In 1948, Angleton returned to the United States as an army major. He resigned his commission and immediately joined the CIA, serving Bedell Smith as chief of foreign intelligence operations. When Allen Dulles came on board as DCI following the 1952 presidential election, Angleton was made head of a powerful new unit named the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff. He had been chosen personally by the new director. For the next eight years, Angleton would enjoy unprecedented access to Dulles—he was the only staff member with permission to enter the director’s office unannounced. He and the DCI would drive home together at the end of each workday.23
By tradition, responsibility for internal security had rested with the FBI. With the advent of the CIA, the two agencies proceeded in uneasy partnership. In theory, the FBI had responsibility for subversive activities within the United States, and the CI Staff handled communist espionage abroad. In reality, the CIA retained control of all operations designed to penetrate opposition intelligence services, domestic or foreign. Whereas the FBI historically simply arrested and deported enemy spies, the CIA attempted to “turn” them, that is, to convert them into double agents. Attached to virtually every overseas CIA station were one or more counterintelligence officers whose duty it was to monitor US espionage and covert action operations to ensure that they had not been penetrated by the KGB. Successful “moles” would be in a position to feed false information to CIA officers and disrupt carefully planned operations.
Beyond monitoring the activities of their own intelligence community, counterintelligence personnel were tasked with penetrating the KGB and other communist intelligence services. Because Marxist-Leninist societies were so tightly controlled, recruitment of double agents behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains proved extremely difficult. Counterintelligence’s primary targets were KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agents, the only Russians empowered to move freely about the world. In the United States, counterintelligence concentrated on preventing KGB penetration of the Agency itself and, if penetration occurred, on ferreting it out. “As practiced by the CIA and the KGB,” Victor Marchetti wrote in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, “counterespionage is a highly complex and devious activity. It depends on cunning entrapments, agents provocateur, spies and counterspies, double and triple crosses. It is the stuff that spy novels are made of, with limitless possibilities for deceptions and turns of plot.”24
From the perspective of the CI Staff, every Agency employee was a potential Soviet spy or “mole.” According to some reports, the chief of CI maintained a list of the fifty or so key positions in the CIA that were most likely to be targeted for penetration and kept the individuals occupying those positions under constant surveillance. Angleton was convinced that mole hunting was absolutely crucial to any and every successful intelligence operation. “If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service,” he was quoted as saying. Compared to totalitarian societies, the Western democracies, with their characteristic emphasis on openness, individualism, and privacy, as well as their suspicion of authority and secrecy, were particularly vulnerable to penetration by the KGB and the GRU. Moreover, as America’s spy handlers cast their net for new agents, they were bound to land a bad fish from time to time. By penetrating the CIA and other Western services, the Soviets could do far more than spy on them, Angleton pointed out: they could also serve as agents of influence, creating deceptions that would enable Moscow to manipulate those services and, by extension, their governments. The goal of the opposition, he wrote, was to create “a wilderness of mirrors”—a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot. The “wilderness” consisted of the “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet Bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and spilt the West . . . producing an ever-fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.”25
As Jim Angleton well knew, the intelligence labyrinths in which Moscow hoped to trap Western intelligence were historical realities. In the early 1920s, Lenin and his first intelligence chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had devised an elaborate counterespionage apparatus named “the Trust.” Agents of the Trust spread out across Europe to make contact with White Russian refugees, portraying themselves and their organization as an anticommunist network operating within the Soviet Union. They fed the émigrés false information, saying, in effect, that communism was failing and that the Bolshevik regime was about to be overthrown by the Russian people. The émigrés, in turn, sold these mutually reinforcing bits of information to Western security forces, with the result that they halted plans for military landings, economic blockades, and other forms of coercion. Then there was the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), the highly effective Soviet military intelligence network that spied on Germany during World War II. Its agents successfully penetrated Nazi occupation authorities in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands as well as in Nazi Germany itself. Because of “Venona”—the US-UK operation that broke the Soviet intelligence code during World War II—the CIA, and Angleton in particular, was intimately familiar with the Rote Kapelle. Indeed, he subsequently used it as a teaching tool for training his operatives.26
