WEDGE
FROM PEARL HARBOR TO 9/11
HOW THE SECRET WAR
BETWEEN THE FBI AND CIA
HAS ENDANGERED NATIONAL SECURITY
MARK RIEBLING
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GRAY GHOST
IAN FLEMING’S FAVORITE NOVELIST, John Buchan, created in
The Thirty-nine Steps a character for whom one whole
chapter was named: “The Dry-Fly Fisherman.” Richard
Hannay, the hero of Buchan’s stories, met him at a
waterfall. The fisherman nodded to Hannay, leaned his
delicate ten-foot split-cane rod against a nearby bridge,
and stared at the surface of the waters. His kind blue eyes
seemed to go very deep. He had a square, cleft jaw and a
broad, lined brow; Hannay had never seen a shrewder
face. But his hair was prematurely gray and thin about the
temples, and there were lines of overwork below the eyes;
his big frame seemed built for a much heavier man, his
shoulders were stooped, and his skin was drained of color,
like that of someone who got too little fresh air. He made
a few cryptic remarks, then invited Hannay into his adjacent country home; they drank good champagne,
dined, and smoked. Hannay’s host swung his long legs
over the side of a chair and identified himself as Sir
Walter Bullivant, the country’s counterintelligence chief.
He would become Hannay’s mentor and boss, and the
prototype for master spy-catchers in fiction and in fact.
If Fleming himself never really made a Bullivant type
the focus of his fictions—“the white-collar boys” could
“catch spies,
” while Agent 007 would attack SMERSH,
“the threat that made them spy”—that was one reason the
Bond books would be dismissed by Dulles and others as
“unrealistic.” Dulles did not think that professional
intelligence officers, as a rule, went on “perilous or
glamorous missions” or became involved with “luscious
dames.” He would, however, say: “A useful analogy is to
the art of angling. The fisherman’s preparation for the
catch, his consideration of the weather, the light, the
currents, the depth of the water, the right bait or fly to use,
the time of day to fish, the spot he chooses and the
patience he shows are all a part of the art and essential to
success. In fact, I have found that good fishermen tend to
make good intelligence officers.”
So it was with the man whom Dulles thought CIA’s best intelligence officer of all, a dry-fly fisherman who much resembled Buchan’s Bullivant. For the twenty years following December 20, 1954, he would be the FBI’s main point of liaison. His separate peace with Papich would help break a network of Soviet agents in New York, lead the two agencies into a joint project to open the mail of U.S. citizens, and limit fallout when the FBI’s prize spy prisoner was swapped for a CIA pilot downed in Russia. Yet he would also bring to the Agency a way of thinking that crystallized FBI-CIA differences, and which would ultimately rip relations apart.
BY SUMMER 1954, a whole slew of traumas and setbacks had demonstrated the need for a revamped national counterintelligence effort. The Bentley, Hiss, Fuchs, and Rosenberg cases had destroyed the country’s early naivete. The Burgess-Maclean affair alerted the intelligence establishment that its secrets could go, even if its own operations weren’t penetrated. The McCarthyism period brought home the need to prevent such morale sapping episodes by prophylactic measures. That need was felt particularly acutely by Houston, Edwards, and others concerned with personnel security at CIA, who had tangled with the FBI over Offie and Meyer and various loyalty cases, and who didn’t feel the Agency was getting proper investigative help from the Bureau. It was not so much a lack of help, as the wrong kind. CIA was all for getting tips from Hoover, but wanted to handle its own security problems internally, without the Bureau or HUAC or anyone else sneezing into the soup.
A start at reform had been made in June, when Dulles and Hoover worked out, via Houston and Attorney General William P. Rogers, a procedure for FBI investigation of “irregularities” involving CIA employees. Misconduct of any kind was to be the province of CIA’s Office of Security, which had to jump into a situation immediately—not only to preserve CIA’s public reputation, but to protect secrets which might be compromised by the curiosity of the FBI. Every so often, some CIA officer would fall afoul of the administrative charter, or, on rare occasions, flee an automobile accident, or leave a satchel full of classified documents in a taxicab, and Papich would turn the case over to Sheffield Edwards. One CIA officer had to resign after the FBI discovered that his house was stacked to the ceiling with secret government papers; he wasn’t passing them out to the enemy, just building up a library for himself, for writing books, and apparently it helped him, because he later became a top expert in foreign policy. The Bureau could have recommended that the man be prosecuted for unlawful possession of government documents, but CIA’s policy was to handle and resolve everything internally, fearing that secrets would be lost through the “discovery” process in a trial, and the FBI went along.
But DCI Dulles knew that counterintelligence involved more than just letting the Agency take care of its own; it mattered what kind of care was taken. There was a demonstrable need to be more cautious, more concerned with the principles of compartmentalization and “need to know.” If Dulles’ people were going to succeed, the security of sources, operations, and personnel was everything. That was the lesson taught by Wisner’s OPC, at least in the view of William Harvey’s counterintelligence people. If Cord Meyer was trying to suborn the editor of a newspaper, or Wisner to work with a guerrilla leader in the mountains, it was crucial to know whether one’s agent might be an informant for the security service. But OPC wanted only action. As one of Harvey’s colleagues was admonished, “Goddamn it, we don’t want counterintelligence, we want guerrillas!” Because of progress in radio detection, and because the adversary controlled Trust-style opposition groups, the task of infiltrating commandos was more difficult than it had been even ten years earlier—yet there didn’t seem to be any shift in tactics from world war to Cold War. Wisner’s men were still fighting the Nazis, still dropping people behind the lines, and it took the spectacular failures of OPC’s covert actions, in Poland, Albania, and the Ukraine, to teach the wisdom of Harvey’s more cautious approach.
Additional pressures came from outside the Agency. The White House was getting mail urging that Hoover be made director of CIA, or that the Agency be folded into the FBI; J. Edgar would kick out the commies as he had chased down Dillinger, and only then would the nation’s secrets be safe. One concerned citizen complained that CIA had been puffed into existence by Donovan’s press campaign, and that Hoover’s more efficient SIS had been taken over by the Agency because Hoover refused to publicize the FBI’s successes; “the public and even Congress never even heard of [SIS], nor did it get any publicity, nor did J. Edgar Hoover or the men in charge get pictures in the paper entitled ‘Superspy.’ ” Eisenhower responded to the pressure as any politician would, by appointing a committee to look into it. The inquiry was headed by Lieutenant General James Doolittle, and the sixty-nine-page Doolittle Report, presented to Eisenhower in September 1954, proposed some radical reforms.
Most signally, the report urged CIA to assume the country’s leading counterintelligence role. The National Security Council had given the job of collating counterintelligence to CIA in December 1947, but there was a consensus, Harvey’s Staff C notwithstanding, that countering enemy intelligence was the FBI’s job. That would have to change. The United States needed to abandon the law-enforcement route for a “more ruthless” approach, the Doolittle Report stressed, and that new ruthlessness must be applied to “intensification of CIA’s counterintelligence efforts to prevent or detect and eliminate penetrations.” The situation required a new strategy, a new concept for American life, one which would spill across normally restricted areas, legal channels, and departmental lines.
It also required a new chief of counterintelligence, for in mid-1953 Harvey had been made Chief of Base in Berlin. The outgoing Bedell Smith had told Papich early that year that Harvey was probably going to be posted abroad. “As you know, ” Hoover was reminded in a summary of that conversation, “[Harvey] has been the center of many controversies.” But there was more to the decision than a desire to keep Harvey out of Hoover’s way. Harvey himself had wanted to leave Staff C, because he hoped to rise in the Agency and, compared with other disciplines, counterintelligence was considered career ending. Harvey didn’t have much of a chance to manage people, the way he would if he were running agents in even the smallest foreign station, and thus wasn’t as easily marked for promotion; already, while he was stalled in Staff C, two less knowledgeable men with overseas experience had overtaken him. He added an extra martini at lunch, and when the chief ship of Berlin Base came free, he asked for the job and got it. Divided into Russian, British, French, and American zones, isolated in the heartland of communist Germany, Berlin was the hotbed of the Cold War. It was, too, a welcome reprieve from the hassles and obstructionism of the FBI. It would be almost nine years before Harvey worked again in Washington, though, as he would find, that was not long enough to outrun Hoover’s memory.
SAM PAPICH MET CIA’s new counterintelligence chief in a large corner office of L Building, where a row of windows looked out on the Lincoln Memorial—or would have, if Venetian blinds had not been shut against the light. Six secretaries in the anteroom testified to the new appointee’s power, as did the long row of black safes in his inner sanctum, and the piles of documents. Red priority stickers were everywhere in the mass of papers, like poppies pushing through a field of snow. In all other respects, the office lacked distinctiveness, typical CIA; there wasn’t much on the walls. But in a high leather-backed chair behind the desk was as singular a man as Papich had ever seen.
His black hair was slicked back from a pale forehead, a
bony blade of nose, sunken cheeks, and elegantly pointed
chin—a chiseled, cadaverous face that had been proposed,
only half facetiously, as a logo for CIA. His deep-set eyes
were emphasized by arched brows, framed by horn rimmed bifocals, and lit with a kind of controlled fire. He
was thirty-seven years old, and well over six feet tall, but
his gaunt frame was stooped and slightly twisted, making
him seem, as one colleague said, half his height and twice
his age. Clasped to his shirt pocket was a plastic picture ID, required wearing for anyone inside headquarters, and
around its edges were twenty-four boxes filled with red
letters, signifying the security clearances that gave him
access to more restricted areas, and more secrets, than any
man except the Agency’s director.
James Jesus Angleton was one of only a handful of people—Harvey was another—who would ever become truly legendary within the faceless bureaucracy of knowledge that was CIA. A chain-smoking poetry enthusiast, ace fly-fisherman, and grower of rare orchids, Angleton had been recruited into OSS after graduating from Yale. He had served under Norman Pearson in X-2 and had been particularly adept at burning and turning Nazi stay-behinds in Italy. After the war, he had been put in charge of a so-called Special Desk to handle such tasks as liaison with the Israelis and the British. That latter experience had stamped him with a general auspiciousness, for he had lunched regularly with Kim Philby and detected nothing until it was too late. Some of his Special Desk duties had also caused Angleton to clash with DeLoach the few times they met, so Papich was not entirely surprised that when he first encountered Angleton, in that corner office of L Building, they got into “a real fight.”
After preliminary greetings, the new counterintelligence chief lit a cigarette, leaned across his desk, and, in his gravelly burr, brought up a case that had allegedly been mishandled by the Bureau. It had been damaging to CIA, and Angleton made a big deal about it —maybe with good reason, but Papich disagreed with him. It got to a bitter stage; they were shouting insults. Finally, Papich just walked out. Maybe Angleton was testing him, to make clear that he was going to dominate liaison. Well, thought Papich, he’s not going to.
They saw each other again the next day, and managed to act cordially. Before too long, small talk brought out that they were from neighboring big-sky states, and they both liked fly-fishing. They went off one weekend to do a little angling for brown trout in the freestone streams of West Virginia, and after that they were friends. Papich was impressed by the fact that Angleton would never just cast a fly; he would always spend a half-hour or so just stalking along the riverbank, examining the insect life, and then craft lures to imitate the species along that particular stretch of shore—brown ants, inchworms, soldier beetles, whatever he saw. Angleton had mastered the esoteric lore and literature of the discipline, which dated back to fifteenth-century Scotland; he could loop his line through the air and splash it onto the waters just so, in imitation of a hatching fly, and his vest and hat were decorated with traditional fly designs, in all their exotic colors and types and names: Flamingo Zonker, Yellow Goofus Bug, Egg-Sucking Leach. Angleton knew them all, but his standby was the Gray Ghost, a classic American freestone-river design—ocher floss-silk body ribbed with flat silver tinsel, black silk nose, white buck tail, and gray cock hackles sweeping sleekly back, like wings. Given Angleton’s own spookish demeanor and suspicious outlook, “Gray Ghost” became one of his nicknames, and colleagues thought it the one that fit him best.
The fishing trips sealed what would become a close working relationship, and Papich became a serious student of Angleton’s counterintelligence philosophy. To Angleton, catching spies was much like landing trout. It was all about patience, research, deception. Yet CI was not merely a body of knowledge; it was also a way of seeing things. It meant transcending the details of a case, putting tactical problems in a strategic perspective, gaining a larger view. Angleton felt that too much of the country’s conception of CI, as promoted by detective entertainments and the FBI’s own actions, was “spy versus spy.” That was like fighting soldier-to-soldier using bayonets, as opposed to understanding why the soldiers were being put face to face. That was counterespionage, not counterintelligence. What CI really required, most of all, was a good dollop of focused historical research—not the random digestion of massive mounds of fact, but purposeful, teleological analysis, looking for patterns over a long period of time. His work against the Nazis had taught him that patient accumulation of fact allowed one to decipher the enemy’s thinking, and thus anticipate his moves. If one could not read the enemy’s files, one could at least read his mind.
Trying to read the Soviet mind on CIA-FBI relations, Angleton considered it logical that the KGB would try to split America’s CI community along its pre-existent fault line. “When the enemy is united, divide him”—so the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had counseled in The Art of War—a work which, through the Mongol-Tartars, had greatly influenced Russian strategy, and which, in English translation, Angleton had read more than once. “Drive a wedge … Separate the enemy’s allies from him. Make them mutually suspicious so that they drift apart. Then you can plot against them.” The West itself was trying to split Romania and Hungary from Moscow, and to play Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) against the KGB. Just so, Angleton reasoned, the Soviets wanted to sow schisms between the Americans and the British, and between CIA and FBI. “That was part and parcel of Jim’s basic philosophy—he didn’t want that to happen, ” Papich would later say. “It was one of the worst things that could happen, because once you destroy a relationship between services, you’ve destroyed the effectiveness of both services.”
Though the CI chief was not yet sure exactly how the Soviets would make inter-agency trouble, he guessed they would try to capitalize on a “dissociation of sensibility.” (The phrase came from a famous essay by Angleton’s favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, who used it to describe thematic dualism's in literature; Angleton used it to describe the tension between Hoover’s law-enforcement mentality and CIA’s double-agent approach.) Angleton also supposed the KGB would try to slip between jurisdictional cracks. Just as a fly-fisherman, spotting a brown trout nibbling near the surface of the shallows, would cast from beyond its field of vision, so would the Soviets profit from inter-agency blind spots. If such schemes were not thwarted by close liaison, American CI would be essentially at war with itself, and the game could be lost. “Counter-intelligence, ” Angleton liked to say, “is only as good as relations between the CIA and FBI.”
AN EARLY TEST of the new cooperation came when Papich tried to broker a joint FBI-CIA operation to kidnap a Soviet spy in the Middle East. Elizabeth Bentley had told Harvey back in 1946 that her controller, an American known to her only as “Jack, ” had been operating a big net of agents; by 1953, FBI counterintelligence man Robert Lamphere was sure that “Jack” was an American man named Joseph Katz. Subpoenaed by HUAC, Katz had fled to Israel, where, being of the Jewish faith, he was automatically eligible for citizenship. The U.S. did not have an extradition treaty with Israel, but Angleton’s close ties to Israeli intelligence offered certain possibilities. Lamphere had met Angleton back when he was running Special Desk, and though they had little direct contact, Lamphere had always got excellent results whenever he asked, via liaison, for Angleton to do something overseas. Now the three formulated a joint FBI-CIA operation to return Katz to the United States. The key to the operation would be luring Katz onto a U.S.-registered boat, outside Israel’s territorial waters, where Lamphere could make a legal arrest. It was going to be risky, but Lamphere outlined the plan in a memo to Hoover, who gave preliminary approval. “He didn’t like the idea of the joint CIA-FBI operation, ” Lamphere said, “but had been made to understand that the FBI did not have the resources or contacts in Israel to pull off this one, whereas the CIA did.”
Papich and Lamphere got all their shots, and were ready to fly to Israel, when Hoover took a last-hour look at the whole operation and scotched it. The FBI director told them that he’d talked to a deputy attorney general, and had got the distinct impression that Angleton had informed Justice of the plan. Feeling that this was supposed to be an FBI expedition, and that CIA had overstepped its jurisdiction by going to Justice, Hoover called the whole thing off. Angleton insisted that he’d never had any such conversation with Justice, and Lamphere told Hoover that Justice probably knew about it because he, Lamphere, had cut them a copy of the planning memo, but there was no moving the director.
Of course, the team was extremely disappointed. “I was chagrined on two counts, ” Lamphere remembered. “One, both Sam Papich and I had wanted this joint operation to improve relations between the FBI and the CIA—and the result had been just the opposite, a further rupture between the agencies. Two, I was disappointed that my one best hope to reopen the Bentley case and prosecute some of the key figures was now gone.” Lamphere was so disgusted with Hoover’s bullheadedness that he soon resigned from the Bureau.
Angleton also was peeved. He went to Papich and said, “Why the hell did the boss turn this one down?” Papich thought the director was probably concerned that another agency—and another foreign service, the Mossad—had too much operational control. He recounted how some botched operations with local police in the hunt for Dillinger had taught Hoover to participate in joint projects only if he could control the show. That didn’t wash too well with Angleton. It sickened him that, despite the best laid plans of FBI and CIA men, Soviet spies like Katz still could count on the “dissociation” of American counterintelligence.
RUNNING OPERATIONS SILENTLY, without Hoover’s direct knowledge, produced much better results. In one case, Angleton got the Bureau access to a New York mob lawyer. The man was a rascal, but there was no counting the cases the FBI prosecuted on the basis of his cooperation, all involving corruption within unions and city government—and all for free, just given over by Angleton. Papich also worked with CIA people on projects spearheaded by Angleton in the cryptographic field, while the Agency, for its part, serviced countless FBI requests for coverage of American communist leaders traveling abroad. Since the great majority of Soviet and Eastern-bloc operations against the U.S. were originated overseas, CIA was naturally able to supply more leads for the FBI than conversely, but the Agency got its share of dividends. Angleton would ask the Bureau to undertake “black bag” jobs against certain domestic targets, and the Bureau would sometimes do so.
