who has been disparaged by most writers on espionage history with sexist condescension. They cannot agree whether she was a slut or a neurotic spinster, a dummy or an arch-manipulator, a confused incompetent or a wily Mata Hari. The earliest vilification came from liberals who were her contemporaries, and could not forgive her unsettling testimony about American communist organization, but later generations, unfettered by ideological alliances, have proved equally unsympathetic. Bentley’s supposed inadequacy and ineptitude are belied by her success in managing a busy travel agency, and in running a large Washington spy ring. She showed courage in turning FBI informant, and was an impressively self-possessed witness, under great pressure, when she testified to HUAC. The substance of what she said was true, although in some matters she dramatized or misled. Her fear that Soviet agents wished to murder her was accurate, not fantastic. She suffered astounding abuse after becoming a public figure, she was ostracized and found herself unemployable. It is time to salute her brains, fortitude and resilience rather than to repeat demeaning clichés.19
Bentley won a scholarship to Vassar College aged eighteen in 1926. After graduating in English, French and Italian, she studied at the University of Perugia, and in 1933 won a fellowship at the University of Florence. She became a member of the Columbia University cell of CPUSA in 1935, and an underground agent in 1938. She reported to Golos, who became her lover. After the outbreak of the European war in 1939, the US authorities seized the records of a travel agency named World Tourists run by Golos, and convicted Browder for his part in the procurement of false American passports. When World Tourists had been ruined as a cover, Golos opened a new front, the US Service and Shipping Corporation, with Bentley as office manager. She took over managing his Washington spy rings when he had a fatal heart attack while taking an after-dinner nap on the sofa of her Brooklyn apartment in 1943. Initially she answered to Akhmerov.
One of the sources from whom Bentley collected material was the academic turned Washington functionary named Maurice Halperin @ HARE. Halperin had been born in Boston in 1906 to Jewish parents who had emigrated a few years earlier from a shtetl on the Polish–Ukrainian border. The family were supported by a small store selling cigars. He studied Romance languages at Harvard in 1923–6, married at the age of twenty, got a job teaching French and Spanish in Ranger, Texas and then moved to Norman, Oklahoma, where he worked in the modern languages department of the university. He gained a doctorate from the Sorbonne during a long sabbatical. Das Kapital proved incomprehensible when he tried to read it, but he understood and was attracted by commentaries on Marxist historical dialectic. He came to see the communist front as the best resistance to the Nazis, and was by 1936–7 at least a fellow-traveller. In 1941 Halperin was fired from his academic post in Oklahoma on the supposition that he was a communist. A few months later, days before the Pearl Harbor attack, he was recruited by the Harvard historian William Langer to work in COI. By 1943 Halperin was head of the Latin America Division of OSS. According to Bentley, he was a secret CPUSA member and, under the alias of HARE, an assiduous supplier of material to her and Mary Price until 1945. After the war he gained a post in the State Department, despite having been named by Bentley to the FBI.20
Another notable source for Bentley was Gregory Silvermaster @ Nathan Masters @ PAL @ ROBERT, who had been born in Odessa in 1898. He became fluent in English while living with his Jewish parents in China. He moved to the USA in 1914, gained a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley with a thesis on Lenin’s early economic thought, became a US citizen in 1926, and from 1935 worked as a labour economist for a succession of New Deal government agencies. Silvermaster was an early member of the CPUSA who, after the Nazi attack on Russia in 1941, developed an important Washington espionage network with some two dozen informants in government offices. Using clandestine communist influence he obtained an appointment at the Board of Economic Warfare in 1942. Both the Office of Naval Intelligence and the War Department considered him to be a potential security risk, and tried to block this appointment. Both agencies held back from accusing him without evidence of espionage: neither had been trusted by the FBI with the knowledge of Silvermaster’s contacts with Soviet spy networks in the US. To counter the military and naval intelligence veto on him, Silvermaster mustered support from senior government officials, Harry Dexter White @ LAWYER @ REED, Lauchlin Currie @ PAGE and Calvin Baldwin, who lobbied the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, insisting that an injustice was being done. Patterson trusted and wished to accommodate his colleagues in other departments, and therefore nullified military intelligence’s ban on Silvermaster. Patterson had no way of knowing that White and Currie were Soviet spies, and Baldwin a secret communist sympathizer. His naive susceptibility to their approaches was typical of both London and Washington at this time. After a year with the Board of Economic Warfare Silvermaster gained a transfer to the War Production Board, where he remained until 1946. He provided Moscow with classified material on US armaments output, which was collected from him in microfilm form by Bentley.21
Despite bein
g denounced by Bentley and others, Silvermaster was never prosecuted. Like scores of other communist infiltrators he escaped prosecution for lack of evidence that could be used in court. He flourished after the war as a building contractor in New Jersey. His chief coadjutor, William Ullmann @ DONALD, a graduate of Harvard Business School and sometime assistant to Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, lived in Silvermaster’s Washington home, ran a basement darkroom there to photograph the network’s secret material, became the lover of Silvermaster’s wife and from 1942 supplied secret material on the United States Army Air Force which he obtained while working in the Pentagon. Ullmann, too, was never prosecuted, became a New Jersey real-estate developer and was a multi-millionaire when he died in 1993. Rhodes prospered as a public relations consultant, dividing his time between a Kensington flat and a Paris apartment until his death in 1966. Halperin lost his job at Boston University in 1953, after pleading the Fifth Amendment before a Senate inquiry into espionage, and thereafter had a peripatetic life in Mexico City, Moscow, Havana and Vancouver.
As the feeble federal response to the CPUSA–Soviet passport frauds showed, the experience and techniques of American counter-intelligence were rudimentary. There was a random element in the definition of official secrets and in the rules to protect them. Washington officials engaged in endless vitiating skirmishes that failed to settle which agencies held responsibility for the protection of such material. The security criteria for Washington personnel with access to sensitive information were indistinct: there was little or no vetting of pre-war or wartime appointees. Warnings about such appointees, whether from neighbours, the FBI or high-quality informants such as Chambers and Bentley, were discounted. There was excessive trust not only in personal recommendations, but in personal exonerations. Suspicious characters were protected by powerful mentors who explained away their defects. Sometimes these mentors were playing great inter-agency power games, with little responsible consideration of national security. Inter-departmental rivalries, notably between the FBI, service intelligence officers and OSS, made US counter-espionage ill concerted. The USA failed to exclude doubtful individuals such as Akhmerov, secured few convictions for passport fraud, and for political reasons commuted Browder’s prison sentence for passport crimes. Though overwhelming suspicions and evidence were in time accumulated against Moscow’s agents in Washington, there was a lack of evidence that could be used in court.