Enemies

by Tim Weiner

  11. “implemented a set of defensive measures”: Vassilev transcription of March 1949 and July 1949 KGB files; “The FBI began piecing together”: National Security Agency, “L’Affaire Weisband.”

  12. “Mr. Hoover was not one who trusted anyone”: Furgerson oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  13. “It is outrageous”: Hoover note on memo, Keay to Ladd, April 7, 1949, FBI/FOIA.

  Trying to battle Allen Dulles for the title of American intelligence czar, Hoover wrote to Dulles staking out his claims. The FBI’s authority covered all the foreigners in the United States whom the CIA was trying to recruit and run as agents overseas—not only aliens and defectors but foreign students and businessmen. In short, the CIA should not fish in the FBI’s waters. This was a very sore point.

  Dulles had convinced members of Congress to draft new and sweeping legislation. The CIA Act of 1949 strengthened and expanded the power of the director of Central Intelligence, the office Dulles sought. Among those proposed powers was the CIA’s right to bring foreigners into the United States for training as spies and saboteurs against Stalin. Hoover saw this legislative language as a threat to America. What if the aliens turned out to be double agents? What if a Russian defector learned about American intelligence and then returned to Moscow? Hoover wrote in his royal-blue hand that he would fight “this astounding provision,” endorsed by Dulles and his allies at the CIA.

  Upon further review, Hoover decided the whole bill was a disaster. “Make certain,” he instructed, “that we in no way at any time approve the overall proposition. We oppose its enactment & it is viciously bad.”

  Hoover wrote to the attorney general that Dulles and his allies threatened “hopeless confusion” on the home front. His warning went unheeded. The CIA Act was rammed through Congress in great secrecy, with next to no debate. It granted the Agency, among other powers, a secret budget hidden in the Pentagon’s ledgers, the right to spend that money without accounting for it, the license to bring one hundred aliens a year into the United States and grant them permanent residence status without regard to their past war crimes or terrorist conduct, and a degree of freedom in conducting domestic operations, short of serving as a secret police.

  The battle that Hoover and Dulles had begun to wage would shape American intelligence for decades. The fight between the FBI and the CIA started in Washington but it soon spread across the country and overseas. Their theater of war was, on occasion, a theater of the absurd.

  Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, Truman’s director of Central Intelligence, knew he was unqualified; he had said so himself. But the admiral deeply resented being undermined by Wild Bill Donovan, Allen Dulles, and their favorite CIA officer, Frank Wisner, who ran the Agency’s rapidly expanding worldwide campaign of commando operations and psychological warfare against Stalin. All three were leaking derogatory information as part of the Dulles campaign to become director. The admiral took the issue to President Truman and to Hoover; he advised the FBI that “the President had bitterly criticized General Donovan for trying to meddle in CIA affairs and had also termed him ‘a prying SOB.’ ”

  Hoover happily placed Harry Truman’s pungent observations in his CIA dossier. On April 5, 1950, Hoover’s file grew thicker. Hoover had picked up word that Wisner’s officers were working in Hollywood, “trying to recruit undercover Intelligence persons in the movie colony out here,” as a letter from a reliable informant read. “One of the ‘lines’ used is that the FBI is all washed up … There is quite a whispering campaign going on which is untrue and unfair.” Enraged, Hoover demanded a full-scale field investigation of Wisner, his Hollywood recruiters, and their “slanderous statements against the Bureau.”

  The FBI’s liaison at the CIA, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach—a young agent who emulated Hoover in appearance, word, and deed—told the director of Central Intelligence that Wisner’s men were “infringing on the jurisdiction of the FBI” and “slanderously trying to undermine the Bureau.” The admiral began a long lament against Wisner. He was a lord of misrule; “ ‘bad elements’ and incompetent personnel” were rife among his officers. But his star was ascending. The admiral said Wisner would soon take over every branch of the CIA’s worldwide clandestine service; his patron Allen Dulles would be close behind him. The admiral told the FBI agent that he would resign from the CIA as soon as he could find a ship that the president would let him command.

  Wisner ran the only branch of the American government on which Hoover did not have a handle. “What do we know of him?” Hoover had written on the first FBI memo to mention Wisner, which misidentified him as a “prominent newspaperman,” rather than a well-bred lawyer who had run operations in Romania for Wild Bill Donovan in World War II.