But good relations at the working level were always constrained by tensions at the top. Angleton’s own relations with Hoover were cordial the few times they met, but looking back a quarter-century later, the CI chief would realize that during all those years, from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, “there weren’t more than three or four meetings” between Hoover and the directors of CIA, except where they bumped into one another at a national security conference. There was no question in Angleton’s mind but that this adversely affected CI. On the other hand, Angleton had to admit that Hoover had some good reasons to be wary of CIA. In October 1955, for instance, Papich carried over a letter from Hoover suggesting that Donald Maclean might have compromised CIA employees. Maclean had been “a frequent visitor” at CIA, according to a Bureau source, and was alleged to have “dated two of your stenographers.” An FBI search of logs kept by the door guards at CIA’s “O” Building, in front of the Lincoln Pool, showed that Maclean often entered that particular building after hours. While there was no firm proof that he had dated any CIA women, such episodes did not increase Hoover’s trust of CIA.
Hoover’s sometimes petty power plays were none too helpful, either. FBI man William Sullivan later alleged that the FBI planted stories critical of the CIA, and it appears that, in September 1955, the FBI director went public with the accusations against Philby in a way that embarrassed the Agency. Columnist Walter Winchell, a Hoover friend, reported on his popular Sunday-night radio show that Burgess and Maclean had escaped to Moscow after being tipped off by “another top British intelligence agent” who had been in Washington; Winchell said that “the FBI refused to give this man any information for over three years, ” which was false, but that “other American intelligence departments opened up their very secret files for him, ” which of course was true. Hoover also tried to sour the opinion of Joseph Kennedy about CIA in February 1956, when the Boston power-broker was named a member of the president’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. “I discussed with Mr. Kennedy generally some of the weaknesses which we have observed in the operations of CIA, ” Hoover told his top deputies after a private meeting in his headquarters office, “particularly as to the organizational-set-up and the compartmentalization that exists within that agency.” Nor would Hoover keep out of the Washington paper-mill Attorney General Rogers’July 28, 1958, statement that “he [Rogers] just wished the FBI was doing the intelligence work abroad instead of CIA.”
WITH THAT KIND OF SENTIMENT radiating down, it was unsurprising that the two agencies were unable to agree in some important areas, including the storage and retrieval of secrets. The issue arose because Angleton, shortly after becoming Chief/CI, started computerizing document on the huge vacuum-tube punch-card monsters then being made by IBM. With IBM’s help, he developed an innovative computerized microfilm file-index known as Walnut; the project began with Abwehr documents captured in World War II and spread from there. In 1955, Angleton persuaded Dulles to create a U.S. Intelligence Board Committee on Documentation (CODIB) to promote community-wide computerization, but the FBI was not interested in applying computers to its name-trace or identification work. “We’ve got three warehouses, full of papers, and files, and thousands of people, who can run around and work the files, ” Hoover’s CODIB man insisted. Nor did CODIB ever achieve inter-agency standards to ease the exchange of data; CIA and FBI couldn’t even agree on the order of “header” items in a biographic record. “Do you want last name first, then first name and middle initial, followed by date of birth, followed by place of birth?” That question was debated for eight years, and it was not surprising to those within bureaucratic Washington, let alone familiar with FBI-CIA difficulties, that during the entire existence of CODIB, from 1955 to 1963, so simple a problem was never resolved.
While CODIB stalled over minutiae, a deeper problem for centralized analysis stemmed from the FBI’s anti analytical bias. Rocca built an extensive research section, but the FBI’s, headed by Bill Sullivan, was comparatively small, and was directed mostly at the CPUSA, not the KGB. That always rankled Papich. “If, over a period of five years, X number of Soviets had visited New Mexico near Los Alamos, and had been seen driving around—well, who were they, what were their backgrounds? Could the Bureau draw any conclusion as to what the target was? What the hell did it all mean? We’d zero in on an individual, primarily to develop evidence for prosecution, but we did very little big-picture thinking. That all goes back to our law-enforcement nature.”
But if the Bureau was little interested in CIA’s historical research, Angleton’s CI shop, for its part, benefited greatly from FBI tips on the way the Soviets worked. For the first two years of Angleton’s tenure, the Bureau couldn’t tell CIA much it didn’t know already, but that began to change in 1957, when the Yale choir made its maiden trip to Moscow, and the Soviets began opening up, a little bit, to the world. After that, CIA had a lot to learn from the Bureau’s debriefings of returning American tourists. The real epiphany was to come that same year, when Angleton’s cooperation gave the Bureau its biggest break so far in the secret war against Soviet spies. Even so, it was a cooperation that would have to be hidden from Hoover—and the FBI would repay it by risking the safety of CIA’s only mole in Moscow.
Hayhannen claimed to belong to a network of spies in the New York City area, and identified himself as a Soviet “illegal.” In CI jargon, an illegal was any foreign intelligence officer dispatched to the United States under a false identity, in violation of immigration law. Although technically no spy openly declared his profession and all spying was against the law, most intelligence personnel were “legal” in the sense that they were affiliated with their home nation’s embassy and performed some nominal diplomatic functions to justify their presence in country. Illegals, by contrast, might enter the U.S. under totally fictitious identities, often taken from tombstones. They would never make open contact with their sponsors’ embassy, and could live relatively undetected, especially in a polyglot place like New York. Once past the customs barriers of his unwitting hosts, the saying went, a Soviet illegal disappeared like a diamond into an inkwell. It was assumed that illegals aimed to get employment that would permit easy access to scientific and technical information, and that they hoped to penetrate the intelligence community and perhaps even enter political life. Beyond that little was known, because the FBI had never caught a Soviet illegal, or had the chance to debrief one.
“I’m on my way into East Germany, for a meeting with my controllers, ” he told the CIA officer at Paris Station, “and I don’t want to go. I want to cooperate with the United States government.” Hayhannen’s bizarre behavior soon instilled doubts about whether that might be such a good idea, however. “I live in Peekskill, New York, ” he said, “and to prove I’m in Peekskill, I’m going to send a message to my wife.” Picking up his left hand, he began to beat out a message in Morse code on his chest. Christ, thought the CIA officer, this man is insane. But then Hayhannen showed an American passport obtained by using a false birth certificate, and started reeling off information—about his training, meetings he’d had in Vienna, identities of KGB officers, secret caches of funds. He even promised to lead the FBI to his Soviet controller, a mysterious Brooklyn resident known to him only as “Mark.”
This information was immediately cabled Blue-Bottle (highest security) from Paris Station to CIA headquarters in Washington. In essence the station chief said to Frank Wisner, who by then was deputy director for plans: We can’t hold him, we can’t detain him. We don’t want to get involved with the French. We want an immediate reply.
Wisner deferred to Angleton, who consulted Papich, who assessed the situation in Angleton’s basement at three in the morning. Papich thought he could get the cooperation of General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration Service, to put Hayhannen in quarantine. If it was determined Hayhannen was a phony, they could always deport him. Certainly Hayhannen was an unstable character, and Hoover wasn’t about to bring him to the United States on his own, but a lot of Bureau cases could develop if they played it right. There was nothing really in it for CIA, except the risk of bringing in a “crazy” or a false defector, but finally Angleton just said, “Let’s get the character over here, and see what happens.”
Hayhannen was put on a plane from Paris. His CIA bodyguards almost ended up shooting him during the night flight across the Atlantic, because he was drunk and irrational and tried to kick some windows out of the plane. In fact, he was bombed most of the time, and it did not take long to grasp that he was an alcoholic. Once in America, he put down about a fifth of vodka every day, until the Bureau got him into quarantine. They then debriefed him about his boyhood in Finland and Leningrad, how he joined Soviet intelligence to “get ahead, ” his extensive training before coming to the U.S. in October 1952, and his work for the Soviets since then, mostly servicing dead-drops of other agents. His house in Peekskill was found to contain a codebook and secret writing materials. There was no question about it, the man was a Soviet spy.
But Hoover read the writeups and said, “This guy’s an alcoholic—let’s drop him.”
At that point, Angleton moved in. CIA took formal custody of Hayhannen, put him in one of its own safe houses in Manhattan, a better layout in a more secure location, and kept him available for debriefing by the lead FBI agent on the case, Larry McWilliams.
“Mac, ” as everyone called him, was stout, sharp-eyed, and streetwise, his nasal Queens dialect rich in profanity and in words like “discombooberated” or “psychophants, ” which he made up as he went along. For all his tough exterior, Mac was a thoughtful man, educated at the University of Idaho, and he was fascinated by CI; he wasn’t out talking to some tenth-grade hood, but was dealing with abstractions. He couldn’t ask, How am I going to handle a Soviet? without wondering, Now, what’s this organization behind him? How do they plan? Those were the questions that made McWilliams lay up nights, thinking. He kept a pad and pencil next to the bed, in case he had an idea about a case. And since May 12, when he had drawn the straw to go get Hayhannen at Idlewild Airport, he had been doing a lot of scribbling. He sensed they were on to something really big, and eventually Hoover did, too. After seeing the “take” from Hayhannen’s weeks of interrogation in the CIA safehouse, the FBI director happily reclaimed the case as it turned into a hunt for Hayhannen’s American controller, the mysterious Mark.
As a “cutout” between Mark and the presumably large ring of agents he controlled, Hayhannen’s basic task had been to pick up and deliver packages containing money or microfilm. One drop was the Symphony Theater, a movie house at Broadway and 95th Street, on the right side of the balcony, second row from the rear. Mark liked this location, Hayhannen told McWilliams, because two people meeting there could leave by different exits. Another spot was in Riverside Park at 96th Street, where a hole in the railroad fence could hide magnetic containers. Hayhannen had seldom seen Mark himself, but Mark had once taken him to an art studio he kept in Brooklyn. The Finn couldn’t remember where it was, exactly, but he was able to give basic directions and a good description.
After a frantic few days, Mac’s crew was sure that Mark’s place could only be in the Ovington Building, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn Heights, which rented out studios to writers and artists. It was determined that Mark had occupied number 505, directly under the author Norman Mailer. FBI agents were dispersed at sentinel points all around the Ovington—on benches in a park across from the building entrances, in an adjacent post office, and some just walking around like locals. A command post was set up on the roof and upper floors of the highest building in the neighborhood, the Hotel Touraine, two blocks down Fulton, where agents watched through binoculars. The watch went on for weeks, without result, until, at 10:45 P.m. on May 23, someone returned to Studio 505.
He was middle-aged, bald, with glasses and a fringe of gray hair. He diddled around, then put on a dark straw summer hat with a bright-white band, and came out the front entrance with a coat over his arm. A pack of surveillance pursued him to the subway stop at Borough Hall. Special agent Joseph C. MacDonald followed him into an elevator down to the tracks, and into a subway car. Both men got off at the City Hall station, in Manhattan. MacDonald tailed the man in the straw hat to 28th Street and Fifth Avenue, where he vanished.
But the watch was kept at the Brooklyn studio, where, three weeks later, on June 13, the man again appeared. Again he was tracked into Manhattan, and this time a number of agents were already waiting around 28th and Fifth; they saw him enter the Hotel Latham. A check at the front desk revealed that he was registered as Martin Collins.
Though McWilliams was convinced that the man was an illegal, the Bureau still had no admissible evidence that he was an espionage agent. But if they held off from arresting him, there was the chance he might slip away. Mac consulted Papich, who got Immigration to approve the man’s arrest on suspicion of being in the country illegally. At seven o’clock on the morning of June 21, the occupant of Room 839 at the Hotel Latham heard a knock on the door and someone saying, “FBI.”
He opened the door a crack. The G-men pushed it open and entered as a naked, groggy man stood there, blinking. They let him put in his false teeth and pull on yesterday’s clothes, and then he was handcuffed. They tried to ask him questions, but he would not talk. He gave his name as “Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, ” but would say no more.
Mac’s boys searched the room, but didn’t find much except, in the wastepaper basket, a piece of two-by-four. Just a block of wood. No one could figure out what it was, but it had to have some significance; you didn’t just find pieces of two-by-four in Manhattan hotels. Finally, one of the agents got disgusted and threw it against the wall. It split open. Inside was a cavity containing microfilm.
Developed at the FBI’s laboratory, the film was found to contain a brief message in code. The message itself was not particularly illuminating, because it referred to purported spies only by first names, but this and other clues among Abel’s effects—cipher books, locations of dead drops—corroborated the essence of Hayhannen’s story. Rudolf Abel, the FBI was sure, was an illegal who handled not just Hayhannen, but a whole ring of Soviet spies. Of course, there was still much they didn’t know about all the agents Abel had handled, especially since Abel himself refused to talk. Aside from Hayhannen, all McWilliams knew was that Abel had a lot of contact with certain Upper West Siders named Silverman, Levine, Dinnerstein, Schwartz, Fink, Feifer, Ginzburg, etc., who all seemed to be of the same background and outlook: young, well-educated, Jewish, ambitious participants in the intellectual life around Columbia University, politically involved, signers of petitions to ban the bomb, active in the Democratic Party. Later, the Bureau was able to identify a couple who were Soviet agents, Helen and Peter Kroger, whose drops Abel had serviced. But for the moment, Hayhannen’s word and the evidence in Abel’s apartment were enough to have Abel indicted for conspiring to betray secrets on “the disposition of this country’s armed forces and its atomic energy program.” After a trial that received considerable publicity, at which Hayhannen was the chief witness against him, Abel was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and passed time in an Atlanta jail by doing calculus problems on the walls. Hayhannen was returned to his home in Peekskill, where, after a few years of freedom, he drank himself to death.
McWilliams and the FBI came out of it somewhat better. Mac got to meet Hoover, and was marked as someone who might rise. As a result of national headlines about FBI capture of the “Top Red Spy in America, ” more people started to hear about the Bureau’s work in counterintelligence, and young G-men started to gravitate toward it. And the new body of knowledge about Soviet illegal networks became the basis of a two-week FBI counterespionage course at Quantico. The course was nothing like what Papich and McWilliams and others in the FBI’s “CI Club” believed it should be, but it was a start, and there was no question but that the Abel case had enlarged their knowledge of what was going on. “The Abel case was the watershed for all of us, ” McWilliams said, “because up until then, I don’t think anybody, including CIA, really knew the deep, penetrating M.O. of the Soviet intelligence. We started to wake up and find out what the hell was really going on. And when that thing broke, my God, we were inundated with interest from the Canadians, the Australians, the French— everybody wanted to know what we knew. There was just a convulsion of activity.”
Papich always credited Angleton. “The Rudolf Abel case was a great example of cooperation, ” Papich said. “And it was one of Jim’s great accomplishments. If not for him, the whole thing would have gone down the drain. It was his influence that led to the decision to bring Hayhannen from France to the U.S.A. If Angleton hadn’t taken that position—well, I think maybe Hayhannen might have defected to the French. I don’t know what he would have done. He was a nut! Maybe nobody would have accepted him.”
But even if born of teamwork, the Abel-Hayhannen case would also lead to infighting. Having learned from Hayhannen that when illegal agents wished to meet their principals they wrote to a particular address in the Soviet Union, the Bureau’s CI men reasoned that if they could intercept communications directed to that particular address, they might net a good number of spies. In January 1958, Hoover therefore gave permission “to institute confidential inquiries with appropriate Post Office officials to determine the feasibility of covering outgoing correspondence from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R., looking toward picking up a communication dispatched to the aforementioned address.” But when the FBI’s New York SAC inquired about the possibility, Chief Postal Inspector David Stephens told him he could not authorize Post Office cooperation because “something had happened in Washington on a similar matter.” Hoover was on the verge of discovering that CIA was already opening mail in New York, but had been hiding that fact from the FBI.
LIKE WIRETAPPING and surreptitious entry, mail-opening had been practiced by Allied intelligence during World War II, and like those activities it was carried over into the Cold War. The operation had been run jointly by Harvey’s Staff C (under the cryptonym “HT/LINGUAL”) and Edwards’ Office of Security until it was officially transferred to Angleton’s reorganized CI Staff for “rations and quarters” in 1955. Angleton thought HT/LINGUAL “probably the most important overview that counterintelligence had.” Precisely because the enemy regarded America’s mails as inviolate, mail coverage was likely to provide clues to the identities of Soviet agents.
Angleton understood that the mail-opening operation was illegal, and that if it were ever exposed, “serious public reaction in the United States would probably occur.” The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution stated pretty clearly that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.” But Angleton could rationalize mailopening on several counts. The Fourth Amendment applied only to unreasonable searches and seizures, which left it open as to whether reading suspected Soviet spies’ mail to Moscow was reasonable. Since 1947, every president and every attorney general had agreed that warrantless wiretaps could sometimes be reasonable, and if there was an exception to the Fourth Amendment for trespass via electronic surveillance, it did not take much imagination to extend that to trespass via surreptitious entry, or mail-opening. Every law had its exceptions; the laws of God and man clearly said it was wrong to kill or steal, and those laws did not say “except in the time of war, ” but everyone knew that a wartime exception was read into them. Angleton believed that any restrictions on government mail-opening must similarly have read into them an exception that would allow CIA to cover mail in time of secret war. Abraham Lincoln had authorized the Pinkerton Detective Service to open mail to catch Confederate spies; why could the country not do the same to identify Nazi or communist agents? As no less a founding father than Thomas Jefferson had once observed: “A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose law itself, with life, liberty, and property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus sacrificing the end to the means.”[he is on to something there DC]
Besides, it was not as if CIA were going into every person’s mailbox. The program was carefully controlled, the targeting highly selective, the watch-listing terms tighter than those Attorney General Tom Clark had used when getting authorization for telephone taps from President Truman. The entire intent and motivation of the program involved the question of foreign entanglements, counterintelligence objects. A real effort was made to avoid harming the innocent, and there was a consensus among those who knew of the operation that nobody except Soviet spies was disadvantaged by having the CIA read his mail.
