There was a firm hand on his shoulder and a quiet voice in his ear.
“Kindly leave the cinema with me.”
Outside, the man, a plainclothes detective, showed a badge. Dollmann said there must be some mistake. Two armed carabinieri boxed him in and pushed him toward a waiting car. Dollmann said that he was Alfredo Cassani, an employee of the American government.96 What was the problem?
The three men took Dollmann to a holding room in a nearby police station. A pudgy American in a military uniform entered, trailed by a young soldier. The officer introduced himself as Maj. Leo Pagnotta, deputy chief of the 428th U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps. The soldier was a twenty-year-old CIC special agent, William Gowen. He had grown up in Italy, and his father was an aide to Myron Taylor, President Roosevelt’s personal emissary to the Vatican.
Decades later, Gowen still remembered the conversation.
“I am Cassani,” said Dollmann, proffering his papers again.
“I think you’re Dollmann.” Pagnotta shrugged. He returned the document with barely a glance. He didn’t care for forgeries, no matter how faithful. As their exchanges wore on without much emotion or resolution, Dollmann reconsidered his dwindling options. Finally, he extracted a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Pagnotta.
“Please call this number,” he said in an altered tone. “Ask for Major Angleton. He knows who I am.”97
* * *
BY THE END OF 1946, Jim Angleton had risen to the top of U.S. intelligence activities in Italy. He had survived President Harry Truman’s abrupt abolition of the OSS without much disruption of his duties. His authority was growing.
In September 1945, the world war was over and America had to build a new peace. The new president agreed with the critics who warned that the OSS, as a secret intelligence agency, could turn into an American version of the Gestapo, the German police force that had repressed the opposition to Hitler. The overseas stations and personnel of the OSS were transferred overnight to the War Department; Angleton’s work did not change much, but his cryptonym did.98 ARTIFICE was now addressed in the cable traffic as “Major O’Brien.”99
Angleton and his staff at the via Sicilia office were expected to monitor local political activities, especially those of the Communist Party, and to gather evidence for the war-crime trials of the Nazis.100 Angleton preferred the former to the latter.
* * *
LIFE WAS RETURNING TO normal for the Angleton family. For the first time since 1941, they were all living in Italy. Hugh and Carmen chose to resettle in Rome, where Hugh returned to selling business machines. Jim’s younger sister Carmen, who had helped continue publication of Furioso during the war, came to Rome and soon acquired a fiancé, Ernest Hauser, a journalist from Germany. They would be married in January 1947.101 Brother Hugh had graduated from Yale and would marry a Polish woman. The youngest of the Angleton siblings, Delores, was headed for preparatory school in England.
Hugh Angleton wanted his son to resign his government job and take over the family business. Hugh told Jim the business would enable him to take care of Cicely and their son, Jamie, who were living with Cicely’s parents in Tucson. Angleton had other plans. He would not leave secret intelligence work.
* * *
EZRA POUND WAS NOW confined to St. Elizabeths Hospital in southeast Washington. His radio speeches had resulted in an indictment for treason. In the last days of the war, he was arrested by U.S. military police in Rapallo and taken back to the United States for trial. His literary friends persuaded him to plead insanity, and he was committed to the hospital instead of prison. Angleton still appreciated Pound as an artist but thought he was mad.
“Pound probably had the finest ear as far as the English language is concerned,” Angleton told a journalist many years later, “but he never stayed with one style and developed it. He was an innovator, but he had a philosophy which didn’t really hang together. The fact he called one book Personae, or ‘masks,’ is reflective of his poetry and the different façades that he had. I don’t think anyone ever took Pound’s politics seriously.”102
Of course, Angleton had taken Pound’s politics seriously, at least as an undergraduate, and he still thought fondly of the man. In drawing up a will in 1948, he would bequeath a “bottle of spirits” to his friend, the incarcerated poet.103
* * *
IN OCTOBER 1945, ANGLETON met Allen Dulles and his wife, Clover, for the first time. After the abolition of the OSS, Dulles left Switzerland for a holiday in Rome. He wanted to vet the precocious young man who had so ably assisted in Operation Sunrise. They met at the Hotel Hassler, and it didn’t take long for Dulles to appreciate the reflexes he saw at work in this gaunt young man. He had a passionate meticulousness, exemplified by what one chronicler called his “instinct to chew something twice and taste it three times.”104 Allen and Clover Dulles found Angleton immensely attractive.105
Angleton was not happy in marriage. Back in Arizona, Cicely was lonely and frustrated. She was living at her parents’ shady estate in the heart of Tucson, raising Jamie. When Angleton returned to the United States for a two-week consultancy about the future of U.S. intelligence, his reunion with Cicely was dismal.
