Shadow Warrior

by Randall B. Woods

  Shortly after his return from the European theater he wrote an account of his NORSO experiences entitled “Skis and Daggers.” It was a precursor of the World War II genre books for adolescents such as Dave Dawson over Burma. Just as Dave’s sidekick consumes a whole cherry pie before flying off to shoot down Jap Zeroes, the men of NORSO engage in delirious horseplay after their return from Tangen. Helgeson sends his comrades into a fit of mirth by demanding “a dish of pineapple,” while Sather calls Colby a “Trojan Norse.”23

  War, of course, is a dangerous business, for body and soul. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not be, generally eclipse questions of right and wrong. For the men and women who served as Jedburghs and NORSO commandos, this was doubly true. Not only were they deciders of life and death, as all soldiers are, but they were agents of revolution, molders of societies, and purveyors of ideals, however small the scale. Donovan’s people worked outside of traditional political, diplomatic, and military channels; that free agency could be intoxicating. Bill Colby was a good man, a good Catholic, fighting a just war. And yet, in that righteous conflict, in the very triumph over the fascist empires, there lurked danger for the man and for his country. As the Judge in Blood Meridian says to a former priest turned Indian fighter (the novel takes place in the 1850s’ American West), “For the priest has put by the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor [war]. The priest also would be no god-server but a god himself.”24 Colby may not have been the archetypal Nietzschean superman Cormac McCarthy was referencing, but he had allowed his patriotism and his religion to take the fine edges off the horrors of war. For the vast majority of men and women who served in World War II, the experience would be unforgettable, but temporary and eventually fleeting. For a few, it would determine the course of the rest of their lives, and they in turn would shape the future of the nation. William Egan Colby was one of those few. No conscript crusader he, but a professional, a lifer.

  Following the operation in occupied France, most of the Jedburghs were reassigned to the Far East, dropping behind Japanese lines in China or Indochina to rally, train, and equip the native resistance movements. NORSO had not been intended as a substitute for service in the Pacific theater, only a detour. Accordingly, when Colby arrived in London from Oslo, he was informed that he would take ship for America and, after a brief shore leave, depart for the other war, probably to be stationed in Indochina because of his French.

  Rejection of his proposal to overthrow the Franco regime in Spain notwithstanding, Colby was pleased. The ensuing transatlantic voyage was slow but uneventful—there were no Nazi wolf packs to dodge. Colby remembered sailing into New York Harbor past a huge banner that read “WELCOME HOME—WELL DONE.” Almost the first thing the young hero did was to call Barbara Heinzen, the Barnard co-ed he had dated while he was at Columbia. Whether it was love or lust—the family later would joke that John, the eldest child, was born nine months and one minute after Bill landed in New York—the couple became engaged just two weeks after they were reunited. But Bill and Barbara did not set a date for the wedding. He recalled that he did not want to leave a war widow, and she probably did not want to become one.25

  In the Pacific, the Allies had turned the tide. General Douglas MacArthur had returned to the liberated Philippines in the fall of 1944, and early the next year the US Marines, supported by the army and navy, began their island-hopping march northward toward the Japanese homeland islands. By the summer of 1945, the Japanese had lost all of their carriers and most of their air force, but the assumption among MacArthur’s staff was that the enemy would fight to the bitter end. The battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been the bloodiest of the war. Then, as Colby was packing his bags and mentally girding his loins, word came of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6. The Soviet Union invaded Manchuria on August 8, and Nagasaki was bombed the next day. On August 14, 1945, Japan surrendered unconditionally. World War II was over. On September 15, Bill and Barbara were married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Washington, DC. “I stopped in advance at a quiet Catholic church to confess the lively bachelor life I had lived as a paratrooper for three years,” Bill wrote in Honorable Men.26

