by Tim Weiner
2. the first director of Central Intelligence: Three directors of Central Intelligence served Truman from January 1946 to July 1947. They led a small and disorganized service called the Central Intelligence Group. The Central Intelligence Agency was created when Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947. The powers of the Agency were expanded in 1949.
3. “He wanted it understood”: Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd, and Carson, Jan. 25, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
4. “General Eisenhower inquired”: Hoover to Tolson, Tamm, Ladd, and Carson, Jan. 25, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
5. “What do you want me to do?”: William W. Quinn, Buffalo Bill Remembers: Truth and Courage (Fowlerville, Mich.: Wilderness Adventure Books, 1991), pp. 234–267.
6. “It is of the utmost urgency”: Souers to Truman, April 17, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, p. 276.
7. “She was a flake”: Jack Danahy, FBI Oral History Project interview, FBI/FBIOH. The Soviet spy network Bentley served was managed by her lover, Jacob Golos, who had died in 1943. The FBI already had a file on Golos. The Bureau had seen him meet the long-vanished Soviet spy Gaik Ovakimian back in 1941. Ovakimian, in turn, had come to the United States in 1933, when the Roosevelt administration first recognized the Soviets and allowed Moscow to establish diplomatic posts in Washington and New York.
8. “There is an enormous Soviet espionage ring”: Hoover memorandum, May 29, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
9. “It was a time of some hysteria”: Oral history interview with Tom C. Clark, Oct. 17, 1972, HSTL.
10. “in the event of an emergency”: Ladd to Hoover, Feb. 27, 1946, FBI, reprinted in CI Reader, “The Postwar Expansion of FBI Domestic Intelligence.”
11. “intensify its investigation”: Hoover to Attorney General, Personal and Confidential, March 8, 1946, FBI, CI Reader.
12. “Move rapidly”: Hoover notation on memo from Tamm to Hoover, July 18, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
13. “All investigative files”: C. H. Carson, “Closing of [Deleted] Office” and “Closing of SIS Offices,” Aug. 22 and Sept. 9, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
14. “to avoid offending Mr. Hoover”: Tamm to Hoover, Aug. 10, 1946, FRUS Intelligence. Hoover’s rage was not quelled. When Attorney General Clark protested Hoover’s unilateral withdrawal from the Western Hemisphere, FBI assistant director Ed Tamm gave him a piece of Hoover’s mind: “[Director of Central Intelligence] Vandenberg had the effrontery” to hire “men who had deserted from the service of the FBI” as his “alleged intelligence representatives,” he told Clark. These men were “definitely persona non grata” with Hoover.
15. “Watch with meticulous care”: Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, April 10, 1947, FBI/FOIA. Emphasis in original. Hoover took delight in every snafu that the Central Intelligence Group suffered. Its new station chief in Paraguay, whose Spanish was faulty, registered himself at his hotel as an American ambassador. By coincidence, the actual American ambassador to Paraguay, Willard L. Beaulac, left the country for a conference in Washington that day. The nation’s newspapers and radio stations had a field day reporting that Beaulac had been replaced by a mysterious stranger. An FBI radiogram reported the embarrassing incident. “Well, CIG is starting off true to form,” Hoover wrote on his copy of the report.
16. “The ‘empire builders’ ”: Hoover notation on memo from Ladd, June 2, 1947, FBI/FOIA.
17. “a major blow”: Acheson to National Intelligence Authority, Aug. 5, 1946, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 286–287.
18. “I think we ought to have a showdown”: Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, Oct. 29, 1946, FBI/FOIA.
19. “the threat of infiltrating”: “FBI Plan for United States Secret World-Wide Intelligence Coverage,” no date (but updated circa Sept. 1946), FBI/FOIA. The plan was continually updated; this version was included in a package of documentation in preparation for Hoover’s congressional testimony on the legislation that became the National Security Act of 1947.
18. “RED FASCISM”
1. On September 26, 1946: Clark Clifford, “Report to the President,” Sept. 26, 1946, HSTL; “Reds, phonies, and ‘parlor pinks’ ”: Truman diary entry cited in David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 517.
2. “Communism, in reality”: Hoover testimony, House Committee on Un-American Activities, March 26, 1947.
3. “Who’s that young man?”: Bradshaw Mintener interview, Ovid Demaris, The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975), pp. 120–121.
