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

by Tim Weiner

“a rich blind man”: Chief, Munich Operations Base, to Acting Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, July 7, 1948.

  “no question the Russians know”: Helms to ADSO, Col. Donald Galloway, March 19, 1948.

  “We did not want to touch it”: Sichel interview with author.

  “given how hard it was for us”: Tanner interview with author.

  Tanner, who retired from the CIA in 1970, added the following contribution, written in the third person, to the previously untold story of the agency’s support for the Ukrainian insurgents:

  Tanner found only one group meeting his criteria, namely the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine (UHVR). Surprisingly, no Russian émigré group qualified. UHVR not only had overland courier contact with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the Carpathian Mountains, but also received some reports from Ukraine via couriers, Catholic clerics, plus occasional travelers and escapees.

  The key interests of the UHVR and CIA seemed to dovetail: both desperately wanted radio contact with insurgent headquarters, “behind enemy lines.” Policy bigwigs in Washington approved this formula, which had worked well in wartime France, Italy and Yugoslavia.

  Over nine months, two couriers were trained under Tanner’s supervision in radio operation, enciphered codes, parachuting and target practice for self-defense. They parachuted onto a mountain meadow near Lvov the night of September 5, 1949. This first air drop and the next one in 1951 produced radio contact, but no earthshaking information. The final two missions were definitely compromised via Angleton’s briefings to Philby and the unlucky courier groups were arrested on the spot by Soviet NKVD “welcoming committees.”

  To Ukrainian nationalists in the USSR, the first air drop was a huge morale boost and must have led to exaggerated expectations. By mid-1953, however, the Soviets had effectively overwhelmed armed insurgent resistance.

  Four errors and stellar stupidities in the postwar era stuck in Tanner’s mind. First, at the end of World War Two, the Allies forcibly repatriated Soviet citizens. When they found out they were about to be handed back to the Russians, many committed suicide. And those handed back never reached Soviet soil, but were shot or hung in Eastern Europe by Security Service death squads.

  Second, the cover of CIA’s Munich base personnel was blown skyhigh by an error in the 1949 U.S. Army phone book: names listed with no unit designation all belonged to CIA people. The Army might as well have placed an asterisk next to their names.

  Thirdly, after World War Two parachute experts and trainers left OSS as the need for their services was over. There were two results: a Serbo-American OSS veteran who had parachuted into wartime Yugoslavia taught the two Ukrainian couriers to somersault backwards when they hit the ground, despite the four-foot carbines strapped to their sides. Also, for the September 1949 drop Washington advised using the wrong freight chute and the crate holding 1400 pounds of equipment burst into small pieces upon impact.

  Fourthly, and worst of all, James Angleton briefed Kim Philby, the Soviet mole in British intelligence, about the REDSOX program [the overall effort to infiltrate former Soviet and ethnic foreign nationals behind the iron curtain].

  “What had we done wrong?”: John Limond Hart’s convincing critique of Angleton is in his posthumous memoir, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002), especially pp. 136–137. Hart was called out of retirement in 1976 to assay the damage Angleton had done to the CIA as its counterintelligence chief. On the Albanian operation: McCargar oral history, FAOH; Michael Burke, Outrageous Good Fortune (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 140–169. Wisner picked Mike Burke to train the Albanians. Burke, later the president of the New York Yankees, was an OSS veteran and he liked the covert life. He signed on as a $15,000-a-year contract agent and was off to Munich, where he met the Albanian politicos at a safe house in a working-class district of the city. “As the youngest person in the room, representing a young and rich country, I commanded their attention,” Burke wrote. He believed that he and the exiles understood one another. The Albanians saw things differently: “The Americans who prepared our men for these missions knew nothing of Albania, the Albanian people or their mentality,” said Xhemal Laci, an Albanian monarchist who recruited men for the cause in Germany. The operation was so completely compromised from the start that it was anyone’s guess where the deepest roots of the disaster lay. McCargar, who was a good friend of Angleton’s, concluded: “The Albanian community in Italy was so thoroughly penetrated, not only by the Italians but by the Communists, that to me that was where the Russians were getting their information, as were the Albanian Communist authorities.”