  Hoover was appalled to learn, as he soon did, that Wisner’s outfit had more money and more power than the FBI.

  14. “This is the most shocking picture”: Hoover note on memo, Mohr to Tolson, “CIA Appropriations,” Aug. 18, 1951, FBI/FOIA.

  21. “IT LOOKS LIKE WORLD WAR III IS HERE”

  1. “espionage, sabotage, subversive activities”: Truman statement, July 24, 1950, HSTL. Some of Truman’s aides were shocked at the scope of this statement. “How in Hell did this get out?” the national security aide Stephen Spingarn wrote to his White House colleague, George Elsey. “Don’t know—thought you were handling,” replied Elsey, who suspected Hoover was attempting a power grab.

  2. “ten substantial and highly reliable”: FBI report to White House, “Present International Situation and the Role of American Communists in the Event of War,” Aug. 24, 1950, HSTL.

  3. sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services: The Soviets ran operations called honey traps. An attractive young woman (or an attractive young man) would flirt with an American abroad. Their coupling took place in a hotel room wired by the KGB. The American would be confronted with pictures of the tryst and a proposition: work with Moscow or face the music. The CIA grappled with cases of this kind in the Truman years. The longtime CIA station chief in Switzerland, a homosexual, had fallen into a honey trap; he was under suspicion of succumbing and serving the Soviets. He was recalled to Washington and he shot himself. The CIA hushed up the case, but the FBI knew a thing or two about it. A few years later, the most powerful foreign policy columnist in Washington, Joe Alsop, fell into a honey trap with a young man in Moscow. The FBI knew all about that one. The FBI also knew, as few did, that throughout the years Whittaker Chambers had been an underground Soviet agent, he had constantly picked up men for furtive one-night stands in New York and Washington. He had broken with communism and homosexuality at exactly the same time. The secrets and the sex—the fake names, the encoded language, the thrills and dangers—had been two sides of one coin to Chambers.

  4. “The Soviets knew”: Conway oral history, FBI/FBIOH.

  5. Sex Deviates Program: The origins and scope of the Sex Deviates Program and the Responsibilities Program are laid out in a report to Hoover from the FBI Executives’ Conference, chaired by Tolson, “Dissemination of Information by the Bureau Outside the Executive Departments,” Oct. 14, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

  6. “General Smith seemed to be”: Hoover memorandum for Tolson and Ladd, Oct. 18, 1950, FBI/FOIA. Hoover was particularly concerned about a CIA officer named Carmel Offie, who worked under the CIA’s clandestine services chief, Frank Wisner. He suspected that Offie was an espionage agent for Israel. He knew for a fact that Offie had well-connected friends in high places all over Washington, that he was a social butterfly with an ear for hot gossip and an eye out for loose lips, and that he was a flamboyant and promiscuous homosexual with a police record for having had oral sex in a public rest room in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House.

  Hoover had the record. An FBI memo to Hoover preparing him for his meeting with General Smith read: “We have on several occasions found it necessary to advise CIA of arrest records received at the Identification Division which reflected the homosexual activity of CIA employee
s. The case of Carmel Offie represents a typical example. Offie, as you know, remained on the CIA payroll for a long period of time after CIA became acquainted with the fact that he was a homosexual.

  “You will recall that Offie is currently being investigated by the FBI due to his alleged participation in Israeli espionage activities,” the memo concluded.

  7. “He has been very cooperative”: Roach to Belmont, transmitting Papich memo, Sept. 27, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  8. “widely exposed to penetration”: Keay to Belmont, with Hoover note, transmitting Papich memo, “Central Intelligence Agency/Security of its Operations,” July 2, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

  9. “Pursuant to your request”: Ladd to Hoover, June 24, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

  22. NO SENSE OF DECENCY

  1. Nixon called twice a day: Ed Tamm, a top aide to Hoover who became a federal judge, recalled that during the Eisenhower administration, “right before the director left for the office, Nixon called him, every morning,” and called again “every night, and told him what was going to happen tomorrow and who he was going to see.” Tamm interview cited in Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 404.

