by Tim Weiner
“Mr. President”: Chace, Acheson, pp. 162–165; Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 219.
“The oceans have shrunk”: Statement of Lieutenant General Hoyt S. Vandenberg on S. 758, National Security Act of 1947, NARA. “It takes time,” Vandenberg said, “to start something that we are 400 years behind the times on today.”
“and probably never should have been”: CIA/LLM, p. 4. Souers, Vandenberg, and Hillenkoetter were among a dozen of the nineteen directors of central intelligence who were unprepared or unsuited for office. “This assignment was definitely unsought,” Hillenkoetter wrote to Wild Bill Donovan on May 21, 1947. “As you are the past master in this art, I am presuming to ask you if you will give me some advice as well as your ideas on the subject.” Hilly would need all the help he could get. Letter to Donovan, Forgan papers, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Room 1501 of the Longworth Office Building: Dulles’s testimony is recorded in Hearing Before the Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, June 27, 1947. In 1982, Representative Jack Brooks, chair of the House Committee on Government Operations, and Representative Edward Boland, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had their staffs unearth the transcript and printed it with an introduction on its unusual history. Representative Clare E. Hoffman of Michigan, the Republican chair of the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, led the session in 1947. The witnesses testified under code names (Mr. A, Mr. B, Mr. C). Hoffman had kept the only transcript of the hearing; in October 1947, he loaned it to the legislative counsel of the CIA, Walter Pforzheimer, who made a copy, stored it in a safe, and returned the original. Hoffman destroyed the original in 1950. The sole surviving copy was unearthed from CIA archives thirty-two years later.
The other major witnesses at the hearing were Director of Central Intelligence Vandenberg and John “Frenchy” Grombach, leader of The Pond, the spy service created by army intelligence back in 1942. “We are not playing with marbles,” Grombach told the committee. “We are playing with our national security, and our lives” by letting Central Intelligence run clandestine operations. Let the army spy for the United States, he argued, and let Central Intelligence write reports. Any other way would be “wrong and dangerous.
” Vandenberg struck back. The real danger, he testified, was The Pond—“a gravy train,” a “commercial concern,” filled with mercenary amateurs who babbled secrets in barrooms. The clandestine collection of secret intelligence was a difficult business that had to be conducted by tightly controlled professionals.
Vandenberg went on to explain how to build a proper intelligence network. “The clandestine field, sir, is a very complicated one,” he testified. “The way it works is that you have an expert in the clandestine field, or as near an expert as the United States has, and who we can hire for the money that we can pay…. He then builds a chain of people that he knows. Then, we have to have another man picked, in whom we have full confidence, who builds a chain alongside, who is just watching…to make sure that this man is not giving you information and receiving pay from a foreign government…. The man who originally set up the netostensibly has no connection with any person or any department of the Government.” He cautioned: “The chances of the U.S. Government in peacetime getting into tremendous difficulties behooves us to keep it right under our thumb; and you cannot keep it under your thumb if you are contracting for it [by hiring] some chap who comes into the office and tells you he would be very glad if you would give him $500,000 a year…. It might very well be that that man is paid by another government and is feeding you the information that that government would like for you to have.”
That was an accurate outline of the challenges the CIA faced at its creation—more so than what followed from Allen Dulles: “I do not believe in a big agency,” he said. “You ought to keep it small. If this thing gets to be a great big octopus, it should not function well. Abroad, you will need a certain number of people, but it ought not to be a great number. It ought to be scores rather than hundreds.” He inherited nearly ten thousand people when he took over in 1953 and built from there past fifteen thousand, toward twenty thousand, and most of them were charged with running covert operations abroad. Covert operations were a task Dulles never got around to mentioning.
“the greatest cemetery for dead cats”: Walter Millis (ed.) with E. S. Duffield, The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), p. 299.
“I had the gravest forebodings”: Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 214.
hundreds of major covert actions—eighty-one of them during Truman’s second term: a number published in “Coordination and Policy Approval of Covert Actions,” a coordinated NSC/CIA document dated February 23, 1967, and declassified after along struggle in 2002.
The CIA’s counsel, Lawrence Houston: Houston told Hillenkoetter that the act gave the CIA no legal authority for anything resembling covert action. Nor was there any implied intent of Congress to be read between the lines of the law. If the NSC gave orders for that kind of mission, and if the CIA went back to Congress and specifically requested and received the authority and the money for a covert operation, that might be another matter. Thirty years passed before his advice was heeded. Houston to Hillenkoetter, “CIA Authority to Perform Propaganda and Commando Type Functions,” September 25, 1947, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 622–623.
25–26 “guerrilla warfare”…. “fight fire with fire”: Kennan to Forrestal, September 26, 1947, Record Group 165, ABC files, 352:1, NARA.