19. SURPRISE ATTACK
1. “Very strongly anti-FBI”: Clifford notes of conversation with Truman, May 2, 1947, HSTL.
2. “a Frankenstein”: Snyder oral history, HSTL.
3. He artfully twisted the arms: Hoover’s off-the-record briefing was printed at the FBI on July 3, 1947. Its delivery to selected congressmen working on the National Security Act came on Hoover’s terms—off the record. It appears here for the first time.
4. “very frank in his statement”: [Deleted] to Ladd, April 17, 1947, FBI/FOIA.
5. “the raw material for building”: Testimony of Allen W. Dulles, Hearing of the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. The hearing was closed; a sole surviving copy of the transcript of the testimony of key witnesses was kept in a locked safe at CIA headquarters. Staff members of the House Intelligence and Government Operations committees unearthed it in 1982.
6. “It is a tragedy”: Hoover notation on memo from Victor Keay to H. B. Fletcher re: Criticism of CIA, FBI/FOIA, Oct. 28, 1948; “If the people of this nation”: Memorandum for Mr. Ladd re: Central Intelligence Agency, Aug. 11, 1948, FBI/FOIA.
7. “It strikes me as a waste”: Hoover notation on memo to Ladd, Aug. 19, 1947, FBI/FOIA; “Please cut out all”: Hoover notation on memo, Ladd to Hoover, Oct. 23, 1947, FBI/FOIA, emphasis in original; “Waste no time on it”: Hoover notation on memo for Ladd, Dec. 11, 1947, FBI/FOIA.
8. “the present widespread belief”: “Subject: Intelligence Matters,” Top Secret memorandum of conversation by John H. Ohly, special assistant to secretary of defense, Oct. 24, 1947, HSTL.
9. “the smuggling into the United States”: Forrestal to Hoover, Dec. 20, 1948, Top Secret letter quoting Hoover memo to Forrestal dated Nov. 1, 1947, HSTL. Hoover’s Nov. 1, 1947, warning to Forrestal on the threat of Soviet atomic terrorism served as a political catalyst. Stratagems to subvert Stalin consumed the secretary of defense, who became a driving force behind the creation of the new clandestine service of the CIA and its overseas operations. The goal was nothing less than undermining the Soviet state, freeing the captive nations of Eastern Europe, and rolling Russia’s borders back to where they had been before World War II. The chief of the new covert operations outfit, Frank Wisner, sought the FBI’s help in vetting Russian and Eastern European exiles in the United States whom he sought to train and equip as political shock troops to attack Stalin and his allies. Hoover’s men were happy to oblige, as the task enabled them to add to Hoover’s dossiers on the CIA. Their boss cast an extremely skeptical gaze on Wisner and his men, whose plans went down in the FBI files as “Project ‘X.’ ”
10. The United States Army’s Signal Intelligence Service: The navy had its own project aimed at Soviet communications in the Pacific. The army and navy combined their attack before the end of World War II. The American code-making and code-breaking effort became the National Security Agency in 1952.
11. At that point, General Carter W. Clarke: On or before Sept. 1, 1947, Clarke briefed the FBI’s liaison to army code breakers, Special Agent S. Wesley Reynolds, on the gist of the Soviet diplomatic messages. The FBI’s official historian, John F. Fox, Jr., has recorded that “Clarke asked Reynolds if the Bureau knew of any Soviet cover names that might help his team’s effort. Reynolds soon turned over a list of 200 known cover names that the FBI had acquired. Most of them had not been found in the traffic to that point.” The army gave the FBI received fragments of their decryptions. Reynolds filed them; but “the message fragments were plac
ed in a safe and forgotten” for nine months. John J. Fox, Jr., “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence,” presented at the Oct. 27, 2005, Symposium on Cryptologic History, National Security Agency.