  2. “day-to-day and person-to-person”: “FBI Liaison Activities,” Jan. 26, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

  3. “Our bible was Executive Order 10450”: Walsh interview, Foreign Affairs Oral History (FAOH).

  4. “It was not a good time”: Grand interview, FAOH.

  5. “The FBI reported to me”: Attorney General Herbert Brownell, “The Fight Against Communism,” national radio and television address, April 9, 1954.

  6. “robbing the whole of the war industry”: The anonymous letter to Hoover, dated Aug. 7, 1943, was reproduced in the National Security Agency’s 1995 release of historical documents from the Venona files.

  7. “How many other like situations”: Hoover notation on memo from Ladd, June 23, 1947, FBI, cited in John F. Fox, Jr., “What the Spiders Did: U.S. and Soviet Counterintelligence Before the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 11, no. 3 (Summer 2009), p. 222. My reconstruction of the career of Boris Morros comes from the decoded Venona documents and the work of John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassilev in Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, pp. 445–453. The key Soviet agent ensnared in the Mocase was a longtime illegal known as Jack Soble, whose cover was a shaving-brush company with importing and exporting offices in Paris. Soble’s agents in America included Martha Dodd Stern, the daughter of an American ambassador to Germany; her husband, Alfred Stern, a millionaire New York investment broker; Jane Foster Zlatovski, an 11th-generation American and a veteran of Wild Bill Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, and her husband, George Zlatovski, an army intelligence officer during and after World War II.

  8. “No one need erect”: McCarthy to Hoover, July 30, 1952, FBI/FOIA.

  9. “McCarthy is a former Marine”: San Diego Evening Tribune interview with Hoover, Aug. 22, 1953, cited in Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets, p. 431.

  10. “neither sacrosanct nor immune”: Transcript of telephone conversation between Allen and Foster Dulles cited in David M. Barrett, The CIA and Congress: The Untold Story from Truman to Kennedy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), p. 184.

  11. “Senator McCarthy had found”: Papich to Hoover, Aug. 5, 1953, FBI files, DDEL.

  12. “thirty-one potentially friendly witnesses”: The reports to Hoover and the quotations from conversations between the FBI and McCarthy’s staff during the summer and fall of 1953 are recorded in three separate documents: an untitled 12-page report attached to a memo from Roach to Belmont, July 14, 1953, FBI/FOIA; Belmont to Boardman, “Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Army-McCarthy Hearings)/Communist Penetration of Central Intelligence Agency,” July 28, 1953, FBI/FOIA; and an appended “Analysis of Alleged Communist Penetration into the Central Intelligence Agency Involving Past and Present Employees,” July 28, 1953, FBI/FOIA.

  13. “My boys, I am convinced”: Hagerty diaries, June 8, 1954, DDEL.

  23. GAME WITHOUT RULES

  1. “The President stated”: Roach to Belmont, “Doolittle Study of Covert Operations/Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 18, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  2. “I have a completely defeatist attitude”: Hoover note, Keay to Belmont, “Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 18, 1954, FBI/FOIA. Hoover’s attitude brightened when he saw a detailed FBI report on Doolittle’s interview with the CIA’s Jim Angleton, who was about to take charge of the Agency’s counterintelligence operations. Angleton’s work spilled over into domestic politics; like Hoover, he saw American leftists as Moscow’s puppets. He also ran a section called Special Projects, salvaging the wreckage of blown covert operations. The report came via Angleton himself, Hoover’s best spy inside the CIA. Hoover could not have had a more useful source, short of a wiretap on Allen Dulles.

  Hoover and Angleton appeared to have little in common on the surface, save anticommunism. Hoover was one of the most recognized people in America, the tough cop who looked like a well-fed bulldog. Angleton was one of the most shadowy men in Washington, a tubercular chain-smoker who resembled a wraith. But they thought alike. They grasped the intricacies of counterintelligence operations, where one spy service tries to penetrate another unseen. They were skilled at the political intrigues of Washington, where backstabbing is an art form, and alliances struck at noon are betrayed at midnight.

  On Aug. 19, 1954, “Angleton advised that he ‘opened up’ ” to the Doolittle group, telling them “exactly how he felt about his agency.” The CIA’s covert operations were racked by “confusion, duplication, and waste of manpower and money,” Angleton said. Many had “failed miserably.”

