Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  A secret CIA history of the Berlin tunnel, written in August 1967 and declassified in February 2007, laid out three questions that faced William K. Harvey, a hard-drinking, gun-toting ex-FBI agent who took over as chief of the Berlin base in 1952: Could the agency dig a 1,476-foot tunnel into the Soviet zone of East Berlin and hit a target two inches in diameter—and twenty-seven inches underneath a major highway—without being caught? How could it get rid of the spoils—some three thousand tons of sandy soil—in secret? And what kind of cover story would serve to disguise the construction of an installation for the dig in a squalid district of refugees’ shacks at the edge of the American zone?

  Allen Dulles and his British counterpart, Sir John Sinclair, agreed in December 1953 on terms of reference for a set of conferences on the tunnel operation, which was to be code-named JOINTLY. The talks led to a plan of action the following summer. A building covering a full city block would rise amid the rubble, with antennae bristling from the roof, and the Soviets would be given to understand that it was a station for intercepting signals intelligence from the atmosphere—the magician’s trick of diverting the eye. The Americans would dig the tunnel eastward, to a point beneath the cables. The British, relying on their experience in Vienna, would drive a vertical shaft from the end of the tunnel to the cables and then install the taps. A London office that grew to 317 officers would process the spoken conversations recorded by the CIA. In Washington, the agency would set 350 personnel to work transcribing teletype transmissions intercepted in the tunnel. The Army Corps of Engineers did the digging, with technical assistance from the British. The biggest problem, as ever, proved to be translating the words intercepted by the operation: “We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed,” the CIA history noted, for the agency’s language capabilities in Russian and even in German were sorely lacking.

  The tunnel was completed at the end of February 1955, and the British began to set the taps one month later. Information began flowing in May. It came to tens of thousands of hours of conversations and teletypes, including precious details about Soviet nuclear and conventional forces in Germany and Poland, insights into the Soviet Ministry of Defense in Moscow, and the architecture of Soviet counterintelligence operations in Berlin. It provided pictures of political confusion and indecision among Soviet and East German officialdom, and the names or cover identities of several hundred Soviet intelligence officers. It delivered news—even if it took weeks or months of translation—at a cost of $6.7 million. Once it was revealed, as the CIA anticipated it would be one day, the tunnel was seen as a sign that “the U.S., almost universally regarded as a stumbling neophyte in espionage matters, was capable of a coup against the Soviet Union, which has long been the acknowledged master in such matters,” the CIA history poignantly reported.

  The agency had not expected the operation would be blown quite so soon. It lasted less than a year—until the following April, when the tunnel was uncovered. For the Kremlin had known about it from the start, before the first shovel of earth was turned. The plan was uncovered by a Soviet mole in British intelligence, George Blake, who had switched his allegiances while a prisoner of war in North Korea and who had let the Soviets in on the secret back in late 1953. The Soviets valued Blake so highly that Moscow let the tunnel operation run for eleven months before exposing it in a blaze of heavy-handed publicity. Years later, even after realizing that the other side had known of the tunnel from the start, the CIA still believed it had dug a gold mine. To this day, the question remains: did Moscow deliberately feed deceptive information into the tunnel? The evidence suggests that the CIA gained two invaluable and untainted kinds of knowledge from the taps. The agency learned a basic blueprint of the Soviet and East German security systems, and it never picked up a glimmer of warning that Moscow intended to go to war.

  “Those of us who knew a little bit about Russia viewed it as a backward Third World country that wanted to develop along the lines of the West,” said the CIA’s Tom Polgar, the Berlin base veteran. But that view was rejected at the highest levels in Washington. The White House and the Pentagon presumed that the Kremlin’s intentions were identical to theirs: to destroy their enemy on the first day of World War III. Their mission was therefore to locate Soviet military capabilities and destroy them first. They had no faith that American spies could do that.

  But American machines might.