Of course, nobody ever knew his mail was being opened, either, because it was carefully done by trained personnel of the Technical Services Division within CIA. The envelopes were collected within a restricted secure area of Federal Building No. 111 (Jamaica Airmail Facility), adjoining Idlewild Airport, and couriered to CIA’s New York City office. Each evening, a six-man team of CIA technicians, fluent in Russian and proficient in holographs and flaps, would photograph envelope exteriors with a Diebold camera, and select some for opening. Perhaps two-thirds were chosen at random; the others were culled from a “watch list” which included, at various times, people like Linus Pauling, Bella Abzug, Senator Hubert Humphrey, John Steinbeck, Edward Albee, Thomas Merton, Jay Rockefeller, Martin Luther King, and Richard Nixon. The method of opening which had been taught to the CIA officers during their one-week Technical Services Division “flaps-and-seals” course was to hold the envelope over a steaming teakettle to soften the sealant, then slip a narrow stick under the flap. When you got good at it, it could be done in as little as five seconds. After the letters were photographed, they were replaced in the envelopes, were resealed and returned to the mails the following morning. CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, came by to see the new operation after it was set up and wrote approvingly: “This is a highly efficient way to get the job done and the investigators enjoy the work and appreciate the opportunity to earn overtime pay.”
It was understood by all at the Agency who knew about the program, however, that J. Edgar Hoover would be somewhat less happy about its existence. In early 1952, when the operation began, there had been some bad blood between Hoover and the chief of the Postal Inspection Service; also, CIA and FBI had been barely talking to each other. The habit of secrecy persisted even as relations improved under Papich, partly because any “confession” would have to account for why the Agency had failed to consult the Bureau in the first place. Angleton well knew that, in addition to foreign intelligence, the program would produce “information affecting Internal Security, ” and when he proposed to Dulles that his new CI Staff disseminate HT/LINGUAL information “to other Agency components, ” security chief Sheffield Edwards had therefore added by hand on Angleton’s proposal:“and to the FBI.” But Edwards’ writing it did not make it so. Angleton later explained that he held back because no matter how well he got on personally with Papich, “relations with the FBI were pretty spotty.”
In January 1958, Postal Inspector Stephens informed Angleton that the Bureau desired to begin its own mail coverage in New York. Angleton consulted Dulles, and they agreed that there was no choice but to disclose the program to Hoover before the FBI uncovered it anyway. On January 21, Angleton met with Sam Papich “on a personal basis”—late that night, among the orchids in his greenhouse, after they had been doing some drinking— and told him that CIA was opening mail. The project was one of the largest and most sensitive of all CIA covert operations, Angleton said, and its sole purpose was a foreign one—to identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who had family relations in the U.S. That was hardly the only objective of HT/LINGUAL, however, and when Hoover heard about it, he made it clear he considered the project a serious violation of turf. Papich anticipated, as he later said, that “all hell was going to break loose.”
But Hoover’s blood went from boiling to merely simmering when Papich convinced him, via assistant director Al Belmont, that CIA had some jurisdictional right to conduct mail coverage—and that the situation was actually a potential windfall for the FBI. Instead of having to start its own coverage from scratch, it could enjoy the benefits of CIA’s operation, without any of the expenses or responsibilities. “The question immediately arises as to whether CIA in effecting this coverage in New York has invaded our jurisdiction, ” Belmont wrote Hoover. “In this regard, it is believed that they have a legitimate right in the objectives for which the coverage was set up, namely, the development of contacts and sources of information behind the Iron Curtain…. At the same time, there is an internal security objective here in which, because of our responsibilities, we have a definite interest, namely, the identification of illegal agents who may be in the United States. While recognizing this interest, it is not believed that the Bureau should assume this coverage because of the inherent dangers in the sensitive nature of it, its complexity, size, and expense. It is believed that we can capitalize on this coverage by pointing out to CIA our internal security objectives and holding them responsible to share their coverage with us.”
Hoover marked the memo: “O.K.” Two days later, on January 24, Papich was sent to CIA headquarters to “point out” Hoover’s position to Angleton, Edwards, and John Maury, head of the Agency’s Soviet Russia Division.
Without mentioning Angleton’s “personal” admission to him, Papich announced that he had reason to believe CIA was opening mail in New York. CIA’s representatives acknowledged it, gave Papich a briefing, and offered to “handle leads” for the Bureau. The FBI would be the only other agency to receive raw copies of the material. In return, the FBI must restrict HT/LINGUAL materials to special-agent supervisors, who regularly handled sensitive information. FBI field offices would receive the product only after it had been sanitized. Films must never be placed in case files, though files could contain coded cross-references to allow retrieval.
Hoover agreed to CIA’s terms, and the FBI was made part of the operation, which became known in the Bureau as Hunter Project. As the joint enterprise became part of Papich’s liaison routine, he would pick up a batch of Hunter reports at the Agency each week and take them to a special desk in the Soviet Section at the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Over the following fifteen years, Papich would personally carry in his briefcase over fifty seven thousand Hunter reports from CIA to FBI headquarters. An internal Agency study would eventually acknowledge that since the Bureau received more dissemination's than any single branch of the Agency, “the FBI is receiving the major benefit from this project.” The Hunter reports included such items as indications that someone might be serving as a Soviet courier, news about Russian social and art clubs in the U.S., and contacts between American citizens and Soviet agents. The Bureau found CIA’s Hunter reports helpful in evaluating what they already had on some suspects, and closed a few cases as a result of that supportive information.
So it was with the man whom Dulles thought CIA’s best intelligence officer of all, a dry-fly fisherman who much resembled Buchan’s Bullivant. For the twenty years following December 20, 1954, he would be the FBI’s main point of liaison. His separate peace with Papich would help break a network of Soviet agents in New York, lead the two agencies into a joint project to open the mail of U.S. citizens, and limit fallout when the FBI’s prize spy prisoner was swapped for a CIA pilot downed in Russia. Yet he would also bring to the Agency a way of thinking that crystallized FBI-CIA differences, and which would ultimately rip relations apart.
BY SUMMER 1954, a whole slew of traumas and setbacks had demonstrated the need for a revamped national counterintelligence effort. The Bentley, Hiss, Fuchs, and Rosenberg cases had destroyed the country’s early naivete. The Burgess-Maclean affair alerted the intelligence establishment that its secrets could go, even if its own operations weren’t penetrated. The McCarthyism period brought home the need to prevent such morale sapping episodes by prophylactic measures. That need was felt particularly acutely by Houston, Edwards, and others concerned with personnel security at CIA, who had tangled with the FBI over Offie and Meyer and various loyalty cases, and who didn’t feel the Agency was getting proper investigative help from the Bureau. It was not so much a lack of help, as the wrong kind. CIA was all for getting tips from Hoover, but wanted to handle its own security problems internally, without the Bureau or HUAC or anyone else sneezing into the soup.
A start at reform had been made in June, when Dulles and Hoover worked out, via Houston and Attorney General William P. Rogers, a procedure for FBI investigation of “irregularities” involving CIA employees. Misconduct of any kind was to be the province of CIA’s Office of Security, which had to jump into a situation immediately—not only to preserve CIA’s public reputation, but to protect secrets which might be compromised by the curiosity of the FBI. Every so often, some CIA officer would fall afoul of the administrative charter, or, on rare occasions, flee an automobile accident, or leave a satchel full of classified documents in a taxicab, and Papich would turn the case over to Sheffield Edwards. One CIA officer had to resign after the FBI discovered that his house was stacked to the ceiling with secret government papers; he wasn’t passing them out to the enemy, just building up a library for himself, for writing books, and apparently it helped him, because he later became a top expert in foreign policy. The Bureau could have recommended that the man be prosecuted for unlawful possession of government documents, but CIA’s policy was to handle and resolve everything internally, fearing that secrets would be lost through the “discovery” process in a trial, and the FBI went along.
But DCI Dulles knew that counterintelligence involved more than just letting the Agency take care of its own; it mattered what kind of care was taken. There was a demonstrable need to be more cautious, more concerned with the principles of compartmentalization and “need to know.” If Dulles’ people were going to succeed, the security of sources, operations, and personnel was everything. That was the lesson taught by Wisner’s OPC, at least in the view of William Harvey’s counterintelligence people. If Cord Meyer was trying to suborn the editor of a newspaper, or Wisner to work with a guerrilla leader in the mountains, it was crucial to know whether one’s agent might be an informant for the security service. But OPC wanted only action. As one of Harvey’s colleagues was admonished, “Goddamn it, we don’t want counterintelligence, we want guerrillas!” Because of progress in radio detection, and because the adversary controlled Trust-style opposition groups, the task of infiltrating commandos was more difficult than it had been even ten years earlier—yet there didn’t seem to be any shift in tactics from world war to Cold War. Wisner’s men were still fighting the Nazis, still dropping people behind the lines, and it took the spectacular failures of OPC’s covert actions, in Poland, Albania, and the Ukraine, to teach the wisdom of Harvey’s more cautious approach.
Additional pressures came from outside the Agency. The White House was getting mail urging that Hoover be made director of CIA, or that the Agency be folded into the FBI; J. Edgar would kick out the commies as he had chased down Dillinger, and only then would the nation’s secrets be safe. One concerned citizen complained that CIA had been puffed into existence by Donovan’s press campaign, and that Hoover’s more efficient SIS had been taken over by the Agency because Hoover refused to publicize the FBI’s successes; “the public and even Congress never even heard of [SIS], nor did it get any publicity, nor did J. Edgar Hoover or the men in charge get pictures in the paper entitled ‘Superspy.’ ” Eisenhower responded to the pressure as any politician would, by appointing a committee to look into it. The inquiry was headed by Lieutenant General James Doolittle, and the sixty-nine-page Doolittle Report, presented to Eisenhower in September 1954, proposed some radical reforms.
Most signally, the report urged CIA to assume the country’s leading counterintelligence role. The National Security Council had given the job of collating counterintelligence to CIA in December 1947, but there was a consensus, Harvey’s Staff C notwithstanding, that countering enemy intelligence was the FBI’s job. That would have to change. The United States needed to abandon the law-enforcement route for a “more ruthless” approach, the Doolittle Report stressed, and that new ruthlessness must be applied to “intensification of CIA’s counterintelligence efforts to prevent or detect and eliminate penetrations.” The situation required a new strategy, a new concept for American life, one which would spill across normally restricted areas, legal channels, and departmental lines.
It also required a new chief of counterintelligence, for in mid-1953 Harvey had been made Chief of Base in Berlin. The outgoing Bedell Smith had told Papich early that year that Harvey was probably going to be posted abroad. “As you know, ” Hoover was reminded in a summary of that conversation, “[Harvey] has been the center of many controversies.” But there was more to the decision than a desire to keep Harvey out of Hoover’s way. Harvey himself had wanted to leave Staff C, because he hoped to rise in the Agency and, compared with other disciplines, counterintelligence was considered career ending. Harvey didn’t have much of a chance to manage people, the way he would if he were running agents in even the smallest foreign station, and thus wasn’t as easily marked for promotion; already, while he was stalled in Staff C, two less knowledgeable men with overseas experience had overtaken him. He added an extra martini at lunch, and when the chief ship of Berlin Base came free, he asked for the job and got it. Divided into Russian, British, French, and American zones, isolated in the heartland of communist Germany, Berlin was the hotbed of the Cold War. It was, too, a welcome reprieve from the hassles and obstructionism of the FBI. It would be almost nine years before Harvey worked again in Washington, though, as he would find, that was not long enough to outrun Hoover’s memory.
SAM PAPICH MET CIA’s new counterintelligence chief in a large corner office of L Building, where a row of windows looked out on the Lincoln Memorial—or would have, if Venetian blinds had not been shut against the light. Six secretaries in the anteroom testified to the new appointee’s power, as did the long row of black safes in his inner sanctum, and the piles of documents. Red priority stickers were everywhere in the mass of papers, like poppies pushing through a field of snow. In all other respects, the office lacked distinctiveness, typical CIA; there wasn’t much on the walls. But in a high leather-backed chair behind the desk was as singular a man as Papich had ever seen.
James Jesus Angleton was one of only a handful of people—Harvey was another—who would ever become truly legendary within the faceless bureaucracy of knowledge that was CIA. A chain-smoking poetry enthusiast, ace fly-fisherman, and grower of rare orchids, Angleton had been recruited into OSS after graduating from Yale. He had served under Norman Pearson in X-2 and had been particularly adept at burning and turning Nazi stay-behinds in Italy. After the war, he had been put in charge of a so-called Special Desk to handle such tasks as liaison with the Israelis and the British. That latter experience had stamped him with a general auspiciousness, for he had lunched regularly with Kim Philby and detected nothing until it was too late. Some of his Special Desk duties had also caused Angleton to clash with DeLoach the few times they met, so Papich was not entirely surprised that when he first encountered Angleton, in that corner office of L Building, they got into “a real fight.”
After preliminary greetings, the new counterintelligence chief lit a cigarette, leaned across his desk, and, in his gravelly burr, brought up a case that had allegedly been mishandled by the Bureau. It had been damaging to CIA, and Angleton made a big deal about it —maybe with good reason, but Papich disagreed with him. It got to a bitter stage; they were shouting insults. Finally, Papich just walked out. Maybe Angleton was testing him, to make clear that he was going to dominate liaison. Well, thought Papich, he’s not going to.
They saw each other again the next day, and managed to act cordially. Before too long, small talk brought out that they were from neighboring big-sky states, and they both liked fly-fishing. They went off one weekend to do a little angling for brown trout in the freestone streams of West Virginia, and after that they were friends. Papich was impressed by the fact that Angleton would never just cast a fly; he would always spend a half-hour or so just stalking along the riverbank, examining the insect life, and then craft lures to imitate the species along that particular stretch of shore—brown ants, inchworms, soldier beetles, whatever he saw. Angleton had mastered the esoteric lore and literature of the discipline, which dated back to fifteenth-century Scotland; he could loop his line through the air and splash it onto the waters just so, in imitation of a hatching fly, and his vest and hat were decorated with traditional fly designs, in all their exotic colors and types and names: Flamingo Zonker, Yellow Goofus Bug, Egg-Sucking Leach. Angleton knew them all, but his standby was the Gray Ghost, a classic American freestone-river design—ocher floss-silk body ribbed with flat silver tinsel, black silk nose, white buck tail, and gray cock hackles sweeping sleekly back, like wings. Given Angleton’s own spookish demeanor and suspicious outlook, “Gray Ghost” became one of his nicknames, and colleagues thought it the one that fit him best.
The fishing trips sealed what would become a close working relationship, and Papich became a serious student of Angleton’s counterintelligence philosophy. To Angleton, catching spies was much like landing trout. It was all about patience, research, deception. Yet CI was not merely a body of knowledge; it was also a way of seeing things. It meant transcending the details of a case, putting tactical problems in a strategic perspective, gaining a larger view. Angleton felt that too much of the country’s conception of CI, as promoted by detective entertainments and the FBI’s own actions, was “spy versus spy.” That was like fighting soldier-to-soldier using bayonets, as opposed to understanding why the soldiers were being put face to face. That was counterespionage, not counterintelligence. What CI really required, most of all, was a good dollop of focused historical research—not the random digestion of massive mounds of fact, but purposeful, teleological analysis, looking for patterns over a long period of time. His work against the Nazis had taught him that patient accumulation of fact allowed one to decipher the enemy’s thinking, and thus anticipate his moves. If one could not read the enemy’s files, one could at least read his mind.
Trying to read the Soviet mind on CIA-FBI relations, Angleton considered it logical that the KGB would try to split America’s CI community along its pre-existent fault line. “When the enemy is united, divide him”—so the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had counseled in The Art of War—a work which, through the Mongol-Tartars, had greatly influenced Russian strategy, and which, in English translation, Angleton had read more than once. “Drive a wedge … Separate the enemy’s allies from him. Make them mutually suspicious so that they drift apart. Then you can plot against them.” The West itself was trying to split Romania and Hungary from Moscow, and to play Soviet military intelligence (the GRU) against the KGB. Just so, Angleton reasoned, the Soviets wanted to sow schisms between the Americans and the British, and between CIA and FBI. “That was part and parcel of Jim’s basic philosophy—he didn’t want that to happen, ” Papich would later say. “It was one of the worst things that could happen, because once you destroy a relationship between services, you’ve destroyed the effectiveness of both services.”
Though the CI chief was not yet sure exactly how the Soviets would make inter-agency trouble, he guessed they would try to capitalize on a “dissociation of sensibility.” (The phrase came from a famous essay by Angleton’s favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, who used it to describe thematic dualism's in literature; Angleton used it to describe the tension between Hoover’s law-enforcement mentality and CIA’s double-agent approach.) Angleton also supposed the KGB would try to slip between jurisdictional cracks. Just as a fly-fisherman, spotting a brown trout nibbling near the surface of the shallows, would cast from beyond its field of vision, so would the Soviets profit from inter-agency blind spots. If such schemes were not thwarted by close liaison, American CI would be essentially at war with itself, and the game could be lost. “Counter-intelligence, ” Angleton liked to say, “is only as good as relations between the CIA and FBI.”