12. “In view of loose methods”: Hoover worried about the disclosure of secrets throughout the American intelligence community. For example, the question of who knew about the army’s payment of $150,000 a year to American communications companies in exchange for copies of foreign diplomatic cables in the Venona program vexed Hoover as well as army general A. R. Bolling, who told the FBI that “only a few people, including the President and the Secretary of Defense” knew about the deal, and advised the Bureau to hold the fact very tightly. Keay memo to Ladd, May 6, 1949, FBI/FOIA. On the opening of the FBI investigation that led to the execution of the Rosenbergs, the documentation includes Ladd to Hoover, Jan. 8, 1953, “re: Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Espionage-R”; Hoover to New York field office, Aug. 18, 1949; and New York field office to headquarters, Aug. 18, 1949, all first cited in FBI historian Fox’s 2005 conference report at the NSA, “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence.” Hoover first wrote in May 1952 that the army and the FBI might consider reading the CIA into Venona despite its “loose methods” and “questionable personnel.” Hoover note on a memo from Belmont to Ladd, May 23, 1952, FBI/FOIA.
13. “We now had dozens”: Robert J. Lamphere and Tom Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1995), pp. 96–97.
14. “I am going through”: Truman to Churchill, July 10, 1948, cited in David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 648–649.
15. “like an animated shuttlecock”: Pearson wrote in his Sept. 26, 1948, syndicated newspaper column, Washington Merry-Go-Round, that the “handsome FBI-man Lou Nichols” met every few days with the chairmen of HUAC and the Senate investigations subcommittee. How did Pearson know this? He correctly suspected that Hoover’s men had him under surveillance. So he put Hoover’s man under surveillance. He wrote in that same column: “This town’s name is not Moscow, but it’s gotten to be a place where sleuths tail other sleuths almost as much as the NKVD secret police do.”
16. “an acquittal under very embarrassing circumstances”: Jones memo to Ladd, Jan. 16, 1947, FBI, cited by the official FBI historian John J. Fox, Jr., “In the Enemy’s House: Venona and the Maturation of American Counterintelligence,” presented at the Oct. 27, 2005, Symposium on Cryptologic History.
17. One was Laurence Duggan: Duggan was grilled by the FBI in December 1948 after Chambers went public; and the next week by his old Soviet intelligence contacts. He died five days later by jumping or falling out of a sixteenth-story window. Hiss was indicted for perjury by a federal grand jury in December 1948 after denying under oath that he had given State Department documents to Chambers. He was convicted and sentenced to five years. Chambers had lied to the grand jury too, but without penalty. Soviet intelligence files published in 2009 proved Hiss had been a spy.
18. “No, I was not”: The executive-session testimony Chambers gave was never officially released. Excerpts from the transcript were first published in Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (New York: Modern Library, 1998), pp. 216–219. The open testimony is at p. 221.
The question of why the FBI deliberately ignored what Chambers had confessed to A. A. Berle in September 1939 and in his first interview with the Bureau in May 1942 has a pointed answer. The journalist Isaac Don Levine had been the go-between for Berle; Hoover had blackballed him in the summer of 1939; when Hoover blackballed you, you and your associates stayed blackballed. Levine had embarrassed the Bureau. He had written a series of stories for the Saturday Evening Post—a magazine with five million subscribers—which told the story of Soviet espionage in America for the first time. It was the story of Walter Krivitsky, a senior Soviet intelligence officer who had broken with Stalin, defected in Paris, met with the American ambassador, William Bullitt, and won his help to come to the United States. His information had helped convince Bullitt, once an ardent supporter of Soviet recognition, that Stalin’s government was a gigantic conspiracy to commit murder. Ambassador Bullitt, a journalist himself in his youth, knew and trusted Levine as a talented foreign correspondent. He vouchsafed for the Soviet defector.
The Saturday Evening Post stories were riveting. They described how Stalin liquidated his real and imagined rivals. They detailed how the Soviet secret police had stolen the passports of the American volunteers who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and used the documents for the international travels of Soviet espionage agents. They laid out in some detail the workings of the Soviet foreign intelligence apparatus in the United States—and they suggested that the Soviets had been running rings around the FBI for years.
The FBI had interviewed Krivitsky twice in New York, the first time shortly after the first article appeared in print. He was the first Soviet spy to speak with anyone at the Bureau. A retired senior FBI counterintelligence officer, Raymond J. Batvinis, reviewed the Krivitsky case file more than sixty years after it was closed. He concluded that Hoover himself decided that Krivitsky could not be trusted and should not be believed. Hoover based his judgment on an editor’s note accompanying the first article that described Krivitsky as “still a believer in the true Communism of Lenin.” That was too much for Hoover. He then wrote off Levine because he had written Krivitsky’s story. His ban tainted Berle’s report. “How can we make sense of the FBI’s failure to recognize a unique and extraordinarily valuable source of information that could have broken open Soviet intelligence activities in the Western Hemisphere like an egg?” Batvinis wrote in 2007, with the perspective of a man who had spent his career hunting spies. He concluded that Hoover and his men simply lacked “the professional skills” they needed to interview and understand a defecting Soviet intelligence officer. The result was a lost decade.
