by Tim Weiner
Senior CIA officers, including Helms, destroyed almost all the records of these programs in fear that they might become public. The evidence that remains is fragmentary, but it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s. Members of the clandestine service, the agency’s security office, and the CIA’s scientists and doctors met monthly to discuss the progress of Project Artichoke until 1956. “These discussions included the planning of overseas interrogations,” the agency’s files show, and the use of “special interrogation” techniques continued for several years thereafter.
The drive to penetrate the iron curtain had led the CIA to adopt the tactics of its enemies.
“A WELL THOUGHT-OUT PLAN, EXCEPT…”
Among the CIA operations that General Truscott killed off was a project to support a group called the Young Germans. Many of its leaders were aging Hitler Youth. The membership rolls had grown to more than twenty thousand in 1952. They enthusiastically took the CIA’s weapons, radios, cameras, and money and buried them all over the country. They also began drawing up their own extensive hit list of mainstream democratic West German politicians to be assassinated when the hour was at hand. The Young Germans became so blatant that their existence and their enemies list blew up into a public scandal.
“That became cause for a great deal of concern and a major flap when the secrecy was broken,” said John McMahon, a future deputy director of central intelligence, then a young CIA officer on Truscott’s staff.
On the same day that Dulles was speaking at the Princeton Inn, Henry Hecksher was writing a heartfelt plea to CIA headquarters. For years, Hecksher, soon to become chief of the Berlin base, had cultivated a unique agent inside East Germany, Horst Erdmann, who ran an impressive organization called the Free Jurists’ Committee. The Free Jurists were an underground group of young lawyers and paralegals challenging the communist regime in East Berlin. They compiled dossiers on the crimes committed by the state. An International Congress of Jurists was set to convene in West Berlin in July 1952, and the Free Jurists could play an important political part on a world stage.
Wisner wanted to take control of the Free Jurists and turn them into an armed underground. Hecksher protested. These men were sources of intelligence, he argued, and if they were forced into a paramilitary role, they would become cannon fodder. He was overruled. Wisner’s officers in Berlin selected one of General Reinhard Gehlen’s officers to transform the group into a fighting force made up of three-man cells. But every member of every cell they created knew the identity of every other member of every other cell—a classic lapse in security. After Soviet soldiers kidnapped and tortured one of their leaders on the eve of the international conference, every one of the CIA’s Free Jurists was arrested.
Toward the end of 1952, in the last months of Smith’s tenure as director of central intelligence, more of Wisner’s hastily improvised operations began coming apart. The fallout left a lasting impression on a newly anointed CIA officer named Ted Shackley, who started a supercharged career at the agency as a second lieutenant shanghaied from his job training military police in West Virginia. His first assignment was to make himself familiar with a major Wisner operation to support a Polish liberation army, the Freedom and Independence Movement, known as WIN.
Wisner and his men had dropped roughly $5 million worth of gold bars, submachine guns, rifles, ammunition, and two-way radios into Poland. They had established trusted contacts with “WIN outside,” a handful of émigrés in Germany and London. They believed that “WIN inside” was a powerful force—five hundred soldiers in Poland, twenty thousand armed partisans, and a hundred thousand sympathizers—all prepared to fight the Red Army.
It was an illusion. The Polish secret police, backed by the Soviets, had wiped out WIN back in 1947. “WIN inside” was a phantom, a communist trick. In 1950, a clueless courier was sent to alert the Polish émigrés in London. His message was that WIN lived and thrived in Warsaw. The émigrés contacted Wisner’s men, who leaped at the chance to build a resistance group behind enemy lines, and parachuted as many patriots as possible back into Poland. At headquarters, the CIA’s leaders thought they had finally beaten the communists at their own game. “Poland represents one of the most promising areas for the development of underground resistance,” Bedell Smith said at a meeting of his deputies in August 1952. Wisner told him that “WIN is now riding high.”
The Soviet and Polish intelligence services had spent years setting their traps. “They were well aware of our air operations. When we would drop these agents in,” McMahon said, “they would go out and make contact with people we knew would be helpful to us. And the Poles and the KGB were right in back of them and would mop them up. So it was a well thought-out plan, except we were recruiting agents of the Soviet Union. It turned out to be a monumental disaster. People died.” Perhaps thirty, maybe more, were lost.
Shackley said he never forgot the sight of his fellow officers realizing that five years of planning and millions of dollars had gone down the drain. The unkindest cut might have been their discovery that the Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA’s money to the Communist Party of Italy.
“CIA had clearly thought they could operate in Eastern Europe the way the OSS had operated in occupied Western Europe during the war,” said the CIA’s Henry Loomis, a future chief of the Voice of America. “That was clearly impossible.”
In Washington, Frank Lindsay, who had run operations in Eastern Europe from headquarters, resigned in anguish. He told Dulles and Wisner that scientific and technical means of spying on the Soviets would have to replace covert action as the CIA’s strategy against communism. Quixotic paramilitary missions to support imaginary resistance movements could not push the Russians out of Europe.
In Germany, McMahon had spent months reading all the cable traffic coming in to the station. He came to a stark conclusion. “We had no capability there,” he said years later. “Our insight into the Soviet Union was zero.”
