IN THE END it was not the Baltic coastal plain but the rugged Balkans that witnessed the first big CIA paramilitary operation. This plan, in conjunction with the British, aimed to unseat the Communist government of Albania, a small state on the eastern littoral of the Adriatic Sea. Geography made the campaign possible: Albania bordered on just two other nations, Greece and Yugoslavia, by 1949 both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania’s “Iron Curtain,” isolated from the remainder of the Soviet bloc, became vulnerable. At the same time bases were available on the island of Malta and in Italy, both only a short distance away.
The CIA intended Albania to be a rollback of the Iron Curtain. To the degree a strategic rationale existed for this campaign, it lay in preventing Soviet access to warm-water ports, especially on the Adriatic, crucial to naval control of the central Mediterranean. At the moment the action began the CIA had intelligence that Soviet sailors and advisers were setting up a naval base there. The notion of creating an internal opposition to depose Enver Hoxha, wartime resistance leader who had risen to Communist dictator, came from the SIS. Small bands of commandos were to be infiltrated to set up local guerrilla groups, which could be coordinated and supported from the outside.
The plan, which the British called Operation Valuable and the CIA knew as BG/Fiend,* was discussed internally by the British in late 1948. British difficulties with Albania had begun with incidents two years earlier in which British warships were fired upon. Later a pair of destroyers were mined and sunk in the narrow Corfu Channel along the Albanian coast. Although the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) had armed and advised Enver Hoxha during the war, by 1949 London had decided to overthrow him. In February British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin agreed to the plan to “detach” Albania from the Soviet bloc. The Hoxha government, meanwhile, further encouraged British hostility by refusing to accept an International Court of Justice decision against Albania in the Corfu Channel case.
The British wanted American help, especially financial backing and the use of certain facilities. In March, William Hayter, a senior British intelligence officer, led a delegation of SIS and Foreign Office officials to Washington to argue for American support of Operation Valuable and to present a broad range of alternatives for the prosecution of the Cold War. The Americans responded with alacrity, and DCI Hillenkoetter consulted the 10/2 panel. A month later Frank Wisner took senior officials with him on a trip to London where the Albania plans were finalized. The deal would be sealed with a handshake over lunch at Buck’s Club.
Coordinated by a joint committee in Washington, the British representatives for Project Valuable/Fiend were the SIS liaison man and their Balkan expert at the embassy. Americans included Robert Joyce, representing the State Department and its Policy Planning Staff, and James McCargar for the Office of Policy Coordination, whom Frank Lindsay assigned to take the lead. McCargar, a former diplomat pulled into quasi-covert work in his last assignments, had found the task so rewarding that he moved to the CIA. The first OPC field officer assigned would be Robert Low, a veteran of OSS/Cairo, who as a journalist had recently reported from the Balkans. The British initially provided almost all the manpower—it was the Brits who had people with Albania experience from the war, along with well-versed paramilitary experts. Lindsay, whose wartime OSS service had been in Yugoslavia, well knew that.
Hopes in Washington were high. Fiend was, Frank Wisner exclaimed to Joyce, “a clinical experiment to see whether larger rollback