  The OSS recommended Major Colby for Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and he was accepted. With his war record and education, the twenty-five-year-old officer could look forward to rapid advancement in the postwar military, but it was not to be. Colby recalled that he admired and respected the army in which his father had made a career, but that it was not for him. The regular military was too confining and rigid. Colby had spent the war in an organization that encouraged innovative thinking, individual initiative, and self-reliance. The men and women of the OSS with whom he had associated were intelligent, educated, daring, and immensely stimulating. The former Jedburgh did not quietly suffer fools, or even average people. “Generally admirable,” his OSS evaluation for 1945 read, “but critical of the incompetents in the higher positions.” Colby liked adventure, but he did not want to be told what to live and die for by people less intelligent than himself. His father had had to live with that ever since he had joined the military. No, Bill Colby decided, he wanted to return to Columbia and earn his law degree, make a nice living, serve the cause of New Deal liberalism, and raise a family.27

  Pressure on the Truman administration—FDR had died of a massive heart attack on April 12, 1945—to demobilize the armed forces was intense, but America’s international responsibilities had grown immeasurably as a result of the war. Its strategic and economic interests were vast and in need of protection. The War Department came up with a point system to govern release from the service based on time in service and merit. Colby had been in uniform since before Pearl Harbor; he had earned the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, the Croix de Guerre, and the Medal of St. Olaf. He received his discharge and immediately entrained for New York, where Columbia’s registrar told him that he would be admitted if he could start classes the following Monday. Colby rushed back to Washington to tell Barbara.

  Before the young couple departed to begin their new life, there was a final gathering of OSS eagles. On the evening of September 28, Wild Bill Donovan presided over a reunion at the Riverside Skating Rink near where Washington’s Rock Creek Park meets the Potomac River.28 The research and analysis people were there, but it was the Jedburghs and their counterparts in the Far East who were the stars. Before addressing his followers, Donovan lined up those who had most recently been decorated and pinned their medals on them. When he reached Colby, Donovan expressed regret that he himself had never earned the Silver Star. Yes, Colby replied diplomatically, it would have been a nice complement to the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Wild Bill’s remarks were brief and to the point. “Within a few days, each one of us will be going on to new tasks, whether in civilian life or in government service,” he said. “You can go with the assurance that only by decisions of national policy based upon accurate information can we have a chance of a peace that will endure.”29

  5

  THE AGENCY

  As early as 1943, in the midst of World War II, Bill Donovan had proclaimed the need for a peacetime intelligence agency capable of gathering, collating, and analyzing all information affecting the US national security as well as conducting espionage and supervising covert operations overseas.

  Espionage and counterespionage had existed as the “dark side” of diplomacy since the formation of the nation-state system. So had black propaganda (the deliberate spreading of misinformation), psychological warfare, and covert operations. General George Washington, building on his experience as a British officer during the French and Indian War in which he had utilized Indian informants, was America’s first spymaster. In a letter to his subordinates on July 26, 1777, he wrote: “The necessity of procuring good intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged.” The Revolution produced the new nation’s first intelligence “mole”—Dr. Benj
amin Church, who posed as a Boston patriot while secretly providing intelligence about American rebel activities to British general Thomas Gage. Church’s treachery was uncovered by America’s first cryptanalyst, the Reverend Samuel West, who was hired by Washington to decipher one of Church’s letters.

  In the years between the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the nation, absorbed with domestic matters, saw no need to engage in international espionage or defend against it. But in the early stages of the Civil War, Lincoln, like Washington, acted as his own spymaster. He soon turned to professionals in his search for information on the machinations of the Confederacy. Two rival organizations, one headed by the famous detective Allan Pinkerton and the other by Lafayette Baker, filled the void, but they frequently worked at cross purposes. In 1885, President Grover Cleveland called for assignments of military attachés to foreign countries to gather information. During the Spanish-American War, the US Secret Service ran espionage and counterespionage operations. Before and during American participation in World War I, Secret Service and FBI agents were successful in ferreting out German agents and saboteurs operating within the United States, but between the two world wars, American intelligence once again fell into abeyance.