26 In a bitter memo: Penrose to Forrestal, January 2, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 830–834.
“covert psychological operation”: NSC 4/A, December 14, 1947.
What was psychological warfare? The first CIA officers wondered. A war of words? If words were weapons, should they be true or false? Was the CIA supposed to sell democracy on the open market or smuggle it into the Soviet Union? Was this about beaming radio broadcasts or dropping leaflets behind the iron curtain? Or was it a command to mount clandestine operations designed to break enemy morale? The dark arts of strategic deception had fallen into disuse since D-Day. No one had developed a new doctrine of conducting warfare without weapons. From his command post in Europe, General Eisenhower urged fellow officers “to keep alive the arts of psychological warfare.” Eisenhower memo, June 19, 1947, RG 310, Army Operations, P & O 091.412, NARA; Memo from Director of Central Intelligence, “Psychological Warfare,” October 22, 1947, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 626–627.
But Brigadier General Robert A. McClure, the future father of American special-operations forces, found that American “ignorance…about psychological warfare…is astounding.” McClure to Propaganda Branch, MID War Department, Record Group 319, Box 263, NARA; Colonel Alfred H. Paddock, Jr., “Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941–1952,” U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA, November 1979.
Hillenkoetter searched for a chief of a new “Special Procedures Branch” who could cut through the murk. Kennan and Forrestal wanted Allen Dulles for the job. They got Thomas G. Cassady, an old OSS man, a broker and banker from Chicago. Cassady was a disaster. He tried to set up a radio station for transmissions behind the iron curtain, and a printing press for propaganda in Germany, but nobody could come up with the right words to win the hearts and minds of the oppressed. His big idea was Project Ultimate: sending high-level balloons into the Soviet Union with leaflets bearing messages of brotherly love. Why not an airlift of Mickey Mouse watches? asked a skeptic at the State Department.
“the most ancient seat of Western Culture”: “Consequences of Communist Accession to Power in Italy by Legal Means,” CIA, Office of Research and Estimates, March 5, 1948.
“We were going beyond our charter”: Wyatt interview with author. See also his interview for the CNN Cold War series, 1998 National Security Archive transcript available online at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/ coldwar/interview/episode-3/wy
att1.html.
The Italian operation became one of the most expensive, longest-running, and richly rewarding political-action operations in the agency’s first twenty-five years. In November 1947, at the start of the operation, James J. Angleton returned from his post as station chief in Rome to organize a Soviet division inside Galloway’s struggling Office of Special Operations. Angleton had built a substantial stable of agents in Italy, in part by offering some very tough customers immunity from war crimes prosecutions, and he had been thinking about the coming elections and laying plans for many months. Angleton’s executive officer in Rome, Ray Rocca, an Italian American from San Francisco, was left in charge of the first phases of the operation. In retrospect, William Colby felt there was no magic to the operation; it was a straight-cash proposition. It would remain straight cash for a quarter century. The miracle of 1948 was that the center held and that the CIA could claim credit for the victory. In the run-up to that election, the center-right Christian Democrats, allied with the Vatican and led by Alcide De Gasperi, were neck and neck with the Communist Party, whose leaders looked to Moscow and claimed a rank-and-file membership of two million loyalists. “They were the big parties,” said the CIA’s Mark Wyatt. “The neo-fascists were out of the picture. The monarchists were dead.” Three minor parties remained: Republicans, Liberals, and Social Democrats. The CIA decided in March to split its own vote, as it were, by supporting minor-party candidates as well as the Christian Democrats. Overviews of the operation are in Ray S. Cline, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars: Blueprint of the Essential CIA (Washington, DC: Acropolis, 1976), pp. 99–103, and Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 114–117. Cline was deputy director of intelligence at the CIA from 1962 to 1966; Grose unearthed telling congressional testimony describing the uses of the Treasury Department’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.
There are no records of what the Italian operation cost, though estimates run from $10 million to $30 million. The black bags of money were filled, in part, with bonds of friendship and trust. Treasury Secretary Snyder had a close friend in A. P. Giannini, the Italian American financier who ran Transamerica Corporation, a holding company that controlled the Bank of America and some two hundred smaller banks. Giannini, in turn, was put in touch with Wyatt, a fellow San Franciscan. “I had many contacts with prominent Italian-Americans in this country: bankers, industrialists, that were full of ideas, and some of them were very aberrant ideas,” such as a coup d’état if the covert plan failed, Wyatt said. Giannini was among his contacts, as were “powerful political leaders in this country, not just Tammany Hall and Cook County, Illinois, but outstanding ones that knew how to win elections.” Muscle as well as money was involved. An apocryphal story about the 1948 Italian operation holds that three CIA contract agents went to Palermo to do something about the situation on the docks, where they turned to members of the local Mafia to address the problem. They succeeded in getting American arms shipmentspast communist longshoremen, but headquarters was not happy with their methodology. Assessing precisely how crucial the CIA was to the American cause in the 1948 elections is like unscrambling an egg. The flood of American weapons and armor to Italy, the American ships that delivered tons of food, and waves of international news amplified by the shock of the fall of Czechoslovakia all contributed to the victory and to the cementing of the long relationship between the CIA and the increasingly corrupt Italian political elite. Joe Greene, who divided his time between the State Department and the Office of Policy Coordination, recalled that the Italians “announced they wanted to give the U.S. a token of their appreciation for all the Americans had done from the end of the war, when they changed sides, up to the early ’50s. They offered enormous bronze equestrian statues that are on the northwest end of the Memorial Bridge in Washington. De Gasperi came over for that and Truman attended the dedication ceremony. It was a great show.” The horses are still there. Greene oral history, FAOH.