  “The ends don’t always justify the means”: Coffin interview with author.

  “assistance to the émigrés for the eventuality of war”: This retrospective look is in “U.S. Policy on Support for Covert Action Involving Emigrés Directed at the Soviet Union.”

  the CIA confidently declared: CIA Intelligence Memorandum No. 225, “Estimate of Status of Atomic Warfare in the USSR,” September 20, 1949, reprinted in Michael Warner (ed.), CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman (Washington, DC: CIA History Staff, 1994). The full text: “The earliest possible date by which the USSR might be expected to produce an atomic bomb is mid-1950 and the most probable date is mid-1953.” The assistant director of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, Willard Machle, reported to Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter that the agency’s work on Soviet atomic weapons had been an “almost total failure” at every level. The spies had “failed completely” to gather scientific and technical data on the Soviet bomb, and the CIA’s analysts had resorted to “geological reasoning” based on guesstimates of the Soviets’ ability to mine uranium.

  In Machle’s memo to Hillenkoetter, “Inability of OSI to Accomplish Its Mission,” dated September 29, 1949, he lamented that it had “proved difficult to find persons with acceptable qualifications who could be prevailed upon to accept employment in the Agency.” Machle memo, in George S. Jackson and Martin P. Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950–1953, Vol. 6, pp. 19–34, DCI Historical Series HS-2, CIA Historical Staff, 1957, Record Group 263, NARA.

  The in-house CIA historian Roberta Knapp noted that as of September 1949, “the official coordinated statement on Soviet completion of an atomic weapon was to be found in an estimate that predicted three different dates for it—1958, 1955, and ‘between 1950 and 1953’—all wrong.” This, she concludes, “constituted clear evidence of disarray.” As a consequence, the CIA’s Office of Reports and Estimates (ORE) was “doomed,” according to another CIA historian, Donald P. Steury in “How the CIA Missed Stalin’s Bomb,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2005,CIA/CSI. This internal history notes that many ORE analysts were nuclear physicists and engineers from the Manhattan Project who had the optimistic notion that they could track the progress of the Soviet nuclear program by reading published scientific papers, supplemented by evidence from clandestine sources. By 1948 there was no useful evidence in open-source literature emerging from the Soviet Union. But since 1947, a German source at the former I. G. Farben complex (makers, among other things, of Nazi death-camp gases) had reported that the Soviets were importing thirty tons of distilled metallic calcium a month from the plant. The quantity of the pure calcium, which was used to refine uranium ore, was roughly eighty times the annual U.S. output. The source’s reporting was independently corroborated. It should have raised an alarm. It did not.

  Chapter Six

  “One is God, and the other is Stalin”: “Nomination of Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith to Be Director of Central Intelligence Agency,” Executive Session, August 24, 1950, CIA, Walter Bedell Smith papers, DDEL.

  “I expect the worst” and “It’s interesting to see all you fellows here”: David S. Robarge, “Directors of Central Intelligence, 1946–2005,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2005, CIA/CSI.

  “It was the place where all the money was spent”: Bedell Smi
th quoted in “Office of Policy Coordination, 1948–1952,” CIA/CREST.

  “the heart and soul of CIA”: Bedell Smith quoted in George S. Jackson and Martin P. Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950–1953, Vol. 9, Part 2, p. 38. This 1957 history was declassified in 2005. DCI Historical Series HS-2, CIA Historical Staff, Record Group 263, NARA.

  “an impossible task”: Sherman Kent, “The First Year of the Office of National Estimates: The Directorship of William L. Langer,” CIA/CSI, 1970.

  “estimating is what you do when you do not know”: Sherman Kent, “Estimates and Influence,” Foreign Service Journal, April 1969.

  Four hundred CIA analysts: Jackson and Claussen, Organizational History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1950–1953, Vol. 8, p. 2.

  The CIA found itself manipulated: James Lilley, former CIA station chief in Beijing, interview with author. The problem persisted well into the late 1960s, when Lilley found that “the same sort of fabricated Chinese intelligence networks that we had resisted and thrown out 15 years ago” were back in business, picking up tidbits from provincial newspapers in China and selling them to American spies in Hong Kong.