  The Killian report was the beginning of the triumph of technology and the eclipse of old-fashioned espionage at the CIA. “We obtain little significant information from classic covert operations inside Russia,” the report told Eisenhower. “But we can use the ultimate in science and technology to improve our intelligence take.” It urged Eisenhower to build spy planes and space satellites to soar over the Soviet Union and photograph its arsenals.

  The technology was within America’s grasp. It had been for two years. Dulles and Wisner had been too busy with operational matters to pay attention to a July 1952 memo from their colleague Loftus Becker, then the deputy director for intelligence, on a proposal to develop “a satellite vehicle for reconnaissance”—a television camera launched on a rocket, to survey the Soviet Union from deep space. The key was building the camera. Edwin Land, a Nobel laureate who had invented the Polaroid, was sure that he could do it.

  In November 1954, with the Berlin Tunnel under way, Land, Killian, and Dulles met with the president and won his approval to build the U-2 spy plane, a powered glider with a camera in its belly that would put American eyes behind the iron curtain. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead, along with a glum prediction. Someday, he said, “one of these machines is going to be caught, and then we’ll have a storm.”

  Dulles gave the job of building the plane to Dick Bissell, who knew nothing about aircraft but skillfully created a secret government bureaucracy that shielded the U-2 program from scrutiny and helped speed the plane’s creation. “Our Agency,” he proudly told a class of CIA trainees a few years later, “is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U.S. government.”

  Bissell paced down the CIA’s corridors with long strides, a gawky man with great ambitions. He believed that he someday would be the next director of central intelligence, for Dulles told him so. He became increasingly contemptuous of espionage, and disdained Richard Helms and his intelligence officers. The two men became bureaucratic rivals and then bitter enemies. They personified the battle between spies and gadgets, which began fifty years ago and continues today. Bissell saw the U-2 as a weapon—an aggressive blow against the Soviet threat. If Moscow “couldn’t do a goddamn thing to prevent you” from violating Soviet airspace and spying on Soviet forces, that alone would sap Soviet pride and power. He formed a very small and secret cell of CIA officers to run the program, and he assigned the CIA’s James Q. Reber, the assistant director for intelligence coordination, to decide what the plane should photograph inside the Soviet Union. Reber rose to become the longtime chairman of the committee that chose the Soviet targets for the U-2 planes and the spy satellites that succeeded them. But in the end, the Pentagon always set the requirements for reconnaissance: How many bombers did the Soviets have? How many nuclear missiles? How many tanks?

  Later in life, Reber said that the cold war mentality blocked the very idea of photographing anything else.

  “We didn’t raise the right questions,” Reber said. If the CIA had developed a bigger picture of life inside the Soviet Union, it would have learned that the Soviets were putting little money into the resources that truly made a nation strong. They were a weak enemy. If the CIA’s leaders had been able to run effective intelligence operations inside the Soviet Union, they might have seen that Russians were unable to produce the necessities of life. The idea that the final battles of the cold war would be economic instead of military was beyond their imagination.

  “THERE ARE SOME THINGS HE DOESN’T TELL

  THE PRESIDENT”

  The president’s efforts to investigate the c
apabilities of the CIA led to a leap of technology that revolutionized the gathering of intelligence. But they never got to the root of the problem. Seven years after its creation, there was no oversight or control of the CIA. Its secrets were shared on a need-to-know basis, and Allen Dulles decided who needed to know.

  No one was left to look into the agency after Walter Bedell Smith quit the government in October 1954. By sheer force of personality, Bedell Smith had tried to rein in Allen Dulles. But when he left, the ability of anyone but Eisenhower to control covert action went with him.

  In 1955, the president changed the rules by creating the “Special Group”—three designated representatives of the White House, State, and Defense, charged with reviewing the secret operations of the CIA. But they had no ability to approve covert action in advance. If he chose to do so, Dulles might make passing mention of his plans at informal lunches with the Special Group—the new undersecretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, and the president’s national-security assistant. But more often he did not. A five-volume CIA history of Dulles’s career as director of central intelligence noted that he believed they had no need to know about covert action. They were in no position to judge him or the agency. He felt that “no policy approval was required” for his decisions.

