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

by Tim Weiner

  “rumor-spreading, bribery, the organization of non-communist fronts”: Edward P. Lilly, “The Development of American Psychological Operations, 1945–1951,” National Security Council, Top Secret, DDEL, c. 1953.

  The CIA’s Berlin base: Sichel and Polgar interviews with author; “Subject: Targets of German Mission, January 10, 1947,” CIA/CREST. For a reliable overview of the CIA’s Berlin Operations Base, see David E. Murphy, Sergei A. Kondrashev, and George Bailey, Battleground Berlin: CIA vs. KGB in the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Murphy later served as base chief.

  “a zeal and intensity”: Helms’s eulogy at a memorial service for Wisner at CIA headquarters, January 29, 1971. Helms summoned up some lines from Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific” when he remembered the cold warrior in Wisner:

  Wisner was described as “a singular choice to create a covert organization from scratch” in “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–1952,” unsigned, undated, declassified with redactions in March 1997, CIA/CREST. The author was Gerald Miller, Wisner’s Western Europe operations chief.

  It looked as if a night of dark intent

  Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

  Someone had better be prepared for rage….

  Chapter Four

  battle plans for the next five years: Wisner’s ambitions are detailed in his memo “Subject: OPC Projects,” October 29, 1948, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 730–731; author’s interviews with Wisner’s contemporaries, including Richard Helms, Franklin Lindsay, Sam Halpern, Al Ulmer, and Walter Pforzheimer; and “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–1952,” CIA/CREST.

  LeMay told Wisner’s right-hand man Franklin Lindsay: Lindsay interview with author. Lindsay fought as an OSS guerrilla alongside Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. After the war, alongside Allen Dulles, he served on the staff of the congressional committee that authorized the Marshall Plan. In September 1947, he had led a group of members of Congress on that committee, including Richard Nixon, to the occupied city of Trieste, where they witnessed a tense confrontation between a Yugoslav tank column and American forces on the eve of Trieste’s transition to a free territory. Yugoslavia was still in the Soviet orbit; Tito would not break with Stalin for another nine months. It was a hair-trigger moment. The Allied commander in Trieste, General Terence Airey, warned the American and British governments: “If this matter is not handled very carefully a third World War might start here.” Upon returning to Washington, Lindsay and his predecessor as the chief of the wartime military mission to Tito’s forces, Charles Thayer, proposed a guerrilla warfare corps to battle the Soviets—“fighting fire with fire”—an idea that caught Kennan’s eye just as Lindsay caught Wisner’s.

  “the most secret thing”: James McCargar oral history, FAOH. McCargar had worked in secret for The Pond in Hungary, serving both the State Department and the army’s covert intelligence network from April 1946 to December 1947.

  “We were in charge”: Ulmer interview with author.

  First in Athens: The CIA’s Thomas Hercules Karamessines, a Greek American from Staten Island, started out in Athens in 1947 and befriended up-and-coming officers. After the Greek military took over the country twenty years later, they had a friend in Karamessines, who had risen to become the chief of covert action.

  “Individuals, groups, and intelligence services quickly came to see”: “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–1952,” CIA/CREST.

  Wisner flew to Paris…to talk…with Averell Harriman: Franklin Lindsay was working for Harriman in the Paris headquarters of the Marshall Plan in the fall of 1948, witnessed the conversation, and then immediately went to work as an operations chief for Wisner. “Harriman knew all about OPC,” Lindsay said. Wisner fully briefed Harriman on November 16, 1948. After that, money was never an object: “I had a budget of as many millions as I could spend, and I couldn’t spend it all,” McCargar recounted. For Harriman’s knowledge of Wisner’s plans, see Wisner’s memorandum for the file, FRUS Intelligence, pp. 732–733. Wisner’s visit to Dick Bissell came shortly thereafter. Richard M. Bissell, Jr., with Jonathan E. Lewis and Frances T. Pudlo, Reflections of a Cold Warrior: From Yalta to the Bay of Pigs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 68–69.

  The connections among the diplomats, the money men, and the spies were cozy. The ECA chief in Paris was David K. E. Bruce, late of the OSS. Harriman’s chief deputy was Milton Katz, head of the secret intelligence division of the OSS in London under William Casey, the future director of central intelligence.

  The Marshall Plan, in addition to money and cover, chipped in with personnel on covert propaganda and anticommunist actions aimed at labor unions in France and Italy. Some Marshall Plan officials ran covert operations for Wisner for three years after he sealed the deal with Averell Harriman. Wisner also briefed John McCloy, then the senior American civilian in Germany (and the War Department chieftain who helped preserve American intelligence in the face of Truman’s death sentence back in September 1945). Wisner recorded that he “explained to Mr. McCloy the general significance and origin of OPC” and detailed “certain aspects of our present and prospective operations in Germany.” He noted that McCloy “seemed to be impressed by my statement that the original architects of the whole deal included Messrs. Lovett, Harriman, Forrestal, Kennan, Marshall, et al.” FRUS Intelligence, pp. 735–736.