Angleton himself had once been victimized by a Soviet “double game.” While working in London for X-2, he had made the acquaintance of Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby. The son of the famous British Arabist St. John Philby, Kim, who was nicknamed after the boy spy in Rudyard Kipling’s novel, was a top-level operative in Britain’s SIS. A handsome, charming man, Philby seemed a stereotypical member of the British aristocracy, complete with tweed jacket and pipe. Before Angleton had departed for Italy, Philby had acted as something of a dark arts tutor to the young American. The friendship began anew in Washington in 1949, when Philby was posted there as SIS liaison with the FBI and the CIA. For two years, the men would meet every week at Harvey’s restaurant—J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite—for lobster, martinis, and wide-ranging discussions of the worldwide Anglo-American intelligence effort. All the while, Angleton was unaware that in 1934 Philby had been recruited into a Soviet spy ring along with fellow Cambridge students Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blunt. During World War II, MacLean had provided the Kremlin with copies of top-secret British and American documents, including correspondence between Churchill and Truman. In Washington, as an official of the British embassy, Burgess lived in Philby’s basement, where he worked transmitting copies of secret documents to his Russian handlers. In 1951, Burgess and MacLean, fearing that they were about to be exposed, fled to the USSR. Philby was recalled to London, interrogated, and dismissed from the SIS; there was not enough evidence to prosecute him, however. In 1963, Philby himself would flee to Moscow, where he subsequently revealed all. Philby, Burgess, MacLean, and Blunt eventually became known as the Cambridge Four; some allege the involvement of a fifth man, John Cairncross, making them the Cambridge Five. “We shall never know how many agents were killed or tortured as a result of Philby’s work as a double agent,” Lord Birkenhead observed at the time, “and how many operations failed.” For the rest of his days, Angleton would be haunted by memories of those candid lunchtime conversations.27
In 1955, Pietro Nenni and the Italian Socialists began the long, slow process of separating from Togliatti and the PCI. Colby saw the development as a breakthrough in the campaign for apetura alla sisistra, or “opening to the left.” In 1956, he recommended to his superiors in Washington that the Rome station be authorized to open a dialogue with Nenni; facilitating a Socialist switch from the Communists to the center coalition “would be desirable from the viewpoint of both Italian and US interests.” The United States must be pragmatic, he said: “Under present circumstances, we cannot afford to be guided by likes or dislikes, moral approval or disapproval.”28
Like Clare Luce and the Catholic hierarchy, Jim Angleton viewed the Nenni-led PSI as nothing more than a Trojan horse to help Togliatti and the Communists penetrate the ruling coalition. He was not going to stand idly by and allow liberals like Co
lby to open the door to a fifth column. One day in 1956, Gerry Miller, chief of the West European Division of the Office of Plans, summoned Colby to his office. There was a very special American agent operating in Rome, a “singleton” who observed and reported independently to CIA headquarters and the State Department. Miller told Colby that he wanted him to “handle” the agent, whose code name was “Charlie.” The simplicity of the code name belied the complexity of the personality, Colby soon learned. Miller, Colby, and Charlie subsequently rendezvoused at a suburban café for a cappuccino and a get-acquainted session. The new man on the block had been part of the OSS team that had come to Italy during the last stages of World War II and the onset of the Cold War to help the Italians put together a new government. Charlie was Catholic, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and incredibly well-connected in Italy’s political and social circles. “Well-educated and widely read,” Colby said of him, “he could discourse with ease on medieval philosophy and the Pope’s social encyclicals.” In truth, Miller was having trouble keeping Charlie in his loop, and even more trouble gaining access to Charlie’s loop.29
Charlie was, of course, working for Angleton, the two having become acquainted in postwar Italy. Through Charlie, Angleton kept in touch with Italians in the police force and government whom he had recruited in the late forties. Colby soon discovered that Charlie’s independent communiqués to Washington were arguing against an opening to the left, taking the Luce-Angleton position that Nenni was just a stalking horse for Togliatti and, by association, Moscow. “The professional intelligence operators who managed him,” Colby wrote in his memoir, “to ensure that this direct truth reached policy levels, had arranged that his reports be forwarded in their raw form in sealed envelopes to Washington and laid on the desks of senior policy-level officials as the real story direct from the source.” According to one account, on one of Charlie’s visits to Washington, John Foster Dulles’s limousine rather melodramatically picked him up on a street corner so he could brief the secretary of state in private.30
In typical Colby fashion, Bill cultivated Charlie, flattered him, and deferred to him. They became friends. For Charlie, however, the station’s political action chief seemed increasingly omnipresent. Could he see Charlie’s latest dispatch? Who was he going to talk to next? Colby began to insist that Charlie’s product was so important that it had to be disseminated more widely, beginning with the ambassador and the embassy’s other political officer, then with the CIA station chief, and subsequently with the analytical staffs of the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence in Washington. “Charlie’s material then reached all its proper readers,” Colby said, “but arrived without a special aura of mystery, and was put in proper proportion in the jigsaw puzzle collection of information needed to understand the variegated Italian political scene.”31 Angleton was annoyed, but there was little he could do. Colby could hardly be accused of suppressing Charlie’s reports. The former Jedburgh understood that nothing was more dangerous in intelligence than allowing one person’s views and information to be left unjuxtaposed against others. This would not be the last time Colby turned “need-to-know” against itself.