19. “Hoover did his thing”: Spingarn oral history, March 29, 1967, HSTL, and Spingarn interview in Ovid Demaris, The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1975).
20. “That was contrary to our whole tradition”: Spingarn oral history, March 29, 1967, HSTL.
21. “We began to fall out”: Tom C. Clark oral history, Oct. 17, 1972, HSTL.
22. “the program for the detention of Communists”: [Deleted] to Ladd, “CIA Requests for Information Concerning Aliens,” Nov. 19, 1948, FBI/FOIA.
23. “For some months representatives”: Hoover to Souers, July 7, 1950, FRUS Intelligence.
24. Congress secretly financed: In 1971, in a signing statement repealing the Emergency Detention Act of 1950, President Nixon said: “No President has ever attempted to use the provisions of this act. And while six detention camps were established and funded by the Congress, none of them was ever used for the purposes of this legislation. In fact, all six camps have been abandoned or used for other purposes since 1957.”
25. Dewey defeats Truman: One of the fifty reporters who unanimously predicted Truman’s defeat was Bert Andrews, the Washington bureau chief of the reputable Republican daily the New York Herald Tribune, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for a series on the loyalty and security programs. He was a secret confidant for Nixon and Chambers and he plied both men ruthlessly for scoops; riding the arc of the Red hunt, he vowed that he could make Nixon president. When Truman saw the fifty-to-nothing prediction of the press, he said: “I know every one of those fifty fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.”
20. PARANOIA
1. “She bestrides the world like a Colossus”: Robert Payne, Report on America (New York: John Day, 1949), p. 3.
2. “She gives the impression”: Jan. 4, 1945, KGB file cited by Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev in Spies, pp. 288–289. The report on Judith Coplon, aka Sima, was not a decoded Venona message but a file transcribed by Vassilev from KGB archives. The
Soviet central intelligence agency changed its name thirteen times between 1917 and 1991. KGB, short for Committee on State Security, was adopted in March 1954 and lasted until Oct. 1991. The Soviet military intelligence service, which also changed its name, is hereinafter GRU, short for Chief Intelligence Directorate.
3. “O.K.—H.”: Memo to Ladd, Nov. 11, 1949, FBI, cited in Alan F. Westin, “The Wire-Tapping Problem: An Analysis and a Legislative Proposal,” Columbia Law Review 52, no. 2 (November 1952), pp. 165–208. Westin’s analysis contains extensive excerpts from the Coplon trial and appeals record, including the fact that 50 FBI agents monitored the Coplon taps, that an FBI agent gave false testimony at the first trial, and that the FBI destroyed the wiretap records before the second trial.
4. “the entire Coplon affair”: Lamphere and Shachtman, The FBI-KGB War, pp. 115–122.
5. By September 7, 1949, informed: MI5 records cited in Michael S. Goodman, “Who Is Trying to Keep What Secret from Whom and Why? MI5-FBI Relations and the Klaus Fuchs Case,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 3 (2005), pp. 124–146.
6. “Fuchs knew as much”: Keay to Fletcher, “Klaus Fuchs: Espionage,” Feb. 21, 1950, FBI/FOIA.
7. “But after that connection with Gold”: Donald Shannon, FBI Oral History Project interview, Sept. 4, 2003, FBI/FBIOH.
8. “Take note”: Hoover notation, Ladd to Hoover, “Subject: Foocase,” Feb. 16, 1950, FBI/FOIA.
9. “What the competitors have on them”: Moscow Center to KGB New York, April 10, 1950, Vassilev transcription cited in Haynes, Klehr, and Vassilev, Spies.
10. “At the Hall he had a reputation”: National Security Agency, “L’Affaire Weisband,” in Breaches in the Dike—the Security Cases, NSA DOCID 3188691.