  In November 1944, Donovan wrote to President Roosevelt, an old Columbia Law School classmate, proposing the establishment of a central authority directly under White House control that would coordinate the other intelligence bureaucracies in the federal government (naval intelligence and the intelligence division of the State Department, for example) and collect its own information through a network of spies and counterspies that it would recruit, train, and deploy. The new entity, reporting directly to the president, would gather, evaluate, and disseminate all intelligence relating “to national planning and security in peace and war, and the advancement of broad national policy.” This supreme intelligence organization, with its own independent budget, would be authorized to conduct “subversive operations abroad” and perform such other functions related to intelligence as the president should direct. The agency, Donovan made clear, would be strictly prohibited from conducting domestic operations.1

  There was every indication that Roosevelt planned to approve the Donovan plan for a central intelligence agency, but his death on April 12, 1945, intervened. Donovan lacked a personal relationship with Harry S. Truman. Indeed, the new president regarded the postwar avalanche of OSS glamour stories as nothing more than a campaign of self-aggrandizement by what Truman called that “Black Republican leprechaun.” When Donovan eventually gained access to the White House and presented Truman with a copy of his intelligence memo, the president tore it in two and handed it back to him.2

  On September 20, 1945, Truman issued an executive order officially disbanding the OSS. Its two principal functions were delegated to other agencies, the researchers and analysts to the State Department, and the clandestine operatives—the spymasters and counterspies—to the War Department. The paramilitary types, the parachutists and guerrilla fighters like Colby, were left to go home. Donovan announced that he was abandoning public life to return to his New York law firm.3

  Despite his distaste for Donovan, Truman was not unsympathetic to the notion of an overarching intelligence authority. Presidential aide Clark Clifford remembered being in the Oval Office one afternoon in late August 1945, just after the termination of hostilities. Referring to Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew’s 1941 cables to the State Department, Truman declared, “You go back and read Joe Grew and then you come in here and tell me how anybody could have read those cables and not know there was an attack coming.” Grew had reported rumors circulating in Tokyo predicting the exact timing and nature of the attack on Pearl Harbor weeks before it occurred. “If we had had some central repository for information and somebody to look at it and fit all the pieces together, there never would have been a Pearl Harbor.”4

  On January 22, 1946, Truman, by executive order, directed the establishment of a new National Intelligence Authority. It would comprise the secretaries of state, war, and the navy, and would have as its operating arm the Central Intelligence Group (CIG). In a White House ceremony, Truman named his old friend Rear Admiral Sidney Souers as the first head of the CIG, presenting him with a black cloak and wooden dagger and pronouncing him “director of centralized snooping.” The director of the CIG would have no money and no authority of his own. Asked by a reporter several weeks after his appointment what he wanted to do, the first director replied, “I want to go home.” The operatives of the new agency moved into a string of temporary buildings—built for the OSS during the war—located along the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They were shabby structures, poorly cooled and heated, one OSS officer recalled. This central intelligence entity might have remained the empty shell it was except for one thing—the onset of the Cold War.5

  During his first year and a half in office, Harry Truman alternated between conciliation and rhetorical confrontation in his dealings with the Soviet Union. The thrust of his policy, however, was to have the United States live up to the letter and spirit of the Yalta Accords—the agreements entered into by the Allied nations dividing liberated Europe into occupation zones—and to insist that the Kremlin do likewise. Gradually, however, the administration’s attitude toward Moscow hardened. On February 22, 1946, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, George F. Kennan, responding to a request from the State Department for an analysis of Soviet policy, penned his “Long Telegram.” Neither friendship nor war with the Soviets was conceivable, Kennan declared. The Kremlin held a “neurotic” view of the world and was “committed fanatically to the belief that with [the] U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi.” The Marxist-Leninist fear of capitalist encirclement and traditional Russian fears of an attack through Eastern Europe by another Napoleon or Hitler were mutually reinforcing. It was imperative that the United States rebuild and secure the industrial strong points of the noncommunist world, that is, Western Europe and Japan. Through alliances and economic aid, Kennan wrote, America should seek to contain communism until it collapsed as a result of its own internal contradictions. In March 1946, with Truman on the dais, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his famous Iron Curtain speech: The Soviet Union and its satellites would not rest until all of Europe and eventually the entire world were communist, he said. The only thing standing between Western Europe, gravely weakened by World War II, and the five hundred Soviet divisions stationed in Eastern Europe was the United States. Churchill’s warning came as no surprise to Truman. His administration had already come to the conclusion that British and American strategic interests in Europe were more or less identical.