“THE AGENCY’S FUTURE”
The CIA was now a worldwide force with fifteen thousand people, half a billion dollars in secret funds to spend each year, and more than fifty overseas stations. By sheer willpower, Bedell Smith had shaped it into an organization that looked much the way it would for the next fifty years. He had forged the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations into a single clandestine service to serve abroad, created a unified system for analysis at home, and achieved a measure of respect for the CIA at the White House.
But he had never made it a professional intelligence service. “We can’t get qualified people,” he lamented in his last days as director of central intelligence. “They just simply don’t exist.” And he had never made Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner bend to his authority. A week before the 1952 presidential election, Bedell Smith tried one last time to bring them under control.
On October 27, he convened a conference of the CIA’s twenty-six most senior officers and proclaimed that “until CIA could build a reserve of well-trained people, it would have to hold its activities to the limited number of operations that it could do well, rather than attempt to cover a broad field with poor performance” from “improperly trained or inferior personnel.” Galvanized by Truscott’s investigations in Germany, the general ordered the convening of a “Murder Board”—a jury that could kill off the worst of the CIA’s covert operations. Wisner immediately fought back. He said that shutting down dubious operations would be a long and painful process, and it would take many, many months—well into the next administration—for Bedell Smith’s order to be carried out. The general was defeated and the Murder Board defused.
Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency on a national-security platform that called for the free world to liberate the Soviet satellites, a script written by his closest foreign-policy adviser, John Foster Dulles. Their victory plans called for a new director of central intelligence. Chosen over Bedell
Smith’s protests, confirmed without opposition in the Senate, and cheered on by the press, Allen Dulles finally won the job he coveted.
Richard Helms had known Dulles well for eight years, ever since they traveled together to the little red schoolhouse in France where Bedell Smith had accepted the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. Helms was forty now, a tightly wired man, not a slicked-back hair out of place nor a stray paper on his desk when the lights went out at night. Dulles was sixty, shuffling in the carpet slippers he wore in private to ease his gout, ever the absentminded professor. Not long after Eisenhower’s election, Dulles buzzed Helms into the director’s chambers, and the two men sat down for a chat.
“A word about the future,” Dulles said, filling the air with great clouds of pipe smoke. “The Agency’s future.”
“You remember the conniving and blood-spilling that went on when we were trying to sort things out in 1946? What would Central Intelligence be responsible for? Would there even be a service?” Dulles wanted Helms to understand that as long as he was the director of central intelligence, there was damned well going to be a service devoted to daring, difficult, dangerous missions.
“I want to be absolutely sure you understand how important covert action operations are right now,” Dulles said. “The White House and this administration have an intense interest in every aspect of covert action.”
Over the next eight years, through his devotion to covert action, his disdain for the details of analysis, and his dangerous practice of deceiving the president of the United States, Allen Dulles did untold damage to the agency he had helped to create.
PART
TWO
“A Strange Kind of Genius”
The CIA Under Eisenhower
1953 to 1961
8. “WE HAVE NO PLAN”
Allen Dulles had been director of central intelligence for one week when, on March 5, 1953, Joseph Stalin died. “We have no reliable inside intelligence on thinking inside the Kremlin,” the agency lamented a few days later. “Our estimates of Soviet long-range plans and intentions are speculations drawn from inadequate evidence.” The new president of the United States was not pleased. “Ever since 1946,” Eisenhower fumed, “all the so-called experts have been yapping about what would happen when Stalin dies and what we as a nation should do about it. Well, he’s dead. And you can turn the files of our government inside out—in vain—looking for any plans laid. We have no plan. We are not even sure what difference his death makes.”
Stalin’s death intensified American fears about Soviet intentions. The question for the CIA was whether Stalin’s successors—whoever they might be—would launch a preemptive war. But the agency’s speculations about the Soviets were reflections in a funhouse mirror. Stalin never had a master plan for world domination, nor the means to pursue it. The man who eventually took control of the Soviet Union after his death, Nikita Khrushchev, recalled that Stalin “trembled” and “quivered” at the prospect of a global combat with America. “He was afraid of war,” Khrushchev said. “Stalin never did anything to provoke a war with the nited States. He knew his weakness.”
One of the fundamental failings of the Soviet state was that every facet of daily life was subordinated to national security. Stalin and his successors were pathological about their frontiers. Napoleon had invaded from Paris, and then Hitler from Berlin. Stalin’s only coherent postwar foreign policy had been to turn Eastern Europe into an enormous human shield. While he devoted his energies to murdering his internal enemies, the Soviet people stood in endless lines waiting to buy a sack of potatoes. Americans were about to enjoy eight years of peace and prosperity under Eisenhower. But that peace came at the cost of a skyrocketing arms race, political witch hunts, and a permanent war economy.
Eisenhower’s challenge was to confront the Soviet Union without starting World War III or subverting American democracy. He feared that the costs of the cold war could cripple the United States; if his generals and admirals had their way, they would consume the treasury. He decided to base his strategy on secret weapons: nuclear bombs and covert action. They were far cheaper than multibillion-dollar fleets of fighter jets and flotillas of aircraft carriers. With enough nuclear firepower, the United States could deter the Soviets from starting a new world war—or win the war if it came. With a global campaign of covert action, the United States could stop the spread of communism—or, as was Eisenhower’s publicly proclaimed policy, roll back the Russians.