AN EARLY TEST of the new cooperation came when Papich tried to broker a joint FBI-CIA operation to kidnap a Soviet spy in the Middle East. Elizabeth Bentley had told Harvey back in 1946 that her controller, an American known to her only as “Jack, ” had been operating a big net of agents; by 1953, FBI counterintelligence man Robert Lamphere was sure that “Jack” was an American man named Joseph Katz. Subpoenaed by HUAC, Katz had fled to Israel, where, being of the Jewish faith, he was automatically eligible for citizenship. The U.S. did not have an extradition treaty with Israel, but Angleton’s close ties to Israeli intelligence offered certain possibilities. Lamphere had met Angleton back when he was running Special Desk, and though they had little direct contact, Lamphere had always got excellent results whenever he asked, via liaison, for Angleton to do something overseas. Now the three formulated a joint FBI-CIA operation to return Katz to the United States. The key to the operation would be luring Katz onto a U.S.-registered boat, outside Israel’s territorial waters, where Lamphere could make a legal arrest. It was going to be risky, but Lamphere outlined the plan in a memo to Hoover, who gave preliminary approval. “He didn’t like the idea of the joint CIA-FBI operation, ” Lamphere said, “but had been made to understand that the FBI did not have the resources or contacts in Israel to pull off this one, whereas the CIA did.”
Papich and Lamphere got all their shots, and were ready to fly to Israel, when Hoover took a last-hour look at the whole operation and scotched it. The FBI director told them that he’d talked to a deputy attorney general, and had got the distinct impression that Angleton had informed Justice of the plan. Feeling that this was supposed to be an FBI expedition, and that CIA had overstepped its jurisdiction by going to Justice, Hoover called the whole thing off. Angleton insisted that he’d never had any such conversation with Justice, and Lamphere told Hoover that Justice probably knew about it because he, Lamphere, had cut them a copy of the planning memo, but there was no moving the director.
Of course, the team was extremely disappointed. “I was chagrined on two counts, ” Lamphere remembered. “One, both Sam Papich and I had wanted this joint operation to improve relations between the FBI and the CIA—and the result had been just the opposite, a further rupture between the agencies. Two, I was disappointed that my one best hope to reopen the Bentley case and prosecute some of the key figures was now gone.” Lamphere was so disgusted with Hoover’s bullheadedness that he soon resigned from the Bureau.
Angleton also was peeved. He went to Papich and said, “Why the hell did the boss turn this one down?” Papich thought the director was probably concerned that another agency—and another foreign service, the Mossad—had too much operational control. He recounted how some botched operations with local police in the hunt for Dillinger had taught Hoover to participate in joint projects only if he could control the show. That didn’t wash too well with Angleton. It sickened him that, despite the best laid plans of FBI and CIA men, Soviet spies like Katz still could count on the “dissociation” of American counterintelligence.
RUNNING OPERATIONS SILENTLY, without Hoover’s direct knowledge, produced much better results. In one case, Angleton got the Bureau access to a New York mob lawyer. The man was a rascal, but there was no counting the cases the FBI prosecuted on the basis of his cooperation, all involving corruption within unions and city government—and all for free, just given over by Angleton. Papich also worked with CIA people on projects spearheaded by Angleton in the cryptographic field, while the Agency, for its part, serviced countless FBI requests for coverage of American communist leaders traveling abroad. Since the great majority of Soviet and Eastern-bloc operations against the U.S. were originated overseas, CIA was naturally able to supply more leads for the FBI than conversely, but the Agency got its share of dividends. Angleton would ask the Bureau to undertake “black bag” jobs against certain domestic targets, and the Bureau would sometimes do so.
But good relations at the working level were always constrained by tensions at the top. Angleton’s own relations with Hoover were cordial the few times they met, but looking back a quarter-century later, the CI chief would realize that during all those years, from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, “there weren’t more than three or four meetings” between Hoover and the directors of CIA, except where they bumped into one another at a national security conference. There was no question in Angleton’s mind but that this adversely affected CI. On the other hand, Angleton had to admit that Hoover had some good reasons to be wary of CIA. In October 1955, for instance, Papich carried over a letter from Hoover suggesting that Donald Maclean might have compromised CIA employees. Maclean had been “a frequent visitor” at CIA, according to a Bureau source, and was alleged to have “dated two of your stenographers.” An FBI search of logs kept by the door guards at CIA’s “O” Building, in front of the Lincoln Pool, showed that Maclean often entered that particular building after hours. While there was no firm proof that he had dated any CIA women, such episodes did not increase Hoover’s trust of CIA.
Hoover’s sometimes petty power plays were none too helpful, either. FBI man William Sullivan later alleged that the FBI planted stories critical of the CIA, and it appears that, in September 1955, the FBI director went public with the accusations against Philby in a way that embarrassed the Agency. Columnist Walter Winchell, a Hoover friend, reported on his popular Sunday-night radio show that Burgess and Maclean had escaped to Moscow after being tipped off by “another top British intelligence agent” who had been in Washington; Winchell said that “the FBI refused to give this man any information for over three years, ” which was false, but that “other American intelligence departments opened up their very secret files for him, ” which of course was true. Hoover also tried to sour the opinion of Joseph Kennedy about CIA in February 1956, when the Boston power-broker was named a member of the president’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. “I discussed with Mr. Kennedy generally some of the weaknesses which we have observed in the operations of CIA, ” Hoover told his top deputies after a private meeting in his headquarters office, “particularly as to the organizational-set-up and the compartmentalization that exists within that agency.” Nor would Hoover keep out of the Washington paper-mill Attorney General Rogers’July 28, 1958, statement that “he [Rogers] just wished the FBI was doing the intelligence work abroad instead of CIA.”
WITH THAT KIND OF SENTIMENT radiating down, it was unsurprising that the two agencies were unable to agree in some important areas, including the storage and retrieval of secrets. The issue arose because Angleton, shortly after becoming Chief/CI, started computerizing document on the huge vacuum-tube punch-card monsters then being made by IBM. With IBM’s help, he developed an innovative computerized microfilm file-index known as Walnut; the project began with Abwehr documents captured in World War II and spread from there. In 1955, Angleton persuaded Dulles to create a U.S. Intelligence Board Committee on Documentation (CODIB) to promote community-wide computerization, but the FBI was not interested in applying computers to its name-trace or identification work. “We’ve got three warehouses, full of papers, and files, and thousands of people, who can run around and work the files, ” Hoover’s CODIB man insisted. Nor did CODIB ever achieve inter-agency standards to ease the exchange of data; CIA and FBI couldn’t even agree on the order of “header” items in a biographic record. “Do you want last name first, then first name and middle initial, followed by date of birth, followed by place of birth?” That question was debated for eight years, and it was not surprising to those within bureaucratic Washington, let alone familiar with FBI-CIA difficulties, that during the entire existence of CODIB, from 1955 to 1963, so simple a problem was never resolved.
While CODIB stalled over minutiae, a deeper problem for centralized analysis stemmed from the FBI’s anti analytical bias. Rocca built an extensive research section, but the FBI’s, headed by Bill Sullivan, was comparatively small, and was directed mostly at the CPUSA, not the KGB. That always rankled Papich. “If, over a period of five years, X number of Soviets had visited New Mexico near Los Alamos, and had been seen driving around—well, who were they, what were their backgrounds? Could the Bureau draw any conclusion as to what the target was? What the hell did it all mean? We’d zero in on an individual, primarily to develop evidence for prosecution, but we did very little big-picture thinking. That all goes back to our law-enforcement nature.”
But if the Bureau was little interested in CIA’s historical research, Angleton’s CI shop, for its part, benefited greatly from FBI tips on the way the Soviets worked. For the first two years of Angleton’s tenure, the Bureau couldn’t tell CIA much it didn’t know already, but that began to change in 1957, when the Yale choir made its maiden trip to Moscow, and the Soviets began opening up, a little bit, to the world. After that, CIA had a lot to learn from the Bureau’s debriefings of returning American tourists. The real epiphany was to come that same year, when Angleton’s cooperation gave the Bureau its biggest break so far in the secret war against Soviet spies. Even so, it was a cooperation that would have to be hidden from Hoover—and the FBI would repay it by risking the safety of CIA’s only mole in Moscow.
• • •
ON MAY 4, 1957, a rumpled, mustachioed, dark-haired
man entered the U.S. Embassy in Paris with liquor on his
breath. Through a thick Finnish accent, Reino Hayhannen
told the State Department’s duty officer that he had
important national security information to share with the
United States. The duty officer turned him over to the
FBI’s resident legal attache, who considered him “a
weirdo,
” took him outside and put him into a taxicab with
instructions on how to get to the CIA’s offices, telling
him,
“It’s clearly a case for the CIA.” But as soon as one
of CIA’s officers heard Hayhannen’s story, he got on the
phone to the legal attache and insisted: “This guy doesn’t
belong to us, he belongs to the FBI.” The walk-in was
passed back and forth two or three times until finally
someone in the CIA offices listened to him.Hayhannen claimed to belong to a network of spies in the New York City area, and identified himself as a Soviet “illegal.” In CI jargon, an illegal was any foreign intelligence officer dispatched to the United States under a false identity, in violation of immigration law. Although technically no spy openly declared his profession and all spying was against the law, most intelligence personnel were “legal” in the sense that they were affiliated with their home nation’s embassy and performed some nominal diplomatic functions to justify their presence in country. Illegals, by contrast, might enter the U.S. under totally fictitious identities, often taken from tombstones. They would never make open contact with their sponsors’ embassy, and could live relatively undetected, especially in a polyglot place like New York. Once past the customs barriers of his unwitting hosts, the saying went, a Soviet illegal disappeared like a diamond into an inkwell. It was assumed that illegals aimed to get employment that would permit easy access to scientific and technical information, and that they hoped to penetrate the intelligence community and perhaps even enter political life. Beyond that little was known, because the FBI had never caught a Soviet illegal, or had the chance to debrief one.
“I’m on my way into East Germany, for a meeting with my controllers, ” he told the CIA officer at Paris Station, “and I don’t want to go. I want to cooperate with the United States government.” Hayhannen’s bizarre behavior soon instilled doubts about whether that might be such a good idea, however. “I live in Peekskill, New York, ” he said, “and to prove I’m in Peekskill, I’m going to send a message to my wife.” Picking up his left hand, he began to beat out a message in Morse code on his chest. Christ, thought the CIA officer, this man is insane. But then Hayhannen showed an American passport obtained by using a false birth certificate, and started reeling off information—about his training, meetings he’d had in Vienna, identities of KGB officers, secret caches of funds. He even promised to lead the FBI to his Soviet controller, a mysterious Brooklyn resident known to him only as “Mark.”
This information was immediately cabled Blue-Bottle (highest security) from Paris Station to CIA headquarters in Washington. In essence the station chief said to Frank Wisner, who by then was deputy director for plans: We can’t hold him, we can’t detain him. We don’t want to get involved with the French. We want an immediate reply.
Wisner deferred to Angleton, who consulted Papich, who assessed the situation in Angleton’s basement at three in the morning. Papich thought he could get the cooperation of General Joseph Swing, head of the Immigration Service, to put Hayhannen in quarantine. If it was determined Hayhannen was a phony, they could always deport him. Certainly Hayhannen was an unstable character, and Hoover wasn’t about to bring him to the United States on his own, but a lot of Bureau cases could develop if they played it right. There was nothing really in it for CIA, except the risk of bringing in a “crazy” or a false defector, but finally Angleton just said, “Let’s get the character over here, and see what happens.”
Hayhannen was put on a plane from Paris. His CIA bodyguards almost ended up shooting him during the night flight across the Atlantic, because he was drunk and irrational and tried to kick some windows out of the plane. In fact, he was bombed most of the time, and it did not take long to grasp that he was an alcoholic. Once in America, he put down about a fifth of vodka every day, until the Bureau got him into quarantine. They then debriefed him about his boyhood in Finland and Leningrad, how he joined Soviet intelligence to “get ahead, ” his extensive training before coming to the U.S. in October 1952, and his work for the Soviets since then, mostly servicing dead-drops of other agents. His house in Peekskill was found to contain a codebook and secret writing materials. There was no question about it, the man was a Soviet spy.
But Hoover read the writeups and said, “This guy’s an alcoholic—let’s drop him.”
At that point, Angleton moved in. CIA took formal custody of Hayhannen, put him in one of its own safe houses in Manhattan, a better layout in a more secure location, and kept him available for debriefing by the lead FBI agent on the case, Larry McWilliams.
“Mac, ” as everyone called him, was stout, sharp-eyed, and streetwise, his nasal Queens dialect rich in profanity and in words like “discombooberated” or “psychophants, ” which he made up as he went along. For all his tough exterior, Mac was a thoughtful man, educated at the University of Idaho, and he was fascinated by CI; he wasn’t out talking to some tenth-grade hood, but was dealing with abstractions. He couldn’t ask, How am I going to handle a Soviet? without wondering, Now, what’s this organization behind him? How do they plan? Those were the questions that made McWilliams lay up nights, thinking. He kept a pad and pencil next to the bed, in case he had an idea about a case. And since May 12, when he had drawn the straw to go get Hayhannen at Idlewild Airport, he had been doing a lot of scribbling. He sensed they were on to something really big, and eventually Hoover did, too. After seeing the “take” from Hayhannen’s weeks of interrogation in the CIA safehouse, the FBI director happily reclaimed the case as it turned into a hunt for Hayhannen’s American controller, the mysterious Mark.
As a “cutout” between Mark and the presumably large ring of agents he controlled, Hayhannen’s basic task had been to pick up and deliver packages containing money or microfilm. One drop was the Symphony Theater, a movie house at Broadway and 95th Street, on the right side of the balcony, second row from the rear. Mark liked this location, Hayhannen told McWilliams, because two people meeting there could leave by different exits. Another spot was in Riverside Park at 96th Street, where a hole in the railroad fence could hide magnetic containers. Hayhannen had seldom seen Mark himself, but Mark had once taken him to an art studio he kept in Brooklyn. The Finn couldn’t remember where it was, exactly, but he was able to give basic directions and a good description.
After a frantic few days, Mac’s crew was sure that Mark’s place could only be in the Ovington Building, on Fulton Street in Brooklyn Heights, which rented out studios to writers and artists. It was determined that Mark had occupied number 505, directly under the author Norman Mailer. FBI agents were dispersed at sentinel points all around the Ovington—on benches in a park across from the building entrances, in an adjacent post office, and some just walking around like locals. A command post was set up on the roof and upper floors of the highest building in the neighborhood, the Hotel Touraine, two blocks down Fulton, where agents watched through binoculars. The watch went on for weeks, without result, until, at 10:45 P.m. on May 23, someone returned to Studio 505.
He was middle-aged, bald, with glasses and a fringe of gray hair. He diddled around, then put on a dark straw summer hat with a bright-white band, and came out the front entrance with a coat over his arm. A pack of surveillance pursued him to the subway stop at Borough Hall. Special agent Joseph C. MacDonald followed him into an elevator down to the tracks, and into a subway car. Both men got off at the City Hall station, in Manhattan. MacDonald tailed the man in the straw hat to 28th Street and Fifth Avenue, where he vanished.
But the watch was kept at the Brooklyn studio, where, three weeks later, on June 13, the man again appeared. Again he was tracked into Manhattan, and this time a number of agents were already waiting around 28th and Fifth; they saw him enter the Hotel Latham. A check at the front desk revealed that he was registered as Martin Collins.
Though McWilliams was convinced that the man was an illegal, the Bureau still had no admissible evidence that he was an espionage agent. But if they held off from arresting him, there was the chance he might slip away. Mac consulted Papich, who got Immigration to approve the man’s arrest on suspicion of being in the country illegally. At seven o’clock on the morning of June 21, the occupant of Room 839 at the Hotel Latham heard a knock on the door and someone saying, “FBI.”
He opened the door a crack. The G-men pushed it open and entered as a naked, groggy man stood there, blinking. They let him put in his false teeth and pull on yesterday’s clothes, and then he was handcuffed. They tried to ask him questions, but he would not talk. He gave his name as “Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, ” but would say no more.
Mac’s boys searched the room, but didn’t find much except, in the wastepaper basket, a piece of two-by-four. Just a block of wood. No one could figure out what it was, but it had to have some significance; you didn’t just find pieces of two-by-four in Manhattan hotels. Finally, one of the agents got disgusted and threw it against the wall. It split open. Inside was a cavity containing microfilm.
Developed at the FBI’s laboratory, the film was found to contain a brief message in code. The message itself was not particularly illuminating, because it referred to purported spies only by first names, but this and other clues among Abel’s effects—cipher books, locations of dead drops—corroborated the essence of Hayhannen’s story. Rudolf Abel, the FBI was sure, was an illegal who handled not just Hayhannen, but a whole ring of Soviet spies. Of course, there was still much they didn’t know about all the agents Abel had handled, especially since Abel himself refused to talk. Aside from Hayhannen, all McWilliams knew was that Abel had a lot of contact with certain Upper West Siders named Silverman, Levine, Dinnerstein, Schwartz, Fink, Feifer, Ginzburg, etc., who all seemed to be of the same background and outlook: young, well-educated, Jewish, ambitious participants in the intellectual life around Columbia University, politically involved, signers of petitions to ban the bomb, active in the Democratic Party. Later, the Bureau was able to identify a couple who were Soviet agents, Helen and Peter Kroger, whose drops Abel had serviced. But for the moment, Hayhannen’s word and the evidence in Abel’s apartment were enough to have Abel indicted for conspiring to betray secrets on “the disposition of this country’s armed forces and its atomic energy program.” After a trial that received considerable publicity, at which Hayhannen was the chief witness against him, Abel was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and passed time in an Atlanta jail by doing calculus problems on the walls. Hayhannen was returned to his home in Peekskill, where, after a few years of freedom, he drank himself to death.
McWilliams and the FBI came out of it somewhat better. Mac got to meet Hoover, and was marked as someone who might rise. As a result of national headlines about FBI capture of the “Top Red Spy in America, ” more people started to hear about the Bureau’s work in counterintelligence, and young G-men started to gravitate toward it. And the new body of knowledge about Soviet illegal networks became the basis of a two-week FBI counterespionage course at Quantico. The course was nothing like what Papich and McWilliams and others in the FBI’s “CI Club” believed it should be, but it was a start, and there was no question but that the Abel case had enlarged their knowledge of what was going on. “The Abel case was the watershed for all of us, ” McWilliams said, “because up until then, I don’t think anybody, including CIA, really knew the deep, penetrating M.O. of the Soviet intelligence. We started to wake up and find out what the hell was really going on. And when that thing broke, my God, we were inundated with interest from the Canadians, the Australians, the French— everybody wanted to know what we knew. There was just a convulsion of activity.”