The CIA station chief in Prague, Charles Katek: The exfiltration of Katek’s Czech agents was described in interviews by Tom Polgar and Steve Tanner, both CIA officers in Germany in 1948. But the CIA performed less nobly when called upon to save the life of Michael Shipkov, a Bulgarian who served as chief translator for the American Legation in that newly Stalinist state. The legation asked the army for help in getting Shipkov out of the country, said Raymond Courtney, the American vice consul: “They came back with a really childish, impossible scheme: have him set out on the road by night and make his way, not by road but cross country over the mountains with five or six feet of snow, down to the Greek border and try to make a clandestine meeting in a graveyard there. I put Shipkov out on the road about 3 o’clock in the morning and sent the poor guy on his way. Well, he made the first safe house all right and the second safe house, but then the couriers didn’t turn up and he didn’t want to compromise his hosts any further so he tried to set out on his own without any guidance or assistance. The militia picked him up. We learned later that the reason the couriers had not shown was that they had both gone down with flu and had laid over 24 hours in a haystack. Shipkov’s capture was announced over the State radio with a great blare of publicity. Shipkov was given a very, very bad time. After 15 years of that he was released from prison.” Courtney oral history, FAOH.
the Marshall Plan: the CIA’s use of Marshall Plan funds is described in “A Short History of the PSB,” December 21, 1951, NSC Staff Papers, White House Office Files, DDEL. The diversion of Marshall Plan funds for covert action was detailed in an October 17, 1949, memo for Frank Wisner, chief of the Office of Policy Coordination: “CIA Responsibility and Accountability for ECA Counterpart Funds Expended by OPC,” classified Secret, reprinted in Michael Warner (ed.), CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1994). This was a rare accounting: under “general and specific agreements” made in secret among a handful of men in the know, “the 5% counterpart funds of ECA are made available to CIA” for covert operations, according to the CIA document. The ECA, or Economic Cooperation Administration, administered the Marshall Plan.
There was always plenty of cash. “Of course, we had money,” said Melbourne L. Spector, a Marshall Plan administrator in Paris. “We had counterpart funds just coming out of our ears.” Spector oral history, FAOH.
“Tell them to stick their hand in our pocket”: Griffin oral history, HSTL.
“the inauguration of organized political warfare”: Kennan unsigned memo, May 4, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 668–672.
NSC Directive 10/2 called for covert operations: the fighting words in full were as follows:
Kennan was indisputably the directive’s chief intellectual author. A generation later he rued it all, saying that the push for political warfare was his greatest mistake, that covert operations clashed with American traditions, that “excessive secrecy, duplicity and clandestine skullduggery are simply not our dish.” Few in power said so at the time. The conventional wisdom among the cognoscenti was clear. If America was to stopthe Soviets, it was going to need an army of secret soldiers. Kennan managed to write more than a thousand pages of memoirs without any mention of his role as the progenitor of covert action. His justly acclaimed work was thus a small masterpiece of duplicity as well as a magnificent diplomatic history. See also Kennan’s “Mortality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1985–1986; and his statement that the political warfare initiative was “the greatest mistake I ever made” in his testimony to the Church Committee, October 28, 1975, quoted in the committee’s final report, Vol. 4, p. 31.
Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter was aghast at the very idea of the new clandestine service. He made plain his belief that the United States should never engage in covert-action in peacetime. Nor was he the only one to wonder about the costs of secret subversion. Sherman Kent, the greatest of the CIA’s cold-war analysts, had committed the following thought to paper: To send “cla
ndestine operatives into a foreign country against which the United States is not at war and instruct these agents to carry out ‘black’ operations,” he wrote, “not only runs counter to the principles upon which our country was founded but also those for which we recently fought a war.” Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 451.
The National Security Council, taking cognizance of the vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups to discredit and defeat the aims and activities of the United States and other Western powers, has determined that, in the interests of world peace and US national security, the overt foreign activities of the US Government must be supplemented by covert operations…so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.