Ike bet the fate of the nation on his nuclear arsenal and his spy service. Questions about their best use arose at almost every meeting of the National Security Council early in his presidency. The NSC, created in 1947 to govern the use of American power abroad, had been rarely convened under Truman. Eisenhower revived it and ran it as a good general runs his staff. Every week, Allen Dulles left the slightly shabby confines of his offices and stepped into his black limousine; drove past the crumbling Temporaries, where Wisner and his covert operators worked; and entered the gates of the White House. He took his seat at the great oval desk in the Cabinet Room, facing his brother Foster, the secretary of state, along with the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and the president. Allen typically opened each meeting with a tour of the world’s hot spots. Then the talk turned to the strategies of secret war.
“WE COULD LICK THE WHOLE WORLD”
Eisenhower worried endlessly about a nuclear Pearl Harbor, and the CIA could not ease his mind. At the June 5, 1953, meeting of the National Security Council, Allen Dulles told him that the agency could not give him “any prior warning through intelligence channels of a Soviet sneak attack.” A few months later, the CIA ventured a guess that the Soviets would be incapable of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile at the United States before 1969. The estimate proved to be off by a dozen years.
In August 1953, when the Soviet Union tested its first weapon of mass destruction—not quite a thermonuclear bomb, but near enough—the agency had no clue and gave no warning. Six weeks later, when Allen Dulles briefed the president on the Soviet test, Eisenhower wondered whether he should launch an all-out nuclear strike on Moscow before it was too late. He said it looked “as though the hour of decision were at hand, and that we should presently have to really face the question of whether or not we would have to throw everything at once against the enemy,” say the NSC’s declassified minutes. “He had raised this terrible question because there was no sense in our now merely shuddering at the enemy’s capability,” especially when the United States could not know if Moscow had one nuclear weapon or one thousand. “We were engaged in the defense of a way of life, and the great danger was that in defending this way of life we would find ourselves resorting to methods that endangered this way of life. The real problem, as the President saw it, was to devise methods of meeting the Soviet threat and of adopting controls, if necessary, that would not result in our transformation into a garrison state. The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox.”
When Dulles warned the president that “the Russians could launch an atomic attack on the United States tomorrow,” Eisenhower replied that “he didn’t think anyone here thought the cost of winning a global war against the Soviet Union was a cost too high to pay.” But the price of victory might be the destruction of American democracy. The president noted that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had told him, “we should do what was necessary even if the result was to change the American way of life. We could lick the whole world…if we were willing to adopt the system of Adolph Hitler.”
Eisenhower had thought he could confront the paradox with covert action. But a bitter battle in East Berlin had revealed the CIA’s inability to confront communism head-on. On June 16 and 17, 1953, nearly 370,000 East Germans took to the streets. Thousands of students and workers struck violently at their oppressors, burning Soviet and East German Communist Party buildings, trashing police cars, and trying to stop the Soviet tanks that crushed th
eir spirits. The uprising was far larger than the CIA first realized, but the agency could do nothing to save the rebels. Though Frank Wisner weighed the risks of trying to arm the East Berliners, he balked. His liberation armies proved worthless. On June 18, he said that the CIA “should do nothing at this time to incite East Germans to further actions.” The uprising was crushed.
The next week, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to “train and equip underground organizations capable of launching large-scale raids or sustained warfare” in East Germany and the other Soviet satellites. The order also called upon the CIA to “encourage elimination of key puppet officials” in the captive states. Elimination meant what it said. But the order was an empty gesture. The president was learning the limits of the CIA’s abilities. That summer, in the White House Solarium, Eisenhower convened the men he trusted most in the realm of national security—among them Walter Bedell Smith, George Kennan, Foster Dulles, and retired air force lieutenant general James R. Doolittle, the pilot who had led the bombing of Tokyo in 1942—and asked them to redefine American national strategy toward the Soviets. By the end of the Solarium project, the idea of rolling back Russia through covert action was pronounced dead at age five.
The president began trying to redirect the agency. The CIA would fight the enemy in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America—and wherever colonial empires crumbled. Under Eisenhower, the agency undertook 170 new major covert actions in 48 nations—political, psychological, and paramilitary warfare missions in countries where American spies knew little of the culture or the language or the history of the people.
Eisenhower often made his initial decisions on covert action in private conversations with the Dulles brothers. Typically, Allen spoke to Foster with a proposal for an operation, and Foster spoke to the president over a cocktail in the Oval Office. Foster went back to Allen with the president’s approval and an admonition: don’t get caught. The brothers steered the course of covert action in private conversations at their respective headquarters, on the telephone, or on Sundays by the swimming pool with their sister, Eleanor, a State Department officer herself. Foster firmly believed that the United States should do everything in its power to alter or abolish any regime not openly allied with America. Allen wholeheartedly agreed. With Eisenhower’s blessings, they set out to remake the map of the world.