Papich always credited Angleton. “The Rudolf Abel case was a great example of cooperation, ” Papich said. “And it was one of Jim’s great accomplishments. If not for him, the whole thing would have gone down the drain. It was his influence that led to the decision to bring Hayhannen from France to the U.S.A. If Angleton hadn’t taken that position—well, I think maybe Hayhannen might have defected to the French. I don’t know what he would have done. He was a nut! Maybe nobody would have accepted him.”
But even if born of teamwork, the Abel-Hayhannen case would also lead to infighting. Having learned from Hayhannen that when illegal agents wished to meet their principals they wrote to a particular address in the Soviet Union, the Bureau’s CI men reasoned that if they could intercept communications directed to that particular address, they might net a good number of spies. In January 1958, Hoover therefore gave permission “to institute confidential inquiries with appropriate Post Office officials to determine the feasibility of covering outgoing correspondence from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R., looking toward picking up a communication dispatched to the aforementioned address.” But when the FBI’s New York SAC inquired about the possibility, Chief Postal Inspector David Stephens told him he could not authorize Post Office cooperation because “something had happened in Washington on a similar matter.” Hoover was on the verge of discovering that CIA was already opening mail in New York, but had been hiding that fact from the FBI.
LIKE WIRETAPPING and surreptitious entry, mail-opening had been practiced by Allied intelligence during World War II, and like those activities it was carried over into the Cold War. The operation had been run jointly by Harvey’s Staff C (under the cryptonym “HT/LINGUAL”) and Edwards’ Office of Security until it was officially transferred to Angleton’s reorganized CI Staff for “rations and quarters” in 1955. Angleton thought HT/LINGUAL “probably the most important overview that counterintelligence had.” Precisely because the enemy regarded America’s mails as inviolate, mail coverage was likely to provide clues to the identities of Soviet agents.
Angleton understood that the mail-opening operation was illegal, and that if it were ever exposed, “serious public reaction in the United States would probably occur.” The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution stated pretty clearly that “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.” But Angleton could rationalize mailopening on several counts. The Fourth Amendment applied only to unreasonable searches and seizures, which left it open as to whether reading suspected Soviet spies’ mail to Moscow was reasonable. Since 1947, every president and every attorney general had agreed that warrantless wiretaps could sometimes be reasonable, and if there was an exception to the Fourth Amendment for trespass via electronic surveillance, it did not take much imagination to extend that to trespass via surreptitious entry, or mail-opening. Every law had its exceptions; the laws of God and man clearly said it was wrong to kill or steal, and those laws did not say “except in the time of war, ” but everyone knew that a wartime exception was read into them. Angleton believed that any restrictions on government mail-opening must similarly have read into them an exception that would allow CIA to cover mail in time of secret war. Abraham Lincoln had authorized the Pinkerton Detective Service to open mail to catch Confederate spies; why could the country not do the same to identify Nazi or communist agents? As no less a founding father than Thomas Jefferson had once observed: “A strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose law itself, with life, liberty, and property, and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus sacrificing the end to the means.”[he is on to something there DC]
Besides, it was not as if CIA were going into every person’s mailbox. The program was carefully controlled, the targeting highly selective, the watch-listing terms tighter than those Attorney General Tom Clark had used when getting authorization for telephone taps from President Truman. The entire intent and motivation of the program involved the question of foreign entanglements, counterintelligence objects. A real effort was made to avoid harming the innocent, and there was a consensus among those who knew of the operation that nobody except Soviet spies was disadvantaged by having the CIA read his mail.
Of course, nobody ever knew his mail was being opened, either, because it was carefully done by trained personnel of the Technical Services Division within CIA. The envelopes were collected within a restricted secure area of Federal Building No. 111 (Jamaica Airmail Facility), adjoining Idlewild Airport, and couriered to CIA’s New York City office. Each evening, a six-man team of CIA technicians, fluent in Russian and proficient in holographs and flaps, would photograph envelope exteriors with a Diebold camera, and select some for opening. Perhaps two-thirds were chosen at random; the others were culled from a “watch list” which included, at various times, people like Linus Pauling, Bella Abzug, Senator Hubert Humphrey, John Steinbeck, Edward Albee, Thomas Merton, Jay Rockefeller, Martin Luther King, and Richard Nixon. The method of opening which had been taught to the CIA officers during their one-week Technical Services Division “flaps-and-seals” course was to hold the envelope over a steaming teakettle to soften the sealant, then slip a narrow stick under the flap. When you got good at it, it could be done in as little as five seconds. After the letters were photographed, they were replaced in the envelopes, were resealed and returned to the mails the following morning. CIA’s inspector general, Lyman Kirkpatrick, came by to see the new operation after it was set up and wrote approvingly: “This is a highly efficient way to get the job done and the investigators enjoy the work and appreciate the opportunity to earn overtime pay.”
It was understood by all at the Agency who knew about the program, however, that J. Edgar Hoover would be somewhat less happy about its existence. In early 1952, when the operation began, there had been some bad blood between Hoover and the chief of the Postal Inspection Service; also, CIA and FBI had been barely talking to each other. The habit of secrecy persisted even as relations improved under Papich, partly because any “confession” would have to account for why the Agency had failed to consult the Bureau in the first place. Angleton well knew that, in addition to foreign intelligence, the program would produce “information affecting Internal Security, ” and when he proposed to Dulles that his new CI Staff disseminate HT/LINGUAL information “to other Agency components, ” security chief Sheffield Edwards had therefore added by hand on Angleton’s proposal:“and to the FBI.” But Edwards’ writing it did not make it so. Angleton later explained that he held back because no matter how well he got on personally with Papich, “relations with the FBI were pretty spotty.”
In January 1958, Postal Inspector Stephens informed Angleton that the Bureau desired to begin its own mail coverage in New York. Angleton consulted Dulles, and they agreed that there was no choice but to disclose the program to Hoover before the FBI uncovered it anyway. On January 21, Angleton met with Sam Papich “on a personal basis”—late that night, among the orchids in his greenhouse, after they had been doing some drinking— and told him that CIA was opening mail. The project was one of the largest and most sensitive of all CIA covert operations, Angleton said, and its sole purpose was a foreign one—to identify persons behind the Iron Curtain who had family relations in the U.S. That was hardly the only objective of HT/LINGUAL, however, and when Hoover heard about it, he made it clear he considered the project a serious violation of turf. Papich anticipated, as he later said, that “all hell was going to break loose.”
But Hoover’s blood went from boiling to merely simmering when Papich convinced him, via assistant director Al Belmont, that CIA had some jurisdictional right to conduct mail coverage—and that the situation was actually a potential windfall for the FBI. Instead of having to start its own coverage from scratch, it could enjoy the benefits of CIA’s operation, without any of the expenses or responsibilities. “The question immediately arises as to whether CIA in effecting this coverage in New York has invaded our jurisdiction, ” Belmont wrote Hoover. “In this regard, it is believed that they have a legitimate right in the objectives for which the coverage was set up, namely, the development of contacts and sources of information behind the Iron Curtain…. At the same time, there is an internal security objective here in which, because of our responsibilities, we have a definite interest, namely, the identification of illegal agents who may be in the United States. While recognizing this interest, it is not believed that the Bureau should assume this coverage because of the inherent dangers in the sensitive nature of it, its complexity, size, and expense. It is believed that we can capitalize on this coverage by pointing out to CIA our internal security objectives and holding them responsible to share their coverage with us.”
Hoover marked the memo: “O.K.” Two days later, on January 24, Papich was sent to CIA headquarters to “point out” Hoover’s position to Angleton, Edwards, and John Maury, head of the Agency’s Soviet Russia Division.
Without mentioning Angleton’s “personal” admission to him, Papich announced that he had reason to believe CIA was opening mail in New York. CIA’s representatives acknowledged it, gave Papich a briefing, and offered to “handle leads” for the Bureau. The FBI would be the only other agency to receive raw copies of the material. In return, the FBI must restrict HT/LINGUAL materials to special-agent supervisors, who regularly handled sensitive information. FBI field offices would receive the product only after it had been sanitized. Films must never be placed in case files, though files could contain coded cross-references to allow retrieval.
Hoover agreed to CIA’s terms, and the FBI was made part of the operation, which became known in the Bureau as Hunter Project. As the joint enterprise became part of Papich’s liaison routine, he would pick up a batch of Hunter reports at the Agency each week and take them to a special desk in the Soviet Section at the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division. Over the following fifteen years, Papich would personally carry in his briefcase over fifty seven thousand Hunter reports from CIA to FBI headquarters. An internal Agency study would eventually acknowledge that since the Bureau received more dissemination's than any single branch of the Agency, “the FBI is receiving the major benefit from this project.” The Hunter reports included such items as indications that someone might be serving as a Soviet courier, news about Russian social and art clubs in the U.S., and contacts between American citizens and Soviet agents. The Bureau found CIA’s Hunter reports helpful in evaluating what they already had on some suspects, and closed a few cases as a result of that supportive information.
Still, the project did not provide leads resulting in
identification of a single illegal agent. FBI
counterintelligence specialist William Branigan thought
most of the material received, maybe as much as 95
percent of it, was just “junk.” Certainly it was far inferior
to the take from the Bureau’s own mail-opening program,
which they continued to hide from CIA even after the
Agency had “come clean” about its own.
The FBI had begun to open the mail of suspected Nazi
spies during summer 1940, when six of Foxworth’s
special agents, in Bermuda, were taught to do it by the
British. Hoover stopped the practice at war’s end, but
reapproved coverage in the Washington, D.C., area in
September 1951. As in the Agency’s operation, the FBI’s
opened mail between Moscow and the U.S. But unlike
CIA’s, the Bureau’s program had been formally approved
by the attorney general (Smith and Dulles, wanting to
preserve deniability for the Executive Branch, relied on
“implicit con sent”). And whereas the Agency’s ” shotgun
“approach aimed to get general intelligence on the USSR,
the Bureau’s operation was targeted specifically against
long-term Soviet illegals. CIA’s program provided a lot of
positive intelligence about wheat crops in Siberia, but the
FBI’s located three illegals in New York and Washington;
identified U.S.-trained scientists of Chinese descent who
returned to China, which yielded vital positive
intelligence about weapons research abroad; saved the
government tens of millions of dollars by catching a
Defense intelligence employee who was offering to sell
weapons systems to the Soviets; and discovered that
suspected Soviet spy Joseph Katz was living in Haifa,
Israel (whence 1955’s abortive Angleton-Papich-Lamphere mission had hoped to extract him). The FBI’s
method was also quicker than the Agency’s. CIA’s
Technical Services Division had tried to develop an
“oven” to mass-moisten a hundred letters at once, but it
never worked right, and the kettle-and-stick technique
remained the state of the Agency’s art. The FBI’s
machine, however, took one or two seconds for a single
letter, compared with five to fifteen for CIA’s. The
Bureau’s technological knowledge would certainly have
improved the efficiency of the national CI effort if shared
with the Agency, but the FBI did not disclose the
existence of its mail coverage to Angleton or anyone else
at CIA.
Why not?
“It is perhaps difficult to answer,
” FBI CI man Don
Moore would later say. “Perhaps I could liken it to a
defector in place in the KGB. You don’t want to tell
anybody his name, the location, the title, or anything like
that. Not that you don’t trust them completely, but the fact
is that anytime one additional person becomes aware of it,
there is a potential for the information to go further.”
Moore’s colleague Branigan did not believe that the
Bureau had any obligation to inform CIA, since mail
coverage was “strictly a domestic situation involving a
person in the United States, solely within the jurisdiction
of the FBI.”
An argument could be made, of course, that, just as
CIA infringed on the FBI’s turf by opening Americans’
mail in New York, the FBI’s “take” had positive foreign intelligence value, and therefore should have been shared
with the Agency. McWilliams and others in the FBI’s
New York Field Office thought so, and in 1960
recommended informing CIA. Hoover demurred, even
when it was pointed out to him that if the Agency knew
about the FBI coverage, it could provide a list of known
Soviet mail-drops in Europe.
Papich, meanwhile, had been intermittently lobbying
Hoover for permission to disclose the FBI’s program to
CIA as a basic reciprocation of courtesies after
Angleton’s 1958 mail-opening “confession.” Hoover
refused, reminding him that the Agency had disclosed its
operation only after it had been exposed by other means.
All the more reason for the Bureau to come clean now,
Papich said: if the Agency found out about the FBI’s
program on its own, the Bureau would lose the moral high
ground when it came to criticizing CIA for not sharing
information. After three years of stalling, Hoover finally
saw that side of it, and in January 1961 Papich told
Angleton about the Bureau’s mail-opening operation. He
apologized for holding back, and requested the exchange
of lists on known and suspected mail-drops, both
domestic and abroad.
Angleton yelled at him for a few minutes, but agreed to
the exchange of lists. CIA supplied McWilliams’ shop in
New York with a list of sixteen drops and
“accommodation addresses” in Western Europe, and
Angleton also offered the FBI use of an Agency
laboratory in Manhattan to screen intercepted letters for
secret writings such as microdots. The Bureau had its own
screening capacity, however—set up twenty years earlier
to process the microdots provided by Dusko Popov—and
they never did use the CIA’s shop, because the boss
didn’t let them. When informed in a memo that CIA had
built a dot-lab in the Bureau’s yard, Hoover wrote in
anger: “Another inroad!”
FOR ALL THE FUSS over mail-opening, it was another
time-honored espionage practice—penetration—that
tipped the Agency to two new Soviet illegals in New
York, who had probably been sent to replace Abel or
Hayhannen. Perhaps fittingly, given its corrosive
interagency implications, the case began with Hoover’s
bête noire, William King Harvey, in Berlin.
October 1957 found Harvey riding high. After taking
over Berlin Base four years earlier, he had conceived and
carried out an epic-scale penetration into the Soviet
sector: a six-hundred-yard-long tunnel under the EastWest border, which allowed CIA to tap cables carrying
Soviet telephone traffic. Harvey also digested the “take”
from informants run by expert agent-handlers like George
Kisevalter, and got prize “product” from Kisevalter’s best
agent: Pyotr Popov, a lieutenant colonel in Soviet Military
Intelligence (GRU).
Popov had contacted CIA officers in Vienna in
November 1952, represented himself as a patriotic
Russian disillusioned with communist tyranny, and
offered to work as an agent-in-place. Since then, he had
provided CIA with the innermost secrets of the Soviet
military. “This one man’s reporting,
” said CIA Soviet
Division officer Harry Rositzke,
“saved the Pentagon at
least a half-billion dollars in its research and development
program.” After summer 1957, when Popov was assigned
to East Berlin, he also provided identities and travel plans
of illegals transiting that city. The very first agent Popov
was assigned to handle, Margarita Tairova, was headed
for New York City.
The Tairova tip was one of Popov’s many coups for
CIA, but when told of it by Kisevalter, Harvey said: “Oh
shit, oh damn!” CIA would have to inform the FBI, who
would pursue the case with the law-enforcement approach
Harvey had found so frustrating in his own years there. If
the FBI surveilled Tairova and she detected it, Moscow
might deduce that her mission had been blown, and begin
monitoring those very few persons—Popov among them
—who knew her travel plans. Harvey and Kisevalter
worked all night on a cable to Soviet Russia Division
chief Jack Maury, trying to convey the situation’s
delicacy and danger.
When Maury read the cable, he saw the problem. He
urged Dulles that the Bureau be kept out of the case.
Dulles sympathized, but decided that the FBI had to be
informed. The matter was turned over to Angleton, who
immediately got Papich involved and stressed the
sensitivity of the situation.
Nevertheless, from the moment she stepped off the
plane on November 27, Tairova was followed by a dozen
FBI agents. She made contact with a man, soon
determined to be her husband, Walter, and moved in with
him on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The FBI kept
watch from an abandoned apartment across the street,
where Mac’s agents suspended their sandwiches from the
ceiling to keep the roaches away. Then, on March 12,
1958, the couple simply disappeared. Popov later reported
that Margarita had resurfaced in Moscow, complaining
that the FBI had surveilled her from day one. The KGB
was trying to determine how her travel plans could have
leaked. Popov had been grilled about the matter, and
though he believed he had deflected any suspicion,
Kisevalter and Harvey weren’t so sure. They offered their
mole the chance to defect; Popov refused. He was arrested
less than a year later, and the Soviets eventually
announced his execution as a CIA spy.
There was no proving, of course, that the FBI’s
handling of the Tairo vas’ tip had put the KGB on to
Popov. They might have caught on to him, for instance,
by tailing Kisevalter or other CIA men who met with him
in Europe. Harvey and others at the Agency, however,
were prone to blame the Bureau. Even FBI CI men like
James Nolan privately thought the loss was “partly
Hoover’s fault.”
But CIA’s counterintelligence chief did not react by
complaining about Hoover. Angleton was considering the
possibility, he told Papich, that Tairova might have been
strictly a “throwaway” lead, planted on Popov to see if it
would be leaked to the West. If so, Popov had been
suspected before he was assigned to work with illegals in
Berlin, and well before the FBI was ever cut into the case.
That would mean that Popov was probably compromised
by a Soviet mole in CIA. In this sense, the most profound
legacy of the Popov disaster was that CIA could not know
for sure whether its agent had been blown by FBI
incompetence, or by Soviet penetration. Only one thing
was certain: as long as there was the mere possibility of
Soviet moles, Angleton would have to do his damnedest
to root them out.