  “the most significant intelligence loss in U.S. history”: David A. Hatch with RobertLouis Benson, “The Korean War: The SIGINT Background,” National Security Agency, available online at http://www.nsa.gov/publications/publi00022.cfm. Weisband’s role in the history of American intelligence has been misrepresented for decades. The magisterial KGB: The Inside Story by Christopher Andrew, one of the world’s preeminent intelligence historians, and Oleg Gordievsky, the defector from Soviet intelligence, devotes three sentences to Weisband and incorrectly gives the date of his recruitment by Soviet intelligence as 1946. According to the official National Security Agency and CIA histories of the case, Weisband was recruited by the Soviets in 1934. An aircraft industry worker in California told the FBI in 1950 that Weisband had been his KGB handler during the war. Weisband was born in Egypt to Russian parents in 1908, came to the United States in the late 1920s, and became an American citizen in 1938. He joined the Army Signals Security Agency in 1942 and was assigned to North Africa and Italy before returning to Arlington Hall. Weisband was suspended from his work at the security agency and then failed to appear at a federal grand jury hearing on Communist Party activity. Convicted of contempt, he was sentenced to a year in prison—and there the matter ended, for to accuse him openly of espionage would have deepened the problems of American intelligence. Weisband died suddenly in 1967, apparently of natural causes, at age fifty-nine.

  “no convincing indications”: The only thing the CIA at headquarters knew for sure was that General MacArthur believed that the Chinese were not coming. CIA reporting and analysis on Korea from June to December 1950 reflected that fallacy. The reporting is detailed in P. K. Rose, “Two Strategic Intelligence Mistakes in Korea, 1950,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall/Winter, No. 11, 2001; CIA Historical Staff, “Study of CIA Reporting on Chinese Communist Intervention in the Korean War, September–December 1950,” prepared in October 1955 and declassified in June 2001; and Woodrow J. Kuhns, “Assessing the Soviet Threat: The Early Cold War Years,” CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1997.

  an impossible tangle: Before Bill Jackson resigned as Bedell Smith’s deputy director in 1951, he gave the general a report on Wisner’s operations. “Subject: Survey of Office of Policy Coordination by Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,” May 24, 1951, CIA/CREST. It said: “The job…exceeds the capacity of any one man.” The Office of Policy Coordination was trying to build “a world-wide machine, comparable in many ways to a military force” without adequate levels of competent control, personnel, training, logistics, or communications. “There is a great discrepancy between the most highly qualified Division Chiefs and the least qualified,” he reported. “The burdens of operational commitments have overtaken the capacity to recruit highly qualified personnel.”

  It was $587 million: “CIA/Location of Budgeted Funds/Fiscal Year 1953,” a document from the files of Representative George Mahon, one of four members of Congress with knowledge of the CIA’s budget. When Professor David Barrett of Villanova University found this document in 2004, it changed history. For almost thirty years, every book about the CIA has faithfully reprinted the 1976 finding of Senate investigators that Wisner’s budget was $82 million in 1952. That figure is clearly erroneous. The OPC’s budget in 1952 was in fact roughly four times bigger than previously reported.

  “a distinct danger”: Director’s meeting, November 14, 1951, CIA/CREST. The minutes of the daily meetings of the director of central intelligence, his deputies, and his staff, contained in newly declassified records obtained through CREST, give the flavor of the struggles of the CIA. The minutes of this meeting state: “The Director wants them [Dulles and Wisner] to take a very close look at OPC. Paramilitary operations should be sorted out from the rest of the budget as should all operations that do not contribute to intelligence. He believes we have arrived at a point where the size of our OPC operations have become a distinct danger to CIA as an intelligence agency.”

  Bedell Smith saw that United States “had no strategy for conducting this kind of war,” meaning Wisner’s kind of war. “Preliminary Staff Meeting, National Psychological Strategy Board,” May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST. He told Dulles and Wisner, “You do not have in government a basic approved strategy for this kind of war…. While we have the equipment and the power, we are not doing the job we should.”