  Angleton went on to report that “CIA’s counterespionage coverage was disgracefully weak.” The men he had to work with included “inexperienced personnel … many who became connected with the Agency simply for the ride.”

  Angleton said the CIA was “incapable of doing an efficient job if political and psychological warfare operations were to be handled jointly with divisions responsible for espionage and counterespionage activities.” Running coups, broadcasting propaganda, fixing elections, and bribing politicians was not intelligence work. The real work was the collection of information through espionage—stealing secrets. Hoover could not have agreed more.

  Doolittle asked how the FBI and the CIA were getting along. Angleton said that “as far as he was concerned, the relations were excellent.” At his level, perhaps they were. But at the top, they were terrible.

  3. “How in the world”: Keay to Belmont, incorporating Papich memo, “Relations with Central Intelligence Agency; Interview with Allen Dulles, May 22, 1954,” FBI/FOIA.

  4. “Doolittle viewed the Bureau”: Belmont to Boardman, “Doolittle Study of Covert Operations/Central Intelligence Agency,” Aug. 30, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  5. “some of its weaknesses and defects”: Hoover to Tolson, Nov. 19, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  6. “We are facing”: Doolittle “Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Sept. 30, 1954, declassified Aug. 20, 2001, CIA.

  7. “The ideal solution”: Hoover to Tolson, Nov. 19, 1954, FBI/FOIA.

  8. “His February 28, 1955, report”: Belmont was a key member of the NSC planning board subcommittee; the report, “Study of Possible Hostile Soviet Actions,” was adopted by the president and the NSC on March 31, 1955.

  9. “Plans for the detention”: Hoover report, “The Internal Security Program,” NSC 5509, part 8, April 8, 1955.

  10. “most important goal”: Hoover report to General Mark Clark, Jan. 25, 1955, FBI/FOIA.

  24. THE LONG SHADOW

  1. Using cobalt-60: Belmont to Roach, “Director’s Briefing: National Security Council, March 8, 1956,” dated March 22, 1956, FBI/FOIA. This is the only known record that shows the discussion of a “dirty bomb” using cobalt-60 at the NSC briefing.

  2. “Sometimes it is necessary”: Minutes of th
e 279th meeting of the National Security Council, March 8, 1956, partly declassified with deletions, DDEL.

  3. Hoover had asked: On March 8, 1955, Hoover wrote to Attorney General Brownell trying to renew the approvals for warrantless wiretaps he had won in his May 21, 1940, letter from President Roosevelt. Hoover pointedly asked Brownell if that letter still gave the FBI legal authority for wiretapping. If not, Hoover asked the attorney general “to present this matter to President Eisenhower to determine whether he holds the same view.” Brownell wrote back eight days later: “I personally explained to the President, the Cabinet, the National Security Council and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees during 1954 the present policy and procedure on wiretaps.… I do not think it necessary to reopen the matter at this time.”

  4. “Surveillances weren’t the answer”: Jack Danahy, FBI/FBIOH.

  5. “We had a group sort of like the Dirty Dozen”: James R. Healy, May 3, 2007, FBI/FBIOH.

  6. “we were using every means”: Graham J. Desvernine, FBI/FBIOH, Oct. 4, 2006. Desvernine soon joined a small group “whose responsibility was solely the surveillance and recording of conversations from within the car of William Z. Foster”—the head of the Communist Party of the United States. Hoover had been after him since the Bridgman raids of 1922. Foster had run for president three times, in 1924, 1928, and 1932—and been imprisoned only once, and briefly, for his work. His car was the setting for one-on-one meetings among the CPUSA’s dwindling brain trust. William Z. Foster, the grandfather of the CPUSA, would die in 1961 in Moscow, where he was buried in the Kremlin wall.

  7. “a program of intelligence collection”: Edward S. Miller, FBI/FBIOH, May 23, 2008. The CIA’s brilliant but doomed Berlin Tunnel project, conceived and executed by the cashiered FBI agent Bill Harvey, was the crown jewel of Program C.

  8. “We broke into the house”: John F. McCormack, Oct. 31, 2006, FBI/FBIOH.