ONE OF ANGLETON’S early leads to the possible identity
of a KGB mole had been a report from Popov himself,before he was executed, suggesting a leak in CIA’s Top
Secret U-2 spy plane program. In April 1958, Popov had
reported hearing a drunken colonel boast that the KGB
had many technical details on a new high-altitude spy craft
America was routing over the Soviet Union. Details of
this revolutionary plane had been tightly held within the
U.S. government; the leak could only have come from
somewhere within the project itself. Soviet knowledge of
these flights raised a number of troubling issues for
Dulles, such as whether Soviet anti-aircraft operators,
knowing the altitudes at which these planes flew, might
be able to program their guided missiles accordingly and
shoot one down.
The answer to that came on May 1, 1960. The U-2 was
over Sverdlovsk, its pilot later said, when there was an
explosion and an orange flash. The aircraft went out of
control. The pilot threw open the cockpit and parachuted
to earth. Within hours, the Soviets announced the
downing of a CIA plane and the capture of its pilot,
Francis Gary Powers. An Eisenhower-Khrushchev
summit was ruined. The U.S., exposed as a violator of
international law, lost prestige.
The FBI closely monitored public opinion toward
CIA’s role in the affair. The New York Mirror ventured
that “if the FBI instead of CIA had been conducting the
operation … no such error would have resulted.” The
agent who clipped the piece recommended against
sending the newspaper any letter of appreciation, which
“might tend to lend approval to his comparison of the FBI
with CIA,
” but was overruled by former liaison officer
DeLoach. Any critic of the Agency, it seemed, was by
extension the Bureau’s friend.
But for all their appreciation of a good anti-CIA angle
to a major news story, Hoover and others at the FBI
wondered whether the affair could be written off as
merely Agency incompetence. There might have been
leaks in the operation. The radio for coded transmissions
had broken down at the U-2 control base at Adana,
Turkey, so a CIA officer had decided to violate procedure
and relay permission for Powers’ flight on an insecure
circuit that could have been monitored by the Soviets.
CIA investigators interrogated Turkish janitors who might
have been paid by the Soviets to sabotage the spy craft,
and U.S. military counterintelligence officers at Peshawar,
Pakistan, where Powers had taken off, believed they had
foiled a tampering attempt, by persons unknown, against
the U-2 on the eve of its departure. Perhaps there had
been another sabotage plot that had not been detected. By
midsummer 1960, the Bureau was even considering a
theory then circulating in British anticommunist circles—
that the U-2 had been hijacked by the Soviets according to
a carefully orchestrated plan similar to that in Ian
Fleming’s novel Thunderball, in which a NATO jet was
hijacked by a special unit of Bond’s nemesis, SPECTRE.
Quoting “a report sent from behind the Iron Curtain by the Russian underground movement, ” an FBI source in Britain alleged that “For five years there has existed, with its headquarters in the Soviet Union, a special intelligence group with agents scattered throughout the world. Its task is to steal new types of aircraft and other material secrets from the West. The group, known by the code-name “Molnia”—lightning—is under the command of a Colonel Jurii Petrovitch Smolnikov. And it is claimed in leading Communist Party circles that Molnia was not only responsible for capturing the American plane, but since it was formed in 1955 has successfully stolen from under the noses of Western Counter-Intelligence 27 other aircraft; the last one being British. This British plane landed at Pribaltica with one or two members of its crew still in a drugged state.” According to the British source, Powers’ U-2 was captured by Molnia “so that Khrushchev could deliberately wreck the Paris Summit Conference and use the spotlight of world publicity to blame President Eisenhower for the failure.”
Fantastic as it was, the Molnia theory at least offered one way to resolve a running dispute about the U-2’s altitude when struck. Khrushchev claimed it had been at sixty-eight thousand feet, but U.S. intelligence officials did not believe Soviet anti-aircraft rockets could operate effectively at that altitude. Either the plane had “flamed out” at sixty-eight thousand feet, and was not struck by rockets until it was somewhere between twenty and forty thousand, or it had been forced down by other means. That the U-2 had lost altitude and been forced down from a height of only thirty thousand feet, as “high Washington sources” reportedly believed, and as NATO radar allegedly confirmed, could be explained by the fact that agents of Molnia had allegedly drugged Powers prior to takeoff, with a “slow-acting dope to take effect over the heart of Russia.”
Of course, it was possible that Powers had not been drugged at all, but had simply landed the plane in the Soviet Union and defected to the Soviets. Perhaps he had been a Soviet agent for some time. CIA officials were struck by the fact that, strangely enough, Powers’ plane was not “pretty well destroyed, ” as the Soviets claimed, but had “apparently leveled off and made something of a soft landing.” Other “evidence” was circumstantial at best: Powers had failed to use the ejector seat, which would have automatically destroyed the top-secret plane; he was reportedly being treated well in Moscow, with books to read and a small yard in which he could exercise and take sunbaths; he was given a tour of the city and described it as “beautiful”; Khrushchev would not dare to put Powers on trial if he were not sure that Powers would admit every charge laid against him. This line of reasoning gained some currency as various anticommunist sophists of the John Birch variety began giving lectures at rotary clubs in American middle towns, stating, according to FBI documents, “that Powers was not shot down by the USSR, and indicated he defected and is presently living in Russia and receiving pay from Russia.” In the atmosphere of mounting hysteria, Attorney General Rogers came under considerable public pressure to “turn the FBI loose, ” as one concerned citizen recommended, to see if “the Central Intelligence Agency was, or is, infiltrated by Soviet agents.”
Fantastic as it was, the Molnia theory at least offered one way to resolve a running dispute about the U-2’s altitude when struck. Khrushchev claimed it had been at sixty-eight thousand feet, but U.S. intelligence officials did not believe Soviet anti-aircraft rockets could operate effectively at that altitude. Either the plane had “flamed out” at sixty-eight thousand feet, and was not struck by rockets until it was somewhere between twenty and forty thousand, or it had been forced down by other means. That the U-2 had lost altitude and been forced down from a height of only thirty thousand feet, as “high Washington sources” reportedly believed, and as NATO radar allegedly confirmed, could be explained by the fact that agents of Molnia had allegedly drugged Powers prior to takeoff, with a “slow-acting dope to take effect over the heart of Russia.”
Of course, it was possible that Powers had not been drugged at all, but had simply landed the plane in the Soviet Union and defected to the Soviets. Perhaps he had been a Soviet agent for some time. CIA officials were struck by the fact that, strangely enough, Powers’ plane was not “pretty well destroyed, ” as the Soviets claimed, but had “apparently leveled off and made something of a soft landing.” Other “evidence” was circumstantial at best: Powers had failed to use the ejector seat, which would have automatically destroyed the top-secret plane; he was reportedly being treated well in Moscow, with books to read and a small yard in which he could exercise and take sunbaths; he was given a tour of the city and described it as “beautiful”; Khrushchev would not dare to put Powers on trial if he were not sure that Powers would admit every charge laid against him. This line of reasoning gained some currency as various anticommunist sophists of the John Birch variety began giving lectures at rotary clubs in American middle towns, stating, according to FBI documents, “that Powers was not shot down by the USSR, and indicated he defected and is presently living in Russia and receiving pay from Russia.” In the atmosphere of mounting hysteria, Attorney General Rogers came under considerable public pressure to “turn the FBI loose, ” as one concerned citizen recommended, to see if “the Central Intelligence Agency was, or is, infiltrated by Soviet agents.”
Hoover personally was disturbed by the “most
peculiar” circumstances of Powers’ ejection. Powers
confirmed the Soviet account of the incident when
pleading guilty to charges of espionage in a KGB court on
July 7, but Hoover was intrigued by the skeptical analysis
of Sir Philip Livingstone, a former director general of
RAF medical air services. “It is utterly impossible for a
pilot to bail out [at 68,000 feet] without using ejection
equipment,
” Livingstone said. “He would be destroyed
instantly by the slipstream and air pressure. Should he
survive this, he could not last more than 45 seconds
without the oxygen equipment attached to the ejection
seat, and the 50-below cold would make life impossible.”
Hoover noted also that “Oliver Powers, father of the
U-2 pilot, was quoted as stating that his son’s plane had
not been shot down by the Soviets. The father allegedly
obtained this information when he visited his son in
Moscow.” The Soviets had quickly publicized a
statement, attributed to Powers, denying that he had ever
told his father any such thing, but that only made the
situation seem more suspicious. It came to Hoover’s
attention that Powers’ home state was Georgia, and
HUAC investigators had previously alleged “that there
was a Soviet agent in Georgia named Powers.” CIA’s top
management suggested to Agency General Counsel
Lawrence Houston that Powers had deliberately flown his
plane into Soviet hands and defected. Dulles himself told
Eisenhower, according to information in Powers’ FBI file,
“that he would not be surprised if Powers personally
implicated the President himself and then announced
dramatically that he has decided to remain in Russia and
work for peace.”
By October, 1960, there were so many unanswered
questions about Powers’ loyalty that Hoover authorized a
complete investigation into the CIA pilot—his parents, his
political views, his financial status (any substantial
deposits recently?)—to determine whether he had been
known to have communist sympathies or was actually an
agent of the Soviets. Papich began furnishing leads to
CIA on October 10, and the investigation continued
through at least June 1961, when the Agency was sharing
with the Bureau its pilot’s medical records. It is unclear
when the Bureau reached its conclusion about Powers’
loyalty, or what that conclusion was. Years later, when
the Bureau’s file on Powers was finally declassified, the
FBI’s verdict remained blacked out, as the Bureau
explained,
“per CIA request.” Sam Papich and others
familiar with the details of the FBI’s Powers investigation
declined to discuss it.
A few facts gleaned from unredacted passages in the
FBI documents, however, suggest that Bureau suspicions
about CIA’s pilot were never quite dissipated. On
February 10, 1962, it was decided to move Powers’ FBI
file from headquarters to the Bureau’s Special Mail
Room, 1315 Identification Building, where only files of
the most extreme sensitivity were stored. And the Bureau
prepared for the contingency that Powers might be
infiltrated back into the United States as an illegal agent,
perhaps after being brainwashed or undergoing plastic
surgery. A notice was posted in the FBI’s Identification
Division to be alert “in the event any fingerprints in the
future are received in Ident identical with” those of
Powers, or any of six other U.S. airmen missing since
July 1, 1960, in the vicinity of the Barents Sea. “This
action is believed desirable,
” a Bureau memo urged,
“in
view of the possibility that the Russians may try to use
any of these men for their own purposes in the United
States under different names.”
Despite the general suspicions against Powers, Papich
was advised by CIA in January 1961 that secret
negotiations were under way to swap him for Rudolf
Abel, who was serving out his life sentence in a Georgia
prison. Within the week, Hoover wrote Attorney General
Rogers to express his opposition to CIA’s proposed spytrade. “It would appear that [Abel’s] past experiences
make him of particular value to Soviet operations directed
against this country,
” Hoover noted. It was hoped that
Abel might eventually break down in captivity and tell the
Bureau much more than they already knew about KGB
illegal networks, but that obviously would not happen if
he were returned to the USSR. Moreover, Powers’ loyalty
to the United States was not certain. “It would be
catastrophic,
” Hoover warned,
“if the United States
arranged for Powers’ release and he then refused to come
home.” On another memo Hoover scrawled: “They may
get their ‘fingers burned’ ” by giving up Abel and getting
“nothing in return…. If they are determined to play with
fire & make ‘deals’ with such ratters [as Powers] they will
pay the price.”
The Attorney General sided with CIA, however, and
Powers and Abel were exchanged on February 10, 1962,
on the Glienecker Bridge connecting East and West
Berlin. Powers was trundled off to a CIA safe house in
Oxford, Maryland, where for eight days he was
interrogated by one of Angleton’s men. The FBI was cut
in on some of the take beginning February 16. Thirty
years later, that information remained classified by the
Bureau “per CIA request,
” and CIA transcripts of the
debriefings would remain Top Secret as well. Lawrence
Houston eventually disclosed that in the course of their
debriefing of Powers,
“we were getting slightly different
stories.” Powers later compared CIA’s questioning to that
which he received while imprisoned by the Soviets.
The affair ended as it had begun, with negative press
about the Agency; all of it went into Hoover’s files. The
public got a peek into the life of a CIA family when
Barbara Powers was hospitalized for a drug overdose in
April 1962, two months after her husband’s return, and
they were divorced soon after, when he ran off with a CIA
psychiatrist. Powers’ ex-wife then began to write a
memoir, which the FBI noted would “be giving the inside
story on CIA and the Agency’s personnel,
” with emphasis
on “sex and drinking.” In June of that year, the Agency
was taken to task for incompetence by two journalists,
David Wise and Thomas Ross, in their best-selling book
The U-2 Affair; CIA officials assured the Bureau “that
approximately 75% of the book is pure fiction,
” that the
authors had “collected some factual data and then filled in
the gaps with fabricated material,
” but newspaper reviews
of the book became part of Powers’ FBI file.
Hoover might have found some consolation in the
mudbath Central Intelligence was still taking over the U-2
incident, but he remained sore to the end about Abel, the
spy who got away. When columnist Rowland Evans
reported that the directors of CIA and FBI “were
unanimous in recommending the exchange,
” Hoover
practically engraved in the article’s margin with his pen:
“I never did any such thing!”
The mystery of Powers’ downing never was cleared
up. Senator Barry Goldwater believed there was much
more to the story than CIA ever publicly admitted.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy thought Powers should
be tried for treason. Selmer Nilsen, a Norwegian
fisherman and convicted spy who covered the U-2 airbase
at Bodde, Sweden for Soviet intelligence, alleged in 1975
that the U-2 had been downed by a bomb planted in its
tail by a Soviet agent before its takeoff from Peshawar.
Nilsen had been told about the bomb, he said, by a KGB
officer in Moscow, at a May 1960 party to celebrate the
downing of the U-2. When asked about Nilsen’s
allegations, Powers, then working as a traffic reporter for
KNBC-TV news in Los Angeles, insisted that the U-2
planes were inspected so closely before takeoff that “it
would have to be an inside job.”
In 1981, one of the CIA officers who had worked on
security for the U-2 program, Edwin Wilson, was arrested
by the FBI for collaborating with Libyan, East German,
and Soviet intelligence. Wilson could have been the
source of the U-2 leak that Popov brought to CIA’s
attention in April 1958, and might also have contributed
to Powers’ downing. In the late 1950's, while posted at the
U-2 base in Adana, Wilson had watched over some of
Powers’ flights, and had even kept tabs on Powers
himself. Wilson had been transferred back to the U.S.
more than a year before Powers was shot down, but he
might have given the Soviets enough general data for
them to attempt sabotage. He might also have given the
KGB a psychological profile of Powers, to be used in an
attempted recruitment. But no firm evidence of either
scenario has ever emerged.
Powers died in August 1977, when his Bell Jet Ranger
helicopter crashed just outside Van Nuys Airport.
Apparently he had run out of fuel. Conspiracy theorists
thought that explanation suspicious, since Powers’ fuel
gauge had supposedly been repaired the night before, and
since CIA was known to maintain a presence at Van Nuys
Airport, where certain joint research projects with
Lockheed Aircraft were carried out. Agency spokesmen
dismissed newspaper speculation that Powers had been
killed by CIA, perhaps in retaliation for some unknown
transgression, as “absurd.”
But CIA had long since lost the moral high ground on
such matters, and the benefit of any doubt. By then it was
known publicly that CIA did kill people, or had
sometimes tried to. Indeed, even as Powers was swapped
for Abel in 1962, William Harvey was hard at work on
one such plot. These schemes would be the source of
much displeasure to J. Edgar Hoover, and the cause of
much interest to President John F. Kennedy. After
Kennedy was killed, these plots would also become a
matter of dark fascination for President Lyndon Johnson,
and for some of Harvey’s agents, who saw a sinister
connection between CIA’s assassination plans and the
actions of yet another man who might have given U-2
secrets to the Soviets. This individual, whom Powers
himself later blamed for his capture, was a discharged
Marine radar operator who had worked at CIA’s U-2 base
in Atsugi, Japan, and who had defected to the Soviet
Union six months before Powers was downed. His name
was Lee Harvey Oswald.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LICENSED TO KILL
CAMELOT GLISTENED and glittered and gleamed in all its
splendor in late April 1962, when President and Mrs. John
Fitzgerald Kennedy held a reception for forty-nine Nobel
laureates in the East Room of the White House. In a seafoam-green evening gown by Oleg Cassini, the first lady
greeted guests including Berkeley chemist Linus Pauling,
who had spent the day picketing her husband’s decision to
allow nuclear testing on Christmas Island. “I think this is
the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human
knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the
White House,
” JFK said in his dinner toast,
“with the
possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined
alone.” After a reading from Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street,
deriding the cultural sophistication of the average
American, there was jazz dancing to a Marine combo.Soviet Ambassador Anatoliy Do brynin whisked his wife
through a fox trot, insisting the step was “typical
Russian.” Years later, when it became known that CIA
was involved in assassination plots during his
administration, glorious classy evenings such as this led
JFK’s advisers to believe it “totally out of character” for
Kennedy to be privy to such dirty, deadly matters. Yet
even while he presided at the “Easter egghead hunt,
” as it
was jokingly known, his brother Bobby was at CIA
Station JM/WAVE in Miami, assuring America’s James
Bond of White House support for the killing of a foreign
head of state.
For the Kennedy's, ethics was aesthetics, and aesthetics
was athletics. The fighting-Irish spirit of their touch football games was well adapted to an organization
created by an Irish football hero, Wild Bill Donovan. CIA
men quickly learned that they could get approval for
covert projects by lacing memorandum with language like,
“If we do this, we might uncork the touchdown play.” The
new enthusiasm for secret, even illegal work was present
even in Postmaster General James Day, who okay-ed CIA
mail-opening as long there were no “reverberations.” And
it was certainly present in JFK’s approach to the problem
of Fidel Castro.
The idea of covertly unseating Castro was first
suggested to Kennedy by Ian Fleming at a Georgetown
dinner party on Sunday, March 13, 1960. When asked
what Bond might do if assigned to get rid of Castro,
Fleming told JFK there were three things that really
mattered to the Cubans: money, religion, and sex.