  Bedell Smith tried more than once to remove Wisner from control of paramilitary operations. Director’s meeting, April 16, 1952, CIA/CREST. He argued in vain that they far exceeded what had been contemplated in NSC 10/2, the political-warfare manifesto of 1948. But State and Defense all wanted an expansion of covert action—one of “great magnitude.” Bedell Smith to NSC, “Scope and Pace of Covert Operations,” May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST. Bedell Smith’s warning not “to withhold” or “to whitewash unfortunate incidents or serious errors” came at the August 21, 1951, daily staff meeting, CIA/CREST. He had days before implored Wisner and other senior intelligence officers “to give serious attention to the problems of fabrication and duplication in intelligence sources.” Minutes of meeting, August 9, 1951, CIA/CREST.

  The newly available CREST records show that Bedell Smith had inherited “a sort of Holy Roman Empire in which the feudal barons pursued their respective interests subject to no effective direction and control by their titular emperor,” in the words of Ludwell Lee Montague, his personal representative on the National Security Council staff, who recordedthat the general “came to suspect that Dulles and Wisner…would eventually lead him into some ill-conceived and disastrous misadventure.” CIA/LLM, pp. 91–96, 264.

  The classified CIA histories: The classified Central Intelligence Agency histories are “CIA in Korea, 1946–1965,” “The Secret War in Korea, June 1950–June 1952,” and “Infiltration and Resupply of Agents in North Korea, 1952–1953.” They were first cited by Michael Haas, a retired air force colonel, in his monograph, In the Devil’s Shadow: U.N. Special Operations during the Korean War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000).

  “They were suicide missions”: Sichel interview with author.

  “a great reputation and a terrible record”: Gregg interview with author. In the case of Korea, the record has been obscured or falsified. For instance, John Ranelagh, The Agency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), long considered a standard reference on the CIA, contains three paragraphs on covert paramilitary activities during the Korean War. It claims that OPC operations chief Hans Tofte successfully placed agents all over Korea, China, and Manchuria: “These ‘closed’ areas were successfully penetrated with Korean and Chinese CIA agents,” and Tofte’s “multifaceted and complex” operations used “trained guerrillas to operate in North Korea” and placed “agents across Korea who could act as guides and provide hideouts for lost airmen” (pp. 217–218). This
is false, as the CIA’s operational histories of Korea show. Tofte was a fabricator. He faked film footage of CIA guerrillas operating in North Korea; the fraud was quickly unmasked when someone back in Washington wondered why commando missions were being launched in broad daylight. More to the point, the actual missions, as opposed to the staged one, were by and large disasters. The CIA’s own internal histories flatly contradict the pretty picture of Korean War operations represented in The Agency.

  “controlled by the other side”: Thomas oral history, FAOH.

  “a hard look at the miraculous achievements”: John Limond Hart’s posthumous memoir, The CIA’s Russians (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004), spells out his extraordinary experiences in succeeding Al Haney as station chief in Seoul.

  “The CIA, being a new”: Hart quoted in Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), pp. 193–194.

  Hart’s reports of Haney’s fraud were buried, as were Haney’s mistakes. Haney himself later noted, “There was considerable talk during and after Korea by many responsible senior officers that CIA should profit from its experience and be better prepared for the next Korea.” But, he concluded, “I seriously doubt if CIA has profited at all from Korea or that the experiences there have even been catalogued let alone studied for lessons for the future.” Haney to Helms, “Subject: Staff Study re Improvement of CIA/CS Manpower Potential Thereby Increasing Operational Capability,” November 26, 1954, declassified April 2003, CIA/CREST. Haney survived his incredible performance in the Korean War because at the end of his tour in November 1952, he had helped arrange for the transportation of a grievously wounded marine lieutenant in Korea from the battlefield to the hospital ship Constellation to the United States, where seven weeks later the brain-damaged soldier was photographed receiving a rare kiss from his father, Allen W. Dulles. The photo was taken the day before the elder Dulles’s confirmation hearings to become director of central intelligence. Dulles paid his debt of gratitude by making Haney the Florida-based commander of Operation Success in 1954.