by Tim Weiner
In early February 1949, the director of central intelligence went to have a private chat with Carl Vinson, a Georgia Democrat and the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. Hillenkoetter warned that Congress had to pass formal legislation blessing the CIA and granting it a budget as soon as possible. The agency was up to its neck in operations, and it needed legal cover. After confiding his concerns to a few other members of the House and Senate, Hillenkoetter submitted the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 for their consideration. They met for about half an hour in secret to weigh it.
“We will just have to tell the House they will have to accept our judgment and we cannot answer a great many questions that might be asked,” Vinson told his colleagues. Dewey Short of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that it would be “supreme folly” to debate the act in public: “The less we say about this bill, the better off all of us will be.”
The CIA Act was rammed through Congress on May 27, 1949. With its passage, Congress gave the agency the widest conceivable powers. It became fashionable a generation thereafter to condemn America’s spies for crimes against the Constitution. But in the twenty-five years between the passage of the CIA Act and the awakening of a watchdog spirit in Congress, the CIA was barred only from behaving like a secret police force inside the United States. The act gave the agency the ability to do almost anything it wanted, as long as Congress provided the money in an annual package. Approval of the secret budget by a small armed services subcommittee was understood by those in the know to constitute a legal authorization for all secret operations. One of the congressmen voting “aye” summed up this tacit understanding many years later, when he was the president of the United States. If it’s secret, it’s legal, Richard M. Nixon said.
The CIA now had free rein: unvouchered funds—untraceable money buried under falsified items in the Pentagon’s budget—meant unlimited license.
A key clause of the 1949 act allowed the CIA to let one hundred foreigners a year into the United States in the name of national security, granting them “permanent residence without regard to their inadmissibility under the immigration or any other laws.” On the same day that President Truman signed the CIA Act of 1949 into law, Willard G. Wyman, the two-star general now running the agency’s Office of Special Operations, told American immigration officials that a Ukrainian named Mikola Lebed was “rendering valuable assistance to this Agency in Europe.” Under the newly approved law, the CIA smuggled Lebed into the United States.
The agency’s own files described the Ukrainian faction led by Lebed as “a terrorist organization.” Lebed himself had gone to prison for the murder of the Polish interior minister in 1936, and he escaped when Germany attacked Poland three years later. He saw the Nazis as natural allies. The Germans recruited his men into two battalions, including the one named Nightingale, which fought in the Carpathian Mountains, survived past the end of the war, and remained in the forests of Ukraine to haunt Secretary of Defense Forrestal. Lebed had set himself up as a self-proclaimed foreign minister in Munich and offered his Ukrainian partisans to the CIA for missions against Moscow.
The Justice Department determined that he was a war criminal who had slaughtered Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews. But all attempts to deport him ceased after Allen Dulles himself wrote to the federal immigration commissioner, saying Lebed was “of inestimable value to this Agency” and was assisting in “operations of the first importance.”
The CIA “had few methods of collecting intelligence on the Soviet Union and felt compelled to exploit every opportunity, however slim the possibility of success or unsavory the agent,” the secret agency history of the Ukrainian operation notes. “Émigré groups, even those with dubious pasts, were often the only alternative to doing nothing.” So “the sometimes brutal war record of many émigré groups became blurred as they became more critical to the CIA.” By 1949, the United States was ready to work with almost any son of a bitch against Stalin. Lebed fit that bill.
“WE DID NOT WANT TO TOUCH IT”
So did General Reinhard Gehlen.
During World War II, General Gehlen had tried to spy on the Soviets from the eastern front as a leader of the Abwehr, Hitler’s military intelligence service. He was an imperious and cagey man who swore he had a network of “good Germans” to spy behind Russian lines for the United States.
“From the beginning,” Gehlen said, “I was motivated by the following convictions: A showdown between East and West is unavoidable. Every German is under the obligation of contributing his share, so that Germany is in a position to fulfill the missions incumbent on her for the common defense of Western Christian Civilization.” The United States needed “the best German men as co-workers…if Western Culture is to be safeguarded.” The intelligence network he offered to the Americans was a group of “outstanding German nationals who are good Germans but also ideologically on the side of the Western democracies.”
The army, unable to control the Gehlen organization, despite lavishly financing its operations, repeatedly tried to hand it off to the CIA. Many of Richard Helms’s officers were dead-set against it. One recorded his revulsion at working with a network of “SS personnel with known Nazi records.” Another warned that “American Intelligence is a rich blind man using the Abwehr as a seeing-eye dog. The only trouble is—the leash is much too long.” Helms himself expressed a well-founded fear that “there is no question the Russians know this operation is going on.”
“We did not want to touch it,” said Peter Sichel, then chief of German operations at CIA headquarters. “It had nothing to do with morals or ethics, and everything to do with security.”