Therefore, CIA should scatter counterfeit Cuban money
over Havana, with leaflets saying it came compliments of
the U.S.A.; next, the Agency should conjure up some
religious image in the sky, which would imply that God
was against communism; finally, CIA should cause Fidel
Castro to lose his facial hair, for without macho bearded
Cubans there could be no revolution.
By 1962, all three of Fleming’s anti-Castro schemes
were attempted or at least seriously being considered by
the Kennedy government, but the reliance on Fleming’s
ideas went beyond his dinner-party palaver. During
‘JFK’s first four days in power, CIA’s Richard Bissell
was urged twice by “the White House,
” as he later said, to
develop an “Executive Action Capability” to “eliminate
the effectiveness” of troublesome foreign leaders. CIA, in
other words, was to have assets like Fleming’s “OO”
agents, who were licensed to kill. And when Kennedy
asked in November 1961 to meet “America’s James
Bond,
” he was introduced to William Harvey. The
meeting lasted only a few moments; no official record
was kept of it. The next day, Harvey was officially tasked
with eliminating Castro.
Harvey had already been working on assassination
matters for more than a year. After the White House asked
Bissell to create an Executive Action Capability, Harvey
had been charged with the effort, known as ZR/RIFLE,
but in doing so he only formalized a campaign that had
been under way during the final summer of the
Eisenhower administration. Spearheading the effort had
been Vice-President Richard Nixon, who believed, as he
recorded in a 1959 memo, that Castro was “either
incredibly naive about communism or under communist
discipline.” Nixon’s executive assistant for national security affairs, General Robert E. Cushman, had
pressured CIA on the “elimination of Fidel Castro,
” as
Agency documents described it, as part of a planned
invasion of Cuba. While the Agency’s Western
Hemisphere Division conceived a military landing at Bay
of Pigs, Harvey worked with CIA security chief Sheffield
Edwards to neutralize the Cuban leader.
Harvey may have given some consideration to
Fleming’s dinner-party ideas, which were taken to Dulles
by CIA officer John Bross, who had also been at
Kennedy’s table. But it was a Fleming conception not
mentioned at that staid gathering—an idea put forth in the
novel Fleming had just finished—which, coincidentally or
not, became the linchpin of Harvey’s plots. Just as James
Bond, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, worked with
the Mafia to terminate an enemy regarded as far more
sinister, so CIA would now team with U.S. mobsters to
kill Castro.
Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent who sometimes
performed freelance “operational support” for CIA, was
tapped to recruit suave Los Angeles wiseguy Johnny
Rosselli. Maheu flew west and met Rosselli at
Hollywood’s Brown Derby restaurant in August 1960.
The mobster carried himself like a movie star; he wore
Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses indoors, and moved with
cool ease in a double-breasted linen suit; he was tanned,
and his clay-brown face contrasted suavely with his gray-white slicked-back hair. He was known in the underworld
as the Silver Fox. When Maheu proposed a “cutout”
operation, which would give the Agency total deniability,
Rosselli’s first response was to laugh in his face.
“The Feds are tracking me everywhere I go!” he said.
He couldn’t even visit his tailor without being followed
by FBI agents.
But as Maheu pressed him, Rosselli saw a chance
perhaps to immunize himself from future FBI persecution
by cooperating with CIA. In October, he put Maheu in
touch with Chicago Mafia chieftain Sam “Momo”
Giancana and with Santos Trafficante, kingpin of
Florida’s “Gold Coast Syndicate.” Trafficante often
traveled to Havana, ostensibly to determine whether
Mafia-owned casinos were going to be nationalized; he
purportedly knew a disaffected Cuban official who could
get close to the dictator. Since Castro frequently drank
tea, coffee, or bouillon, a liquid poison would be
particularly well suited for the job. Maheu said he would
talk to the operation’s sponsors and see what he could do.
But the Mafiosi were apparently doing some talking of
their own, to people who had nothing to do with the
operation. On October 18, 1960, Hoover wrote Dulles to
report that, according to “a source whose reliability has
not been tested,
” Sam Giancana had stated during a recent
conversation with friends “that Fidel Castro was to be
done away with very shortly.” Giancana claimed that “he
had already met with the assassin-to-be on three
occasions,
” that “everything has been perfected for the
killing of Castro,
” and that the assassin had arranged with
a woman, not further described,
“to drop a pill in some
food or drink of Castro’s.”
Giancana had not talked about CIA in connection with
the anti-Castro attempt, but the FBI soon found out about
his links to the Agency through what one of Edwards’
men called “a Keystone Cops episode” in Las Vegas.
Maheu had arranged for a wiretap on the phone in
comedian Dan Rowan’s Las Vegas hotel room, to see if
Giancana’s moll, Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair
with Rowan. As a favor to Maheu, CIA agreed to pay up
to $1,000 for the tapping device. On the afternoon of
Halloween 1960, one of Maheu’s employees, Ed DuBois,
broke into Rowan’s suite to install a bug, but took a break
in the middle of the job, leaving his equipment
unattended. A maid discovered it and called the local
sheriff. Maheu’s wire-man was arrested. His bail was paid
by Rosselli, attracting the attention of the FBI.
Interrogated by the Bureau, DuBois admitted that he had
been hired by Maheu. Two FBI agents called on Maheu
and read him a formal statement of his legal rights.
According to previous arrangement with CIA, Maheu told
the FBI only that the tap had been part of an operation he
was running “on behalf of the CIA relative to anti-Castro
activities,
” and suggested the Bureau contact Sheff
Edwards at the Agency.
At that point, the matter became Sam Papich’s
problem. Edwards approached him on May 3, 1961, and
said,
“Sam, we got problems.” He told Papich that CIA
was using Maheu because of his contacts with Giancana,
who might be useful “in connection with CIA’s
clandestine efforts against the Castro government.” None
of Giancana’s efforts had yet materialized, Edwards said,
but “several of the plans still are working and may
eventually pay off.” Edwards himself claimed to be
deliberately ignorant of the details of such a “dirty
business.” He did know the overall objective, he said, but
could not reveal it to Papich or anyone else at the FBI.
Edwards also told Papich that CIA would fight the FBI if
it tried to prosecute Maheu, because any public legal
action might disclose sensitive information about CIA’s
failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which had
gone down only two weeks before.
“Of course, all hell broke loose in the FBI,
” Papich
said. “There was a definite increase in tensions. Here was
CIA, coddling characters the Bureau was supposed to be
investigating. That irritated the hell out of Hoover—and
when J. Edgar got mad, boy, he got mad!” Of course, a lot
of it fell on Papich. “Why are they dealing with these
types?” Hoover roared at him. “Did they think it would be
okay with us? What the hell kind of understanding have
you given them?” Papich just stood there and took it.
Everyone at the Bureau felt it was the stupidest thing CIA
had ever tried. You couldn’t make a deal with those
crooks without their owning you after that. Once they
were in bed with you, they had you.
Angry as Hoover was, however, the Maheu-Giancana
affair at least gave him the means of killing two birds with
one bolt. Robert Kennedy’s conscription of FBI agents
into Justice Department task forces for anti-Mafia work,
and Hoover’s determined resistance to this policy, had
become a cause of much friction between the FBI director
and the Kennedy's. The attorney general believed Hoover
to be an obstacle to prosecutions, and had even told
reporters that Hoover believed the Mafia did not exist.
The Las Vegas incident thus offered Hoover the chance
not only to embarrass CIA, but to show Kennedy he was
serious about the Mafia. He tattled to R.F.K in a memo that
CIA had been using Maheu and other “hoodlum
elements” in unspecified “anti-Castro activities.” The
Bureau was “conducting a full investigation,
” and “the
field has been instructed to press investigation
vigorously.”
Indeed, as Maheu later related, FBI agents were
“beginning to tail us … very interested in our every
move.” G-men began spending a lot of time in the
restaurant of Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau hotel,
unofficial headquarters of the anti-Castro plots, while
Maheu fretted that all the “heat” would cool the mobsters’
ardor for assassination. If the CIA plots didn’t offer
security from FBI harassment, why bother? “It was just
further proof of what you always hear: one branch of the
government doesn’t know what the other is doing,
”
Maheu reflected. “I knew my phone was tapped, too, so I
tried to make things easy on the government. I’d
purposely call the CIA from my hotel room rather than
from a pay phone. That way the FBI could listen in, and
save both agencies some extra work.”
In May 1961, with the FBI on to its assets, and with its
Cuban networks in shambles after the bungled beach
landings, CIA suspended its anti-Castro plots—but not its
plotting's. Most U.S. “wet work” had been subcontracted
to the British in World War II, and Harvey wondered
whether it could be so again. In October, he consulted
British MI 5 emissary Peter Wright, who had come to
Washington for a conference on technical surveillance. As
Wright later told it, they were drinking whiskey in a
Virginia hunting lodge owned by CIA when Harvey’s
voice dropped to a low monotone. Could Her Majesty’s
Secret Service be of assistance in “hitting” Castro? “We’d
certainly have that capability,
” Wright told him,
“but I
doubt we would use it nowadays. We’re not in it
anymore, Bill. We got out a couple years ago, after Suez.
We’re the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It’s
your responsibility now.”
“Well,
” Harvey said,
“we’re developing a new
capability in the company to handle these kinds of
problems, and we’re in the market for the requisite
expertise.” He spoke of the need for a deniable “delivery
mechanism.”
“The French!” Wright said brightly. “Have you tried
them? It’s more their type of thing.”
Out of the question. De Gaulle didn’t trust Americans.
“Have you thought of approaching William
Stephenson? A lot of the old-timers say he ran this kind of
thing in New York during the war. Used some Italian,
apparently, when there was no other way of sorting a
German shipping spy. Probably the Mafia, for all I
know.”
So Harvey was back where he began, with the mob. In
November 1961, after JFK had said to him,
“So you’re
our James Bond,
” Harvey had pondered the file on
Johnny Rosselli, stamped “INACTIVE CONTACT.” He
hesitated to get involved with a such a Bureau-tainted
asset. But by the first week of April 1962, he knew his
own job would be in jeopardy if he didn’t do something;
nor was it in his nature to do nothing. He met the Mafioso
in a cocktail lounge at Miami Airport.
The two men could not have been more incongruous.
Rosselli was tanned and coiffed, sporting alligator shoes
and a $2,000 watch, while Harvey was fat and
fashionless, in his usual brown suit. But Harvey immediately liked Rosselli and instinctively trusted him. He
saw a man much like himself, a dedicated anticommunist
whose motive in wanting to kill Castro was nothing more
complicated than patriotism, a man who had never
requested a cent for his services, not even expenses—
although Harvey must have realized that the gangster had
maneuvered himself into an excellent position from which
to stave off prosecution by the Justice Department.
Rosselli, for his part, looked at Harvey and saw a hard drinking man with a revolver-bulge in his jacket, and
thought,
“This guy’s one of us.” Over the coming months,
as Harvey and Rosselli sat up nights drinking and talking
around motel pools, scheming to undo Castro, they
became good friends.
But the FBI crowded in again. In February 1962,
Papich spoke to Edwards about possible prosecutions in
the Las Vegas wiretap case. Edwards protested that “any
prosecution in the matter would endanger sensitive
sources and methods … and would not be in the national
interest.” Harvey was kept apprised of those FBI
pressures, which eventually made Edwards so nervous
that he told CIA counsel Lawrence Houston about the
project. Houston was given the misleading idea that the
operation had been ended, as was Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, whom Houston briefed about it on May
7. Lest the lie be found out, Edwards even falsified a
memo for CIA files, stating that Harvey had terminated
the project.
That same false impression was given the FBI through
Sam Papich, whom a frustrated Harvey approached in
pursuit of a separate peace. As he conferred with Harvey
after hours, it dawned on Papich, though he was never
told in so many words, that the Agency had been plotting
with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. Papich argued about it
with him—“You’re not going to win on this one, you
can’t deal with these characters”—but Harvey insisted
that he had to continue an “open relationship” with
Rosselli. “Even though Harvey claimed that CIA had
canceled, annulled the whole operation on Cuba, they still
had their goddamn problem,
” Papich recalled. “They
couldn’t tell those Mafia types to go to hell. They were in
bed with ’em.” As Harvey himself would later say, one
by-product of CIA’s assassination schemes was “a very
pregnant possibility … of this government being
blackmailed either by Cubans for political purposes or by
figures in organized crime for their own self-protection or
aggrandizement.” Hoping therefore to keep Rosselli well
disposed toward CIA, and to anticipate any upcoming
troubles—and also because he just plain liked him—
Harvey kept in touch with the gangster. He promised
Papich that any contacts with Rosselli would of course be
reported to the Bureau, and that any intelligence on their
domestic criminal activities would be forwarded to
Hoover.
Harvey then blithely returned to plotting the very
violence he assured Papich had been foresworn. A new
set of poison pills was provided to one of Trafficante’s
exile teams. But any discovery of his Rosselli-Trafficante
schemes was now likely to land him in deep trouble,
because he had no official Agency sanction; he would be
proceeding on his own. That much became clear during
the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the Bureau informed CIA
that the attorney general did not want any “crackpot”
individuals or organizations going to Cuba “at this
particularly sensitive time”—especially not any “who
might make assassination attempts. “Harvey disregarded
the order and dispatched a special commando team to
Cuba. The FBI’s Miami office had been surveilling
Harvey’s Cuban exiles in Miami, and reported the team’s
departure to Hoover, who told RFK. The attorney general
took a great deal of exception to Harvey’s recklessness at
a time when the world seemed to be at the lip of
thermonuclear extinction. He went to CIA’s leadership
and told them their man was “out of control.” Harvey’s
immediate boss, Richard Helms, felt he had taken to
“drinking a bit too much” and become “somewhat too
flamboyant,
” and he knew that he did not help relations
with Hoover. The Rosselli connection was to be shut
down, and Harvey was to be transferred—demoted, really
—to chief of station in Rome.
On June 20, 1963, Harvey met Rosselli in Washington
for a goodbye bash before flying off to his new
assignment in “the old country,
” as Rosselli called it.
Since it was going to be his last meeting with the mobster
for a while, Harvey figured he didn’t have to tell Agency
people about the contact, and certainly not Papich or
anyone at the FBI, even though he had promised them he
would.
Again the Bureau found him out. Papich had assured
Hoover at the beginning of 1963 that Harvey and CIA
were no longer seeking Castro’s assassination, and in
Hoover’s mind that freed up the Bureau to move against
Rosselli and his friends. When Harvey drove out to
National Airport to meet Rosselli, he was spotted by FBI
agents who had been surveilling the mobster. The pair
were trailed to Tino’s Continental Restaurant in
Georgetown. Not recognizing Harvey but sensing that he
was something more than an underworld crony, the Gmen contacted Papich, reportedly reaching him at James
Angleton’s dinner table. Angleton and Papich
immediately identified Harvey from the physical
description given by the agents. The next day, Papich told
Harvey that his unauthorized contact with Rosselli would
have to be brought to Hoover’s attention. A sullen,
hungover Harvey requested only that Papich give him a
warning call if it seemed likely that Hoover was going to
make a big stink. Harvey thought it wise to describe the
incident to his. immediate superior, Deputy Director for
Plans Richard Helms, who agreed that there was no need
to brief the DCI unless a call from Hoover was expected.
Blessedly, Hoover left him alone. Occupying his full
allotment of two airline seats, America’s James Bond
lifted away from Washington in early July 1963, grateful
that the final stroke by his old nemesis had been an act of
mercy.
DESPITE AGENCY ASSURANCES to Hoover, CIA kept
trying to kill Castro after Harvey departed the scene. In
midsummer 1963, the Cuban account was turned over to
Desmond FitzGerald, formerly chief of the Agency’s Far
East Division, who asked his staff to determine whether a
tropical seashell could be fitted with explosives and
placed in an area where Castro liked to scuba-dive. The
idea was discarded by Helms, who thought it “cockeyed,
”
but FitzGerald came up with other imaginative schemes.
One was to have the leader of a U.S. delegation to Cuba
present Castro with a poisoned wetsuit as a “gift of
friendship.” Technical Services actually obtained a top quality wetsuit, coated its inside with a fungus that would
cause a chronic skin disease called “Madura foot,
” and
dusted the oxygen hose with a tubercle bacillus, but the
plot was ruined when the U.S. delegation coincidentally
presented Castro with another, uncontaminated suit on its
own initiative.
More serious was a series of events relating to Rolando
Cubela, a Cuban who was CIA’s only “mole” within
Castro’s inner circle. During Castro’s revolution, Cubela
had belonged to a communist-guerrilla cell at the
University of Havana, and had led a daring raid on the
Presidential Palace in 1957, which made him a national
hero and turned the momentum of the conflict in favor of
the rebels. After Castro’s triumph in January 1959,
Cubela was named to the number-two position in the new
Interior Ministry, in charge of state security. He also
served as president of the FEU, Castro’s revolutionary
national student organization, a position which frequently
required him to travel abroad. On one such trip to Brazil,
in early 1961, Cubela contacted CIA officers, said he was
disillusioned with the increasingly communist drift of
Castro’s regime, and volunteered to work for CIA.