“It was exactly what his father had warned us about in 1943,” Cicely said later. “Jim no longer cared about our relationship. He just wanted to get back to Italy, to the life he knew and loved. He didn’t want a family.”106
Cicely began to compile reasons for a divorce. She blamed herself for making him miserable. But in their misery, the young couple did not know how to separate. They stayed in the family guesthouse and fought.107
He returned to Rome. She remained in Tucson. She’d had an awful war, losing both of her brothers during the course of 1944. Her elder brother, Charles d’Autremont, a sailor on a U.S. warship, was killed in a German bombing raid in February 1944.108 Her other brother, Hugh, not yet twenty years old, died ten months later.109 With baby Jamie underfoot and her husband missing in action, Cicely filed for divorce in June 1946.110 Then she discovered she was pregnant again.
She dropped divorce proceedings and settled for the company of her own thoughts. In time, she would become the poet of the family, not Jim. Late in life, she composed two books of poems about old age, nature, and youth, suffused with intimate details of a troubled marriage. Not yet thirty years old, Cicely was a wife and mother but lonely as a little girl.
* * *
ANGLETON’S OFFICE WAS THE seat of his incipient empire. He had taken on a deputy, an OSS officer named Ray Rocca, who was competent, loyal, and handy with a pistol. Rocca would work with Angleton for the next thirty years. Angleton told Norman Pearson he had already amassed more than fifty informants in seven intelligence services.111
Angleton even penetrated his office neighbors in the Army Counterintelligence Corps. Capt. Mario Brod, the commanding officer of the CIC unit in Palermo, became an OSS informant.112 Thanks to Brod, Angleton gained a connection to the American Mafia, which he would find useful in the years to come. With regard to Angleton’s liaison with the Italian security forces, one superior said it was “spectacularly productive.”113
Angleton remained in touch with Kim Philby, who paid an unannounced visit to Rome not long after the liquidation of the OSS. They stayed up late talking about matters both professional and personal.114 Angleton admitted he was worried about his marriage. Philby, a father of four and now married for the second time, was the voice of experience. “He helped me think it through,” Angleton recalled.115
* * *
ANGLETON WAS NOT SURPRISED when Major Pagnotta called about Dollmann. Some months earlier, Angleton had learned from one of his Vatican contacts that two known Nazis, Eugen Dollmann and Eugen Wenner, had escaped from a minimum-security British detention camp. They had taken refuge in a hospital outside Milan.116
Angleton knew of Dollmann. He had represented General Wolff in the secret surrender talks with Dulles in early 1945, thus preparing the way for the cu
lmination of Operation Sunrise.117 Angleton feared Dollmann’s arrest might be a propaganda coup for the Communists. Dulles had always claimed that he had not violated FDR’s policy of unconditional surrender and denied promising leniency to Nazis like Wolff and Dollmann. In fact, Dollmann had received American help after the war and might testify to that effect if brought to trial.
Angleton sent a car to Milan to fetch Dollmann and Wenner and bring them back to Rome in order to “keep them quiet”118
When Angleton met Dollmann in person, he asked for his help.
“You see, for us of the American Secret Service, the struggle against Communism is only just beginning,” he said, according to Dollmann. He proposed Dollmann take a six-week course and then “build up a really good espionage organization against the Russians.”
Dollmann objected that his reputation as a Nazi might inhibit his usefulness in Germany. Angleton waved him off. “We’re the masters of the world,” he said. “No one can touch you.”