But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels. The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West Germany. Gehlen’s longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working for Moscow all along.
Steve Tanner, a young CIA officer based in Munich, said Gehlen had convinced American intelligence officers that he could run missions aimed at the heart of Soviet power. “And, given how hard it was for us,” Tanner reflected, “it seemed idiotic not to try it.”
“WE WEREN’T GOING TO SIT STILL”
Tanner was an army intelligence veteran fresh out of Yale, hired by Richard Helms in 1947, one of the first two hundred CIA officers sworn into service. In Munich, his assignment was to recruit agents to gather intelligence for the United States from behind the iron curtain.
Almost every major nationality from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had at least one self-important émigré group seeking help from the CIA in Munich and Frankfurt. Some of the men Tanner vetted as potential spies were Eastern Europeans who had sided with Germany against Russia. They included “people with fascist backgrounds trying to save their careers by becoming useful to the Americans,” Tanner said, and he was wary of them. The non-Russians “hated the Russians violently,” Tanner said, “and they were automatically on our side.” Others who had fled the outlying republics of the Soviet Union exaggerated their power and influence. “These émigré groups, their main goal was to convince the U.S. government of their importance, and their ability to help the U.S. government, so that they would get support in one form or another,” he said.
Lacking guidelines from Washington, Tanner wrote his own: to receive the CIA’s support, the émigré groups had to be founded on native soil, not in a Munich coffeehouse. They had to have contact with anti-Soviet groups in their home country. They should not be compromised by close collaboration with the Nazis. In December 1948, after a long and careful assessment, Tanner believed he had found a band of Ukrainians who deserved the CIA’s backing. The group call
ed itself the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Its members in Munich served as political representatives of the fighters back home. The Supreme Council, Tanner reported to headquarters, was morally and politically sound.
Tanner spent the spring and summer of 1949 preparing to infiltrate his Ukrainians behind the iron curtain. The men had come out of the Carpathian Mountains as couriers months before, carrying messages from the Ukrainian underground written on thin sheets of paper folded into wads and sewn together. These scraps were seen as signs of a stalwart resistance movement that could provide intelligence on events in Ukraine and warning of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Hopes were even higher at headquarters. The CIA believed that “the existence of this movement could have bearing on the course of an open conflict between the United States and the USSR.”
Tanner hired a daredevil Hungarian air crew who had hijacked a Hungarian commercial airliner and flown it to Munich a few months earlier. General Wyman, the CIA’s special-operations chief, formally approved the mission on July 26. Tanner supervised their training in Morse code and weaponry, planning to drop two of them back into their homeland so that the CIA could communicate with the partisans. But the CIA had no one in Munich with experience in parachuting agents behind enemy lines. Tanner finally found someone. “A Serbo-American colleague who had parachuted into Yugoslavia in World War Two taught my guys how to jump and land. And it was crazy! How can you do a backward somersault on impact with a carbine strapped to your side?” But that was the kind of operation that had made the OSS famous.
Tanner cautioned against great expectations. “We realized that in the woods of western Ukraine, they weren’t liable to know what was on Stalin’s mind, the big political issues,” he said. “At least they could get documents, they could get pocket litter, clothing, shoes.” To create a real network of spies inside the Soviet Union, the CIA would have to provide them with elements of disguise—the daily detritus of Soviet life. Even if the missions never produced much important intelligence, Tanner said, they would have strong symbolic value: “They showed Stalin that we weren’t going to sit still. And that was important, because up ’til then we had done zilch as far as operations into his country.”
On September 5, 1949, Tanner’s men took off in a C-47 flown by the Hungarians who had hijacked their way into Munich. Singing a martial strain, they jumped into the darkness of the Carpathian night, landing near the city of Lvov. American intelligence had penetrated the Soviet Union.
The CIA history declassified in 2005 offers a terse summary of what happened next: “The Soviets quickly eliminated the agents.”
“WHAT HAD WE DONE WRONG?”
The operation nevertheless set off a huge wave of enthusiasm at CIA headquarters. Wisner began drawing up plans to send more men to recruit networks of dissidents, create American-backed resistance forces, and send the White House early warning of a Soviet military attack. The CIA dispatched dozens of Ukrainian agents by air and by land. Almost every one was captured. Soviet intelligence officers used the prisoners to feed back disinformation—all’s well, send more guns, more money, more men. Then they killed them. After five years of “abortive missions,” the agency’s history states, “CIA discontinued this approach.”
“In the long run,” it concludes, “the Agency’s effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic.”
Wisner was undaunted. He started new paramilitary adventures all over Europe.