  the well-greased palms of Corsican gangsters: Gerald Miller’s OPC history records that Wisner “initially concentrated its efforts within the circumference of the trade union movement.” The earliest of these efforts, Operations Pikestaff and Largo, are documented in declassified CIA records, complete with Kennan’s authorizing signature, dated October 1948. “In the early days of the Marshall Plan,” said Victor Reuther, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ representative in Europe in those days, “when there were some political strikes called by communist trade union forces and perhaps communist political elements to try to defeat the Marshall Plan and to try to block foreign aid from being unloaded, it became a matter of breaking these strikes. And the U.S. government, through Central Intelligence, called upon Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone to try to organize a countermove. And of course, if you want to break a strike, you go to boys who have big bare knuckles and who know how to wield cudgels. And they turned to what can best be described as the Corsican Mafia.” A CIA officer who later handled that account, Paul Sakwa, said he cut off the payments to the chief of the Corsican mob, Pierre Ferri-Pisani, in 1953, when the Marshall Plan’s run was over. “There was nothing for Ferri-Pisani to do at the time,” Sakwa said, “and probably he was involved in smuggling heroin going through Marseille, and he did not need our money.” Reuther and Sakwa interviews, “Inside the CIA: On Company Business,” a 1980 documentary directed by Allan Francovich, transcript courtesy of John Bernhart. The present author interviewed Mr. Sakwa in 1995. The relationship of Wisner, Lovestone, and Brown is detailed in the Free Trade Union Committee’s files and Lovestone’s own records at the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department Collections, George Meany Memorial Archives, Silver Spring, MD, and in the Lovestone Collection at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. See also Anthony Carew, “The Origins of CIA Financing of AFL Programs,” Labor History, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1999.

  Lovestone served the CIA for a quarter of a century, earning a reputation as a brilliant manipulator. His first case officer was Wisner’s aide, Carmel Offie, who oversaw labor and émigré affairs as well as the National Committee for Free Europe, and created the first big security scare inside the CIA. Offie was a flamboyant homosexual in an age when deviance was deemed politically dangerous. The CIA’s security officers found a police report showing that Offie had been arrested for soliciting sex in a men’s room a block from the White House. They handed it to J. Edgar Hoover. He hounded Offie, who was quietly dismissed from the CIA and went on the American Federation of Labor’s payroll. FBI agents tapped Lovestone’s phone and recorded him railing to Wild Bill Donovan that the CIA w
as filled with “Park Avenue socialites and incompetents and degenerates…. That whole organization is thoroughly mismanaged, thoroughly inefficient, thoroughly irresponsible.” This was the purest catnip for Hoover.

  “a vast project targeted on the intellectuals”: Braden in Granada Television documentary, “World in Action: The Rise and Fall of the CIA,” June 1975. Among the budding authors who wrote books while working with the CIA in Paris was Peter Mathiessen, one of the greatest writers of his generation and a noted liberal.

  The report, which remained classified for fifty years: “The Central Intelligence Agency and National Organization for Intelligence: A Report to the National Security Council,” also known as the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report, January 1, 1949, CIA/CREST.

  “the heat of confusion”: Roosevelt to Acheson, February 1, 1949, HSTL.

  “The greatest weakness of CIA”: Ohly to Forrestal, February 23, 1949, HSTL.

  After fifty haunted nights: Forrestal’s suicide followed months of “a severe and progressive fatigue,” Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp.448–475. Dr. Menninger said he suffered from “an extreme impulsive drive to self-destruction.” Menninger letter to Captain George Raines, Chief of Neuropsychiatry, U.S. Naval Hospital, Bethesda, MD, in “Report of Board of Investigation in the Case of James V. Forrestal,” National Naval Medical Center, 1949. President Truman replaced Forrestal with Louis Johnson, a wealthy campaign contributor who had been clamoring for the job for months. Johnson was a man with few redeeming virtues, so given to seething rages and staggeringly illogical table-pounding rants that Dean Acheson, who served alongside him as secretary of state, was convinced that he was either brain-damaged or mentally ill. General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, concluded that “Truman had replaced one mental case with another.” As this drama played out at the Pentagon, Truman himself wondered whether he had put a madman in charge of American national security. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 374; Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair, A General’s Life: An Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 503.

  Chapter Five

  “run the railroads”: Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency (New York: RandomHouse, 2003), p. 82.

  Many among them were desperate refugees: In 1948, John W. McDonald, an American officer, was serving as the district attorney of Frankfurt under the American occupation when he encountered the CIA at work. He told the story as follows:

  The police had captured a ring of eighteen people. The number-one person was a Pole named Polansky, a displaced person. He had done a brilliant job of making these plates for fifty-dollar U.S. greenbacks. We caught him and a hundred thousand dollars in counterfeit currency, and the presses and the plates and the ink—everything you could possibly ask for. He also had a U.S. Army uniform. He had an ID card and an Army .45-pistol and a PX card. The whole bit. So I thought this was great. We were about to go to trial with the whole group of them when I was visited one day by a Major, who came into the office.