Cubela struck his American contacts as somewhat
mercurial, even irrational, but there was no refusing
someone who could help plot a coup against Castro. He
was brought into CIA’s files under the cryptonym “AM/
LASH.” For almost a year and a half, CIA lost contact
with their new agent; when he suddenly turned up again,
in a safehouse in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on September 7,
1963, he volunteered to arrange Fidel’s “execution.” The
offer was relayed to FitzGerald, at CIA headquarters, who
authorized CIA officials in Brazil to tell Cubela that his
proposal was under consideration at “the highest levels”
of the U.S. government. On returning to Havana,
AM/LASH made increasing contact with CIA’s
operatives in the city, and kept pressing for U.S.
government help in arranging Castro’s death. When he
went abroad again on October 29, FitzGerald met with
him to discuss the idea. To assure Cubela that the
American government took him seriously, FitzGerald
described himself as a “personal representative of Robert
F. Kennedy.” Cubela repeatedly asked for an
assassination device, especially a “high-powered rifle
with telescopic sights that could be used to kill Castro
from a distance.” FitzGerald said he would do what he
could, and scheduled their next meeting for November 22,
1963.[second time reference made to JFK Assassination via another event of the times.DC]
All along, FitzGerald and others at CIA had assumed
that Cubela was a bona-fide agent, and that the
AM/LASH operation was secure. If he and it were not,
the consequences could be catastrophic. As Harvey had
put down in his ZR/RIFLE notes almost three years
earlier, there was always the chance that CIA
assassination plots, if discovered by intended victims or
their allies, might spur “retaliation,
” or even pre-emptive
retribution. President Kennedy himself had realized back
in November 1961 that, if U.S. officials were identified
with assassination attempts on foreign leaders such as
Castro,
“we would all be targets.” Yet here was a U.S.
official, FitzGerald, meeting with AM/LASH as the
“personal representative” of the president’s brother,
planning the assassination of the most important
communist leader outside of Moscow or Peking. When
FitzGerald’s anti-Castro task force met on September 12,
five days after Cubela’s offer to kill Castro, it was agreed
that “there was a strong likelihood that Castro would
retaliate in some way” if it were discovered that CIA was
plotting with Cubela to kill him. They went ahead,
however, on the assumption that Castro would not find
out.
In light of later events, it would be important to
determine, as the title of one CIA memo asked,
“What
Could Castro Have Known?” There could be little
question but that the Cuban dictator was at least aware of
CIA assistance to guerrilla groups generally. It was
common knowledge in Miami’s Cuban exile community
that Castro routinely sent false defectors to infiltrate and
keep him informed of any plots, and Castro later boasted,
“We knew more about what they did than they did
themselves.” Even before the bungled Bay of Pigs
invasion, operational security was so poor that Agency
activities in Miami frequently came to the attention of the
FBI. During summer 1960, for instance, a German-born
CIA officer, who used the alias Frank Bender, met a
Cuban exile leader in a Miami motel room with too-thin
walls. The occupant of the adjoining room was a
stenographer whose brother worked for the FBI. She was
bothered by the acrid smoke from Bender’s cheap cigar,
which drifted under the door between the two rooms.
Suspicious of Bender’s German accent, she listened and
took shorthand notes, which she then turned over to her
brother. The FBI recognized the nature of the
conversation, and Papich passed the notes to the CIA,
whose officers were deeply embarrassed.
The circle of anti-Castro plotters hired by Edwards and
run by Harvey was similarly porous. There had been loose
talk by Sam Giancana about a “girl” who was supposed to
put “pills” in Castro’s coffee, and those rumors, too, had been reported by Papich to a shamed Edwards at CIA.
Harvey himself worried that Castro might know about the
attempts. “Given the capabilities of Castro’s security
apparata, and the general sieve-like character of the
Cuban community in exile and the number of people who
knew at least something of the operation,
” Harvey later
said,
“I think and thought at the time that it was quite
conceivable that it had been penetrated.”[ya think? DC]
But where the Harvey-era plots had been dogged by
generalized suspicion, the FBI had more definite evidence
that CIA’s post-Harvey plots were in danger of
compromise. On October 10, 1963, the Bureau was told
by an informant in Miami that CIA had been meeting with
“a Cuban official” identified as Rolando Cubela.
According to a memo that same day from the FBI’s
Miami Field Office to headquarters, the Miami informant
knew the date and location of one of Cubela’s meetings
with CIA. Since Castro’s agents had thoroughly
penetrated the same Miami Cuban community in which
the Bureau informant gossiped and lived, there was a
serious danger that CIA’s meetings with Cubela might be
known to Castro.
The Bureau could not have failed to know that such
information would have been desired or valued by CIA.
There had been a routine pattern of cooperation on
matters pertaining to the Cuban-exile community in
Miami since March 1962, when the two agencies began
conducting joint debriefings to exploit what a CIA memo
called the “intelligence potential of Cuban ‘colonies’ ” in
Miami and New Orleans. The Agency had regularly
forwarded to Hoover, via Papich, updated lists of anti-Castro organizations, and the Bureau had kept CIA
current about the doings of such Castro fronts as the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee. That the Bureau had learned
that the Agency was meeting with Cubela should certainly
have prompted CIA to scrutinize the security of the
Cubela operation.
But the October 1963 report was not passed to CIA.
Nor did the Bureau tell the Agency about allegations
that Santos Trafficante, the key figure in CIA’s preCubela assassination attempts, was also really working for
Castro—and that the president’s life might be in danger.
This information came to the FBI from Jose Aleman, an
anti-Castro exile in Miami. Aleman had been a co-conspirator with Cubela during the revolution, but
afterward became disillusioned with Castro’s overt
Marxism and emigrated to the U.S. By September 1962,
one of Aleman’s distant cousins, who had allegedly
helped spring Trafficante from a Cuban jail, had
introduced Aleman to the mobster at a Miami Beach
hotel. Disturbed by what had transpired at that meeting,
Aleman immediately began informing on Trafficante to
George Davis and Paul Scranton of the FBI’s Miami Field
Office. Trafficante had offered to get him a loan from
Jimmy Hoffa’s International Brotherhood of Teamsters,
and while they were on that subject, Trafficante had
mentioned, in passing, that because of the Kennedy
administration’s harassment of certain individuals, JFK
was finished. According to Aleman, Trafficante had said
simply,
“He is going to be hit.”
Such words would seem ominous enough in hindsight,
but at the time Trafficante’s hints were apparently judged
mere gangland braggadocio. Aleman got little reaction
from the FBI when, starting in late 1962 and continuing
through the summer of 1963, three Cubans he had known
in Havana appeared in Miami and then left for Texas.
Aleman suspected them of being Cuban agents and, he
later said, told this to the Bureau. “I advised the FBI in
long conversations that I thought something was going to
happen,
” Aleman said. “I was telling them to be careful.”
Thirty years later, with Bureau records of his debriefings
remaining classified, Aleman’s accusations would resist
positive confirmation. But FBI agent Davis, when advised
of Aleman’s allegations, would affirm: “He’s a reliable
individual.”
A possible threat to the president’s life was only part
of Aleman’s dark message. He was also convinced that
Trafficante was tied in to Cubela, and that both
Trafficante and Cubela were agents of Fidel Castro. He
did not then know that Trafficante was the point man for
CIA’s attempts on Castro’s life, or that Cubela was CIA’s
“mole” in Castro’s junta. He only knew that Cubela and
Trafficante were “linked” and that, as he said,
“something
was wrong in some way.” Cubela was a closet
communist, and the whole Trafficante story was
suspicious. Both before and after the revolution,
Trafficante had run a corrupt bolita (numbers racket) that
was used to pay off Castro’s secret agents. (Aleman did
not know it, but such suspicions were paralleled in a
Federal Bureau of Narcotics memo dated July 21, 1961,
reporting rumors that Castro had kept Trafficante
confined after the revolution merely “to make it appear
that he had a personal dislike for Castro, when in fact
Trafficante is an agent of Castro,
” his “outlet for illegal
contraband in the country.” The Narcotics Bureau memo
also confirmed Aleman on the bolita scheme, stating
outright,
“Fidel Castro has operatives in Miami making
heavy bets with Santos Trafficante Jr.’s organization.”)
But the FBI made no attempts to verify Aleman’s
ramblings about Cubela’s and Trafficante’s loyalties. The
agents were interested primarily in the Mafioso’s business
dealings, because he was on RFK’s “ten most wanted” list
and the Bureau was under intense pressure from the
White House to develop evidence for prosecution.
Besides, there was no “law” against being in bed with
Castro.
Of course, it would have behooved the Bureau to refer
Aleman to CIA, or at least to have referred his allegations
there through Papich, if the potential importance of
Aleman’s allegations to the Agency had been understood.
But the Agency had never told the Bureau that they were
using Trafficante to plot Castro’s death; even with Papich,
Harvey had refused to name anyone beyond Rosselli. Nor
had CIA ever told the Bureau it was using Cubela. The
FBI therefore had no way of knowing that Cubela or
Trafficante would be of special interest to the Agency.
They might have passed on Aleman’s information under
the aegis of routine cooperation on Cuban matters in the
U.S., but even after Cubela’s Agency connections became
known to the Bureau in October 1963, they did not. If
they had, CIA might have investigated the matter and
concluded that Cubela and Trafficante were agents of
Castro, as Aleman alleged, and that both had kept Castro
abreast of CIA attempts to kill him. As it happened, the
Agency did not reach these conclusions until after
President Kennedy was dead, when a re-examination of
the Cubela case turned up two disturbing coincidences.
The first was the timing of CIA’s meeting with Cubela
in Paris, at which the Cuban was promised that the
Agency would provide him with everything he needed to
kill Castro—according to CIA records,
“telescopic scope,
silencer, all the money he wanted.” In the meantime,
Cubela was given a ballpoint pen rigged with a
hypodermic needle so fine that a victim would not
perceive its insertion. It was suggested to Cubela that he
use the deadly but commercially available poison
Blackleaf-40. The Cuban did not think much of the
device, and asked CIA to “come up with something more
sophisticated.” This meeting occurred on November 22,
and it was interrupted by the news from Dallas. As a CIA
report stonily stated: “At the very moment President
Kennedy was shot, a CIA officer was meeting with a
Cuban agent in Paris and giving him an assassination
device for use against Castro.”
The second coincidence also suggested a link between
CIA’s Cubela plots and danger to President Kennedy.
Incredibly, on Saturday, September 7, 1963—the very
day that Cubela, in Brazil, was meeting with U.S.
intelligence officers and offering to kill Castro—the
Cuban dictator just happened to go to the Brazilian
Embassy in Havana. Finding a U.S. reporter, Daniel
Harker, Castro approached him, and said: “United States
leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans
to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be
safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of
themselves since they, too, can be the cause of an attempt
which will cause their death.”
CERTAINLY THE FBI had little reason to suspect in
November 1963 that CIA assets, originally recruited to
kill Castro, might have really been “turned around” by
Castro to go after President Kennedy. That was the theory
of President Lyndon Johnson, after he read a 1967 CIA
study on the Cubela-Trafficante plots, but in fall 1963 that
belief would have presupposed the bringing together of
facts which CIA and FBI knew separately, but which
were not integrated in any single counterintelligence
brain. Even so, the events of November 22 might have
been prevented if CIA had told the Bureau everything it
knew about contacts between the KGB and Lee Harvey
Oswald.
The two agencies had been exchanging data on Oswald
at irregular intervals since November 2, 1957, when a
CIA memo recorded that “Mr. Papich would like to know
what we know about this ex-Marine who recently
defected in the USSR.” Two days later, Papich was
advised that CIA “had no info on subject.” After
Oswald’s return to the United States in June 1962, the
FBI kept a loose watch on his activities—he had come
back with a Russian wife, which was suspicious in its
own right—and right up through November 1963, FBI
reports on Oswald’s pro-Castro pamphleteering were
finding their way into Oswald’s file at CIA. The Agency
could do no more than receive these reports and file them,
because Oswald was a U.S. citizen in the United States,
and clearly an FBI charge.
But the jurisdiction blurred when Oswald traveled to
Mexico in late September 1963. A CIA station officer in
Mexico later affirmed that Oswald “became a person of
great interest to us” as a result of that visit. “We thought
at first that Oswald might be a dangerous potential
defector from the USA to the Soviet Union … so we kept
a special watch on him and his activities.” Yet even if he
was in a foreign country, Oswald was still an American
citizen, and CIA was not supposed to investigate
Americans without a special request from the FBI. No
such request had been received. in the Oswald case; his
presence in Mexico was detected by accident. As the
Agency informed the Bureau on October 10, 1963:
1. On 1 October 1963 a reliable source reported that an
American male, who identified himself as Lee Oswald,
contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring
whether the Embassy had received any news concerning a
telegram which had been sent to Washington. The
American was described as approximately 35 years old,
with an athletic build, about six feet tall, with a receding
hairline.
2. It is believed that OSWALD may be identical to Lee
Henry [sic] OSWALD, born on 8 October 1939 in New
Orleans, Louisiana, a former U.S. Marine who defected to
the Soviet Union in October 1959 and later made
arrangement through the United States Embassy in
Moscow to return to the United States with his Russian born wife … and their child.
3. The information in paragraph one is being
disseminated to your representatives in Mexico City. Any
further information received on this subject will be
furnished you.
It wasn’t. On October 9, the day before FBI was
informed of Oswald’s visit, the CIA station in Mexico
City had cabled headquarters with additional data,
suggesting that Oswald might be even more “dangerous”
than first feared. According to the cable, an American
male speaking broken Russian, who “said his name was
Lee Oswald,
” visited the Soviet Embassy on September
28 and spoke with Consul Valeriy V. Kostikov. The
Agency had obtained that information by tapping the
embassy’s phones in Mexico City, and also had some
highly placed informants within the embassy, who
confirmed the Oswald-Kostikov meeting. According to a
later CIA memo, it was suspected that Kostikov, while
“functioning overtly as a consul,
” was also “a staff officer
of the KGB … connected with the Thirteenth, or‘ liquid
affairs’ department, whose responsibilities include
assassination.” Although it is unclear when CIA’s
suspicions about Kostikov first arose, a declassified CIA
document shows that they existed by at least November
23, 1963, when one of Angleton’s staffers shared the
Agency’s fears with Papich. Two officials who later saw
secret files on the case, however, insist that CIA’s worries
about Kostikov and Department 13 went back even
earlier. According to Clarence Kelley, one of Hoover’s
successors as FBI director, and James Johnston, a counsel
to the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA suspected that
Kostikov was an assassinations specialist in October
1963. If Kelley and Johnston are correct, any report to the
FBI of Oswald’s meeting with Kostikov should have
given the Bureau clear grounds for reopening its security
case on Oswald, and for watching him quite closely on
November 22.
But things did not happen that way. On October 18,
CIA did advise the FBI that Oswald had met with
Kostikov—but failed to mention their belief that Kostikov
was an assassinations specialist for the KGB. Kelley, who
in 1975 reviewed the problem of CIA-FBI cooperation on
the Oswald case, saw the Kostikov blunder as typical of
“the reluctance-to-share attitude prevalent throughout all
government agencies at the time. Not only did the CIA
withhold the true identity of Kostikov, but they also made
it clear that the information they were willing to mete out
was ’of the highest confidentiality/ and should go no
further … Thus, the one FBI agent responsible for
maintaining surveillance on Oswald was kept in the
dark.”
That “one agent” was James Hosty of the Dallas Field
Office, who had held the “Oswald ticket” in Texas for
almost a year and a half. Hosty thought Oswald strange,
but had no reason, at the time, to believe he was
dangerous. “There’s no question but that I should have
known about Kostikov, who he was, and the threat he
represented,
” an embittered Hosty later said. “I first heard
of the Oswald meeting with Kostikov a full month before
the assassination—but somebody forgot to let Dallas
know exactly how dangerous Kostikov was.”
Presumably CIA had its own reasons for not telling the
FBI who Kostikov was. Perhaps it wanted to protect the
security of its technical and human sources within the
Soviet Embassy. Perhaps it was feared that Hoover would
do something heavy-handed, as he had been doing since
the days of Dusko Popov in 1941, and as he had done in
the case of another Popov, Pyotr, in 1958. If the Bureau
suddenly saw Oswald as a subversive meeting with a
KGB assassinations specialist, instead of a crank meeting
a friendly consular official, and interrogated Oswald or
sent legal attaches sniffing around Mexico City, instead of
letting CIA handle that end of it—the KGB would surely
suspect a leak in its operations, and the Agency could lose
its most important sources in Mexico. Perhaps, too, CIA
simply assumed that the FBI already knew who Kostikov
was. A weak set of excuses, to be sure, but no better ones
may be mustered to explain why CIA failed to tell the FBI
that Kostikov was a suspected member of KGB’s
Department 13.
“That omission,
” Kelley later said,
“cost JFK his life.
Had Jim Hosty and the Dallas office known the nature of
the Russian with whom Oswald had met at the Soviet
Embassy in Mexico City, the FBI in Dallas would have
(after learning that the President was coming to Dallas)
undoubtedly taken all necessary steps to neutralize
Oswald—perhaps by interviewing him on November 22.
And history would have taken a different turn … Had our
intelligence communities pooled their information on
Oswald, had the Oswald-Kostikov-Mexico City
information been distributed to the New Orleans and
Dallas field offices in time for them to act then, without a
doubt, JFK would not have died in Dallas on November
22, 1963.”
TO ALLEGE THAT CIA-FBI fumbling contributed to
President Kennedy’s death was not necessarily to say that
Kostikov, or the KGB, ordered Kennedy killed. Soviet
intelligence officers, like those of any nation, routinely
carried out consular work unrelated to their clandestine
functions, in order to preserve diplomatic “cover”;
perhaps Kostikov had simply been helping Oswald with
his visa request. Nor did the FBI, believing CIA’s anti-Castro plots to have been terminated with Harvey
transfer’s, have any reason to suspect that Kennedy had
been killed to avenge attempts on Castro’s life. But
whereas the FBI refused to believe that Oswald had acted
as part of any communist conspiracy, CIA, in coming
years, would not be so eager to dismiss the possibility. If
liaison problems contributed to the Dallas tragedy, they
would even more thoroughly impede its investigation, and
devolve into a projected fight that precluded the truth
from being inarguably known. The fight would be bound
up with the search for Soviet moles, sparked by a 1961
defector, and would ultimately lead to a formal break in
relations between FBI and CIA.
next
BOOK THREE
THE POETRY OF
DECEPTION
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