  In his Long Telegram, Kennan, who would go on to head the Policy Planning Staff in the State Department, had warned that the Soviet threat was all the more terrifying because, in addition to its vast internal resources, Russia had at its disposal “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.” Kennan was referring to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the scores of communist parties operating in countries around the world that had, until 1943, been directed and coordinated by the Communist International. There was also the Soviet Union’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD, which, despite its name, was heavily involved in overseas espionage, counterespionage, propaganda, covert action, and subversion. Like the Communist Party itself, every individual communist was an evangelist of the proletariat and as such a potential spy, saboteur, political operative, or counterspy. Each and every Communist Party member was a revolutionary with a license to subvert. Because of their openness, Western societies were especially vulnerable. As Kennan had noted in his 1946 missive to the State Department, the United States and its fellow democracies featured a “wide variety of national association
s or bodies which can be dominated or influenced by such penetration,” including “labor unions, youth leagues, women’s organizations, racial societies, religious societies, social organizations, cultural groups, liberal magazines [and] publishing houses.”6

  As it was mobilizing diplomatically against the Soviet threat in 1946–1947, the Truman administration was also debating how to organize internally—how to create bureaucracies capable of meeting the new challenge. Out of those debates came the National Security Act of 1947, which effectively created the national security state. The measure brought into being a unified military establishment by setting up a cabinet-level Department of Defense. Another new body, the National Security Council (NSC)—composed of the president; vice president; secretaries of defense, state, and Treasury; and the chief of intelligence—would meet regularly to oversee the nation’s strategic well-being. The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), established in reponse to the crisis of World War II, would become permanent. Finally, the National Intelligence Authority and the CIG were transformed into a new bureau, the Central Intelligence Agency. Both the OSS’s chief European spymaster, Allen Dulles, and General Dwight Eisenhower testified before Congress in favor of a central intelligence authority. “A small but elite corps of men with a passion for anonymity and a willingness to stick to the job,” is how Dulles described the individuals who would staff the new agency.7

  It seems that the creators of the CIA originally intended that it limit itself to intelligence gathering and analysis. The agency’s first director, Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, was not an ambitious man, either for himself or his bureaucracy. He discouraged all talk of psychological warfare, black propaganda, and covert political and military operations. All of this did not sit well with Donovan and the corporate lawyers who had created and run the OSS. These so-called “Park Avenue cowboys” had reveled in the guerrilla and paramilitary operations of the service. In tacit alliance with them were the hardline anticommunists, or “determined interventionists,” who were increasingly asserting themselves within the foreign policy establishment, men like future ambassador to the USSR Charles “Chip” Bohlen, former ambassador to the Soviet Union W. Averell Harriman, and George Kennan. In December 1947, the activists won their first victory when the NSC directed Hillenkoetter to undertake “covert psychological operations” against the Soviet Union. Subsequently, CIA operatives intervened in the 1948 Italian parliamentary elections to prevent a communist victory. Then, on May 4, 1948, in the midst of the Berlin Blockade crisis, Kennan’s Policy Planning Staff recommended “the inauguration of organized political warfare.” What Kennan had in mind was the creation of a new “covert political warfare operations directorate within the Government.”8 American officials had to realize that the boundaries between war and peace had virtually evaporated, he declared. The British had long recognized the fact; the Soviets were currently the world’s leading practitioners of political warfare and covert operations.