  The director, his deputies, and his station chiefs abroad remained free to set their own policies, plot their own operations, and judge the results for themselves, in secret. Dulles advised the White House as he saw fit. “There are some things he doesn’t tell the President,” his sister confided to a State Department colleague. “It is better that he doesn’t know.”

  12. “WE RAN IT IN A

  DIFFERENT WAY”

  One weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill was cold cash. The agency excelled at buying the services of foreign politicians. The first place where it picked the future leader of a world power was Japan.

  Two of the most influential agents the United States ever recruited helped carry out the CIA’s mission to control the government. They had been cell mates, charged as war criminals, and imprisoned for three years in Tokyo after the end of World War II under the American occupation. They walked free at the end of 1948, the day before many of their fellow inmates were taken to the prison gallows.

  With the CIA’s help, Nobusuke Kishi became Japan’s prime minister and the chief of its ruling party. Yoshio Kodama secured his freedom and his position as the nation’s number-one gangster by helping American intelligence. Together they shaped the politics of postwar Japan. In the war against fascism, they had represented everything America hated. In the war against communism, they were just what America needed.

  In the 1930s, Kodama had led a right-wing youth group that attempted to assassinate the prime minister. He was sentenced to prison, but Japan’s government put him to use as a procurer of spies and strategic metals for the coming battle. After five years spent running one of the war’s biggest black markets in occupied China, Kodama held the rank of rear admiral and possessed a personal fortune worth roughly $175 million. Upon his release from prison, Kodama began to pour part of his fortune into the careers of Japan’s most conservative politicians, and he became a key member of a CIA operation that helped bring them to power. He worked with American businessmen, OSS veterans, and ex-diplomats to pull off an audacious covert operation, bankrolled by the CIA, during the Korean War.

  The American military needed tungsten, a scarce strategic metal used for hardening missiles. Kodama’s network smuggled tons of it out of Japanese military caches into the United States. The Pentagon paid $10 million for it. The CIA provided $2.8 million in financing to underwrite the operation. The tungsten-smuggling network reaped more than $2 million. But the operation left Kodama in bad odor with the CIA’s Toyko station. “He is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief,” the station reported on September 10, 1953. “Kodama is completely incapable of intelligence operations, and has no interest in anything but the profits.” The relationship was severed, and the CIA turned its attention to the care and feeding of up-and-coming Japanese politicians—including Kishi—who won seats in the Diet, Japan’s parliament, in the first elections after the end of the American occupation.

  “WE’RE ALL DEMOCRATS NOW”

  Kishi became the leader of the rising conservative movement in Japan. Within a year of his election to the Diet, using Kodama’s money and his own considerable political skills, he controlled the largest faction among Japan’s elected representives. Once in office, he built the ruling party that led the nation for nearly half a century.

  He had signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941 and led Japan’s munitions ministry during World War II. Even while imprisoned after the war, Kishi had well-placed allies in the United States, among them Joseph Grew, the American ambassador in Tokyo when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Grew was under detention in Tokyo in 1942 when Kishi, as a member of the war cabinet, offered to let him out to play a round of golf. They became friends. Days after Kishi was freed from prison, Grew became the first chairman of the National Committee for a Free Europe, the CIA front created to support Radio Free Europe and other political-warfare programs.

  Upon his release, Kishi went directly to the residence of the prime minister, where his brother, Eisaku Sato, the chief secretary of the cabinet under the occupation, handed him a business suit to replace his prisoner’s uniform.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” Kishi said to his brother. “We’re all democrats now.”

  Seven years of patient planning transformed Kishi from prisoner to prime minister. He took English lessons from Newsweek’s Tokyo bureau chief and gained introductions to American politicians from Newsweek’s foreign affairs editor, Harry Kern, a close friend to Allen Dulles and later in life a CIA conduit to Japan. Kishi cultivated American embassy officials like rare orchids. He moved cautiously at first. He was still a notorious man, routinely followed by the police.