Dollmann disdained Angleton. “He was talking like a young university lecturer who dabbled a bit in espionage in his spare time,” he said later. But he didn’t disdain Angleton’s offer of money, identification papers, and a place to stay in Rome.119
* * *
LEO PAGNOTTA, THE ARMY CIC investigator, and Bill Gowen, the special agent, paid a visit to Dollmann’s residence on via Archimedes.120
The man who answered the door was Eugen Wenner, who had also played a role in the Operation Sunrise negotiations.121 Pagnotta asked about the third man living in the apartment. Wenner replied that he was traveling. He was Walter Rauff, another former SS commander who had worked as adjutant to General Wolff in northern Italy. Rauff had also helped design the Black Raven gas wagons that predated the gas chambers as the method for the mass killing of Jews.122 An estimated 250,000 people died in Rauff’s mobile killing machines. U.S. war-crimes prosecutors were determined to bring Rauff to trial. Thanks to Angleton, Rauff lived as a free man for the rest of his life.
“We couldn’t believe Angleton put these men up in a safe house,” Bill Gowen said. “It was inexplicable.”123
When Pagnotta informed Angleton that Dollmann was wanted for questioning about war crimes, Angleton had to acquiesce in his detention. Italian prosecutors probed Dollmann’s possible role in the 1943 Ardeatine Caves massacre in which the Nazis executed 335 Italian prisoners of war. After the authorities absolved Dollmann of involvement, Angleton resumed his effort to secure his release.
When Pagnotta returned to civilian life in the United States in the spring of 1947, Angleton was free to act. As “Major O’Brien,” he visited Dollmann in his squalid jail cell and gave him five hundred Swiss francs.124 He then supervised a team of agents who spirited Dollmann from the premises on a stretcher. Dollmann was whisked off to the U.S military base in Frankfurt, Germany.125 In October 1947, he was given another small cash payment and a new set of valid identification papers and was released on the condition that he report weekly to U.S. officials.
Dollmann continued to serve as a CIA source for at least five more years while writing a memoir of life in Nazi Rome that sold well. In 1951, he was arrested for a homosexual tryst with a Swiss man. Unnamed CIA officials arranged for him to escape back to Italy. When Dollmann attempted in 1951 to pass off a batch of forged Nazi documents as authentic, the CIA cut him off.
Angleton’s rescue of Eugen Dollmann was far from the most important intelligence operation he ran in Rome after the war, but it was one of the most revealing. As with the Black Prince, Angleton said sparing the Nazi translator from justice was a matter of honor.
MONSIGNOR
BY 1947, WELL-PLACED AMERICANS in Italy were saying, sotte voce, that young Jim Angleton had great sources in the Vatican. Some went so far as to say he was meeting on a weekly basis with Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the Vatican’s undersecretary of state for Italian affairs.126 Angleton did not boast of such connections. It was his job to know what was going on in Italian politics, and he made sure he did.
The relationship between the monsignor and the American spy was more transactional than spiritual. Baptized as a Catholic and raised as an Episcopalian, Angleton acknowledged Jesus Christ as his Savior.127 His meetings with Montini concerned more earthly matters.
Montini was a dark, slim, self-effacing man, the son of a lawyer. One U.S. intelligence report described him as “the most authoritative person in the Vatican,” not the least because of his daily personal contact with Pope Pius XII.128 The lessons Angleton learned when he met with Monsignor Montini taught him certain timeless truths about the management of power. Yesterday’s war criminal was today’s asset. If the world was indifferent to the fate of the Jews, the Jews would return the favor. On the grounds of the Vatican, Angleton learned the religion of realism. He refused to rank ideologies of America’s adversaries in terms of morality.129
Angleton put his principles into practice. When Montini learned that U.S. Army CIC investigators were asking questions about certain Croatian fascists sought by the Allied war-crimes tribunals, the monsignor complained to Angleton. The Croatians were steadfast in their support for the Church and in their rejection of communistic atheism. They were also notorious for massacring Jews and looting the banks of Zagreb. When the Nazis withdrew from southeast Europe, their local allies fled to the relative safety of Rome.130
The CIC men thought Montini might be sheltering the Croatians at the San Girolamo seminary, located a mile from the Vatican. And they suspected that the Croatians’ loot, in the form of gold coins stolen from state banks and dead Jews, might be stashed nearby. Through an inside agent, William Gowen was able to copy the registration books listing visitors to various Vatican properties. A check of CIC files found that twenty of the men hosted by the Vatican were suspected war criminals. Gowen reported the information to his superiors, with a copy to Angleton.