The conflict between Luce and Colby, civilized though it was, was fundamental. Colby spoke for liberal cold warriors who wanted to undercut the PCI’s appeal by growing center-left political coalitions that pursued social and economic reforms, which would in turn improve the lot of the working classes. Luce represented those Americans who equated socialism with communism, who insisted that the only viable economic model was free enterprise rooted in the private ownership of property. “She was extremely reactionary,” Senator J. William Fulbright, who had served in the House with Luce, later remarked. “Sort of like what you would associate with Louis XVI.” In 1955 and 1956, two successive Christian Democrat prime ministers, Giovanni Gronchi and Amintore Fanfani, threw their support behind the so-called Vanoni Plan, named for budget minister Ezio Vanoni. The scheme, based on the assumption that private industry and finance in Italy was too weak to generate sufficient economic growth, called for a vast expansion of public investments in housing and public works and the nationalization of some sectors of the economy. In his reports to Washington, Colby lauded the Vanoni Plan as a vehicle for the promotion of social and economic justice in Italy, absolutely vital to creating a lasting noncommunist majority. Luce could not have disagreed more. The Vanoni Plan, she declared, was actually a scheme to build a bridge between the Christian Democrats and the “pro-Communist socialists.”32
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s February 1956 speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) attacked the “crimes of the Stalin era.” It seemed to herald the beginning of a reformist movement behind the Iron Curtain, possibly involving growing tolerance for dissent, respect for law, and even national self-determination. The speech was supposedly “secret,” intended only for the Kremlin’s inner circle. By April, however, the CIA had managed to obtain not one but two copies of the potentially explosive address. Angleton acquired one through his network of Soviet émigré Jews, while Ray Cline, head of the Agency’s research and analysis division, obtained one separately through a paid informant in Eastern Europe.33
Cline and Frank Wisner, Angleton’s immediate superior, differed drastically on what to do with the purloined documents. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Secretary of State Dulles and leading Republicans had promised to “roll back” communism rather than just contain it, as Truman and the Democrats had advocated. Wisner and Angleton were enthusiastic supporters of roll-back; Cline and others in the foreign policy establishment were more cautious, arguing that overt US support for uprisings in Soviet-bloc countries could easily lead to World War III. Angleton would later argue that he and Wisner wanted to delay publication of Khrushchev’s speech until “secret armies” of anticommunist émigrés could be trained in West Germany to be unleashed at the appropriate moment. If it was not delayed, they said, the speech should be edited to create maximum consternation among the communist parties of Europe. Bill Colby was certainly not against rolling back the Iron Curtain, but his first priority was to save Western Europe from a communist takeover. He had become a convert to political action. He and like-minded figures within the CIA and the State Department wanted the speech published in full as a means to promote democracy in Italy, to commit Nenni and the Socialists—and perhaps even Togliatti and the PCI—to the democratic process and the rule of law. The liberals won this particular battle; CIA director Allen Dulles delivered a copy of the full text to the State Department, which in turn released it to the New York Times.34
The ultimate test of roll-back versus containment came in the fall of 1956. Nationalist and democratic elements in Poland and Hungary, in part inspired by the Khrushchev speech, began pressuring Soviet authorities for more autonomy and multiparty elections. The Kremlin managed to placate the Poles, but events in Hungary soon got out of hand. Roving bands of militant students and workers attacked government buildings, defaced symbols of Soviet power, and retaliated against members of the communist secret police. In the midst of this turmoil, the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe broadcast calls to arms to the people of Hungary and implied that help was on the way. Emboldened by these promises of support, Hungarian nationalist leader Imre Nagy announced not only the formation of a coalition government, but also Hungary’s intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet–East European alliance system. Faced with the collapse of their Eastern European empire—Americans were not the only ones who believed in the domino theory—Khrushchev and his generals acted. On November 4, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest; during the fighting that ensued, some thirty thousand Hungarians and seven thousand Russians died. Newsreels showed freedom fighters in Budapest launching futile attacks against Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails and small arms and then being cut down in the streets. To the end, the revolutionaries sent out urgent pleas for help.
Colby later wrote that Frank Wisner was ready to i
ntervene in Hungary with arms, communications equipment, air resupply, and even exile fighters—“this was exactly the end for which the Agency’s paramilitary capability was designed”—but the White House was unequivocal in its opposition. “Starkly,” Colby observed, “we demonstrated that ‘liberation’ was not our policy when the chips were down in Eastern Europe as the price might have been World War III.”35 In truth, the CIA’s so-called “secret armies” would have made no difference whatsoever: only full-scale military intervention by NATO could have forced the Soviets to withdraw. With French and British troops tied down by the Suez crisis, there was little support in the alliance for such a move; as Eisenhower was to observe afterward, there was about as much chance of assembling and inserting a major multinational force into Hungary as there was of sending in the military to aid Tibet.
Frank Wisner was one of the casualties of the uprising. He happened to be on an inspection tour of European CIA stations at the time. As the fighting in Budapest intensified, he rushed first to West Germany and then to Austria, where he stood at the border watching helplessly as Hungarian refugees flooded across. Some had been wounded. Indeed, “people [were] killed by the Russians as he stood there, in his sight,” recalled a colleague. “It was a profound shock.” Wisner rushed back to the embassy and frantically phoned Washington, pleading with the White House to commit troops. It was all to no avail. Later, in Rome, as the fighting continued to rage in Budapest, Wisner, a close friend of Clare Luce, made a point of attending Mass with Hungarian refugees. The ambassador recalled that he regularly returned from these outings dead drunk. By the time the maestro of the Mighty Wurlitzer returned to the United States, he was a nervous wreck and sick with hepatitis from eating tainted clams. He was, recalled a friend, “rambling and raving . . . totally out of control.” Three years later, Wisner was eased out as deputy director of plans, and in 1965 he took his own life, a victim of the delusion of roll-back.36
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