  The conversation went like this:

  “I’m Overt.”

  “Major Overt, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “No, you don’t understand. Overt as opposed to Covert.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m a member of the CIA.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “You have this Pole in prison, named Polansky. He’s one of us.”

  “What do you mean, one of us?”

  “He’s on our payroll. He’s part of the CIA.”

  “Since when does the CIA employ counterfeiters of U.S. dollars?”

  “No, no, no. He did that on his own time.”

  “So it doesn’t count, is that right?”

  “Well, yes, it doesn’t count. He is our best maker of documents, passports and all kinds of things like that that we use for going

  Eastward.”

  “Well, that’s fine, but he has still committed a crime and I couldn’t care less about who he is working for.”

  McDonald continued: “I showed him the door. The next day a Colonel came to see me about the same case and we had exactly the same discussion. I was unimpressed. Two days after that a Major General came to see me. Now that is a lot of brass in those days. It was very serious, I could see that. But he was smarter than the other two, he said, ‘As you know by now, this man worked for us. We are the ones who gave him the uniform, and the .45 and all the ID cards and so forth. I would very much appreciate it if you would drop those charges, so that we will not be publicly embarrassed.’ I went on and a week or so later went to trial and of course got the maximum of ten years, which was the maximum under German law for counterfeiting. But I’ve never forgotten Major Overt. My first encounter with the CIA was not a very auspicious one.” McDonald oral history, FAOH.

  “encouraging resistance movements into the Soviet World”: Wisner cited in Kevin C. Ruffner, “Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists,” Central Intelligence Agency, 1998.

  “a reserve for a possible war emergency”: “U.S. Policy on Support for Covert Action Involving Emigrés Directed at the Soviet Union,” December 12, 1969, FRUS, 1969–1970, Vol. XII, document 106.

  a CIA history: Ruffner, “Cold War Allies.”

  “We will just have to tell the House” and “The less we say about this bill, the better”: Both in Hearings Before the House Committee on Armed Services, as declassified, 81st Congress, 1st session, 1949.

  Mikola Lebed: Norman J. W. Goda, “Nazi Collaborators in the United States,” in U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, National Archives, pp. 249–255. Army intelligence officers had already started a touch-and-go relationship with the Ukrainians, using them to try to gather information on the Soviet military and Soviet spies in postwar Germany. Their first hireling in Munich had been Myron Matvieyko, a German intelligence agent during the war, a murderer and counterfeiter afterward. Suspicions soon grew that he was a mole for Moscow; his subsequent defection to the Soviet Union confirmed that fear.

  “rendering valuable assistance” and “of inestimable value”: The Dulles and Wyman letters are in the National Archives, Record Group 263, Mikola Lebed name file, made public in 2004. After Lebed was admitted to the United States, the agency maintained an operational relationship with his Ukrainians that proved to be one of its most resilient alliances with anticommunist émigré groups. His Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine eventually turned to less lethal forms of resistance activity. The CIA set up a publishing house for Lebed in New York in the 1950s. He lived to see the Soviet Union fall and Ukraine free to chart its own difficult destiny.

  “however slim the possibility of success or unsavory the agent”: Ruffner, “Cold War Allies.”

  General Reinhard Gehlen: Allen Dulles had the last word on Gehlen: “There are few archbishops in espionage. He’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.” The American rationale for recruiting Nazi spies was clear to men like army captain John R. Boker, Jr., as early as the summer of 1945. “Now was the ideal time to gain intelligence of the Soviet Union if we were ever going to get it,” said Boker, a skilled interrogator with deep German roots who started nosing around for Nazis days after their surrender. Boker found his man in Reinhard Gehlen. The American captain regarded the German general as “a goldmine that we had found.” Both men agreed that a new war with the Soviets was coming soon and that their nations should make common cause against the communist threat. Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, the army intelligence chief in Europe and soon to be the CIA’s first assistant director for covert operations, bought this pitch. He decided to hire Gehlen and his spy ring. He did not clear his decision with his superiors—Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley—on the sound assumption
that they would have rejected it. On Sibert’s say-so, General Gehlen and six of his fellow German spies flew to Washington on the personal plane of the future director of central intelligence General Walter Bedell Smith. The Germans were vetted and debriefed for ten months at a secret military installation within Fort Hunt, outside Washington, before they were returned to their fatherland to work against the Russians. This was the birth of a long partnership between America’s intelligence officers and Hitler’s washed-up spies. John R. Boker, Jr., “Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen’s Organization,” May 1, 1952. This debriefing and a host of CIA documents on the Gehlen organization are collected in Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, edited by Kevin C. Ruffner of the CIA’s History Staff, printed by CIA’s Directorate of Operations, European Division, and declassified in 2002. The documents include Gehlen’s statements enclosed in James Critchfield [Chief of Station, Karlsruhe] to Chief, FBM, CIA HQ, February 10, 1949; “Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization,” March 26, 1970; “SS Personnel with Known Nazi Records,” Acting Chief, Karlsruhe Operations Base, to Chief, FBM, August 19, 1948.