  In May 1954, he staged a political coming-out at the Kabuki Theater in Tokyo. He invited Bill Hutchinson, an OSS veteran who worked with the CIA in Japan as an information and propaganda officer at the American embassy, to attend the theater with him. He paraded Hutchinson around the ornate foyers of the Kabuki-za at intermission, showing him off to his friends among the Japanese elite. It was a highly unusual gesture at the time, but it was pure political theater, Kishi’s way of announcing in public that he was back in the international arena—and in the good graces of the United States.

  For a year, Kishi met in secret with CIA and State Department officials in Hutchinson’s living room. “It was clear that he wanted at least the tacit backing of the United States government,” Hutchinson remembered. The talks laid the groundwork for the next forty years of Japan’s relations with the United States.

  Kishi told the Americans that his strategy was to wreck the ruling Liberal Party, rename it, rebuild it, and run it. The new Liberal Democratic Party under his command would be neither liberal nor democratic, but a right-wing club of feudal leaders rising from the ashes of imperial Japan. He would first work behind the scenes while more senior statesmen preceded him as prime minister, and then take charge. He pledged to change the foreign policies of Japan to fit American desires. The United States could keep its military bases in Japan and store nuclear weapons there, a matter of some sensitivity in Japan. All he asked in return was secret political support from America.

  Foster Dulles met with Kishi in August 1955, and the American secretary of state told him face-to-face that he could expect that support—if Japan’s conservatives unified to help the United States fight communism.

  Everyone understood what that American support would be.

  Kishi told Sam Berger, the senior political officer at the American embassy, that it would be best for him to deal directly with a younger and lower-ranking man, unknown in Japan, as his primary contact with the United States. The assignment went to the CIA’s Clyde McAvoy, a marine veteran who ha
d survived the storming of Okinawa and joined the agency after a stint as a newspaper reporter. Shortly after McAvoy arrived in Japan, Sam Berger introduced him to Kishi, and one of the stronger relationships the CIA ever cultivated with a foreign political leader was born.

  “A GREAT COUP”

  The most crucial interaction between the CIA and the Liberal Democratic Party was the exchange of information for money. It was used to support the party and to recruit informers within it. The Americans established paid relationships with promising young men who became, a generation later, members of parliament, ministers, and elder statesmen. Together they promoted the LDP and subverted Japan’s Socialist Party and labor unions. When it came to bankrolling foreign politicians, the agency had grown more sophisticated than it had been seven years earlier in Italy. Instead of passing suitcases filled with cash in four-star hotels, the CIA used trusted American businessmen as go-betweens to deliver money to benefit its allies. Among these were executives from Lockheed, the aircraft company then building the U-2 and negotiating to sell warplanes to the new Japanese defense forces Kishi aimed to build.

  In November 1955, Kishi unified Japan’s conservatives under the banner of the Liberal Democratic Party. As the party’s leader, he allowed the CIA to recruit and run his political followers on a seat-by-seat basis in the Japanese parliament. As he maneuvered his way to the top, he pledged to work with the agency in reshaping a new security treaty between the United States and Japan. As Kishi’s case officer, the CIA’s Clyde McAvoy was able to report on—and influence—the emerging foreign policy of postwar Japan.

  In February 1957, on the day Kishi was to be installed as prime minister, a crucial procedural vote on the security treaty was scheduled in the Diet, where the LDP held the biggest block of votes. “He and I pulled off a great coup that day,” McAvoy remembered. “The United States and Japan were moving toward this agreement. The Japan Communist Party found it especially threatening. On the day of this vote, the communists planned an uprising in the Diet. I found out about this through a left-wing Socialist member of the secretariat who was my agent. Kishi was to meet the Emperor that day. I called for an urgent meeting. He made it—he showed up at the door of our safe house in top hat, striped pants and a cutaway coat—and though I had no approval to do so, I told him of the communists’ plans for a riot in the Diet. Now, the custom was for members to take a break and go to the eating and drinking stalls around the Diet at 10:30 or 11 a.m. Kishi told his own party: don’t take a break. And after everyone but the LDP peeled off they ran to the Diet and passed the bill.”