In October 1949, four weeks after the first flight into the Ukraine, Wisner teamed up with the British to run rebels into communist Albania, the poorest and most isolated nation in Europe. He saw this barren Balkan outcrop as fertile ground for a resistance army formed from exiled royalists and ragtag loyalists in Rome and Athens. A ship launched from Malta carried nine Albanians on the first commando mission. Three men were killed immediately and the secret police chased down the rest. Wisner had neither the time nor the inclination for introspection. He flew more Albanian recruits to Munich for parachute training, then turned them over to the Athens station, which had its own airport, a fleet of planes, and some tough Polish pilots.
They jumped into Albania and landed in the arms of the secret police. With each failed mission, the plans became more frantic, the training more slipshod, the Albanians more desperate, their capture more certain. The agents who survived were taken prisoner, their messages back to the Athens station controlled by their captors.
“What had we done wrong?” wondered the CIA’s John Limond Hart, who was handling the Albanians in Rome. It took years before the CIA understood that the Soviets had known every aspect of the operation from the start. The training camps in Germany were infiltrated. The Albanian exile communities in Rome, Athens, and London were shot through with traitors. And James J. Angleton—the headquarters man responsible for the security of secret operations, the CIA’s guardian against double agents—had coordinated the operation with his best friend in British intelligence: the Soviet spy Kim Philby, London’s liaison with the agency.
Philby worked for Moscow out of a secure room in the Pentagon, adjacent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His friendship with Angleton was sealed with the cold kiss of gin and the warm embrace of whisky. He was an extraordinary drinker, knocking back a fifth a day, and Angleton was on his way to becoming one of the CIA’s champion alcoholics, a title held against stiff competition. For more than a year, before and after many a liquid lunch, Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for the drop zones for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania. Though failure followed failure, death upon death, the flights went on for four years. Roughly two hundred of the CIA’s foreign agents died. Almost no one in the American government knew. It was a most secret thing.
Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was over. He held the job for twenty years. Drunk after lunch, his mind an impenetrable maze, his in-box a black hole, he passed judgment on every operation and every officer that the CIA aimed against the Soviets. He came to believe that a Soviet master plot controlled American perceptions of the world, and that he and he alone understood the depths of the deception. He took the CIA’s missions against Moscow down into a dark labyrinth.
“A FUNDAMENTALLY BAD IDEA”
In early 1950, Wisner ordered up a new assault on the iron curtain. The job went to another Yale man in Munich, by the name of Bill Coffin, a new recruit with the special anticommunist fervor of an ardent socialist. “The ends don’t always justify the means,” Coffin said of his years in the CIA. “But they are the only thing that can.”
Coffin came to the CIA through a family connection, recruited by his brother-in-law, Frank Lindsay, Wisner’s Eastern Europe operations officer. “I said to them, when I went into CIA, ‘I don’t want to do spy work, I want to do underground political work,’” he remembered in 2005. “The question was: can Russians operate underground? And that seemed to me quite morally acceptable at the time.” Coffin had spent the last two years of World War II as a U.S. Army liaison with Soviet commanders. He had been part of the heartless postwar process by which Soviet soldiers were forcibly repatriated. He had been left with a great burden of guilt, which influenced his decision to join the CIA.
“I had seen that Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy Scout,” Coffin said. “I was very anti-Soviet but very pro-Russian.”
Wisner placed his money on the Solidarists, a Russian group that stood as far to the right as possible in Europe after Hitler. Only the handful of CIA officers who spoke Russian, like Bill Coffin, could work with them. The CIA and the Solidarists first smuggled leaflets into Soviet barracks in East Germany. Then they launched balloons bearing thousands of pamphlets. Then they sent four-man parachute missions in unmarked airplanes flying as far east as the outskirts of Moscow. One by one the Solidarist agents floated down to Russia; one by one, they were hunted down, captured, and killed. Once again the CIA delivered its agents to the secret police.
&n
bsp; “It was a fundamentally bad idea,” Coffin said long after he quit the CIA and became known as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the chaplain of Yale and one of the most passionate antiwar voices in America during the 1960s. “We were quite naïve about the use of American power.” Almost a decade passed before the agency admitted, in its own words, that “assistance to the émigrés for the eventuality of war with or revolution within the USSR was unrealistic.”
All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for failure. Their missions were seen as a matter of national survival for the United States. For only hours before Tanner’s men took off on their first flight in September 1949, an air force crew flying out of Alaska had detected traces of radioactivity in the atmosphere. While the results were being analyzed, on September 20, the CIA confidently declared that the Soviet Union would not produce an atomic weapon for at least another four years.
Three days later, Truman told the world that Stalin had the bomb.
On September 29, the CIA’s chief of scientific intelligence reported that his office was unable to accomplish its mission. It lacked the talent to track Moscow’s efforts to build weapons of mass destruction. The agency’s work on Soviet atomic weapons had been an “almost total failure” at every level, he reported; its spies had no scientific or technical data on the Soviet bomb, and its analysts had resorted to guesstimates. He warned that “catastrophic consequences” faced the United States as a result of this failure.