In return, he received an order from Joe Greene, Angleton’s friend at the U.S. embassy. The CIC was to stand down. The Croatians were an Italian, not American, responsibility. Gowen concluded that Angleton, as a favor to Montini, had thwarted the CIC’s plans to arrest the Croatians and seize their ill-gotten gains.
“Angleton was way too smart to put it in writing,” Gowen said. “He had other people do it.”131
* * *
THE POWERFUL SOVIET-AMERICAN ALLIANCE that had crushed Hitler’s Reich in a colossal pincer movement in 1945 evaporated in just two years. The two victorious powers were now bristling rivals confronting each other across Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Balkan Mountains. In every country where the war had been fought, local Communist parties were bidding for power. Even the most remote conflicts became part of a new global struggle between West and East.
The U.S. government mobilized for a cold war. In March 1947, President Truman announced the United States would support the royalist government in Greece, which had collaborated with the Nazis, against the Communists who had fought them. Truman pledged the United States would “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”132 The United States would also help rebuild the economy of its European allies under a plan announced by Secretary of State George Marshall in a speech given at Harvard in June 1947.
In July, Congress approved the National Security Act, which created the new Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA was charged with coordinating intelligence-collection activities, advising the newly created National Security Council in the White House, and distributing finished intelligence to other agencies.133
President Truman reversed his opposition to a peacetime intelligence agency and signed the act. But Truman insisted on language banning CIA operations on U.S. soil, reiterating that he did not want an “American Gestapo.”134 To insulate the new agency from political pressures, a military man, Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, was brought on to serve as director.
The National Security Act empowered the CIA to take on “such other functions and duti
es related to intelligence affecting the national security,” an ambiguous phrase whose meaning was well understood in Washington.
“The ‘other functions’ the CIA was to perform were purposely not specified,” admitted Clark Clifford, an aide to Truman, “but we understood that they would include covert activities.”135
In November 1947, Angleton was summoned back to Washington to join the Agency. He was soon installed in a ten-by-twelve-foot room in offices housed in a series of ramshackle huts lining the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, in the heart of Washington. These shabby white buildings, which had sprouted during the war, were known as “tempos,” as in temporary. They were drafty in winter and torpid in summer, and devoid of charm year-round.136
Angleton arrived just in time for the very first presidentially authorized CIA mission. On December 14, 1947, Truman issued directive NSC 4/A, placing responsibility for “psychological warfare” with the CIA.137 The priority was Italy, where the Communists were strong. Truman ordered deployment of all practicable means to shore up the pro-American Christian Democrats, including overt measures, such as “an effective U.S. information program,” and covert measures, such as the use of “unvouchered funds,” the preferred euphemism for untraceable cash bribes. Within the CIA, the Office of Special Operations, OSO, responsible for espionage and counterespionage, was assigned to carry out the president’s orders.
Angleton’s job title was chief of operations for Staff A, which handled OSO’s foreign intelligence gathering. He inherited the files of the OSS X-2 and assigned the task of sorting and filing them to a former Army Intelligence officer named Bill Hood.138 Hood was impressed by Angleton’s mastery of mundane detail.139 Angleton, he noted, established and codified practices for clearing agents and for reporting on operations that would soon become standard procedure and would remain so for decades.140
* * *
ANGLETON’S CEREBRAL APPROACH ANNOYED one of his new colleagues, Bill Harvey, the chief of Staff C, which was responsible for counterintelligence. William King Harvey was a pudgy, goggle-eyed cop who had graduated at the top of his class from the University of Indiana Law School. He had made himself into the FBI’s expert on the Soviet Union’s extensive intelligence activities in America. After the war ended, Harvey had identified a network of supposedly loyal Americans—including a handful from the OSS—who were actually reporting to Moscow. Harvey’s drinking got him in trouble with J. Edgar Hoover in 1947, so he joined the newly created CIA. Harvey came to the job with a fund of knowledge about Soviet espionage unmatched anywhere in the U.S. government. He did not think much of Angleton, at least not at first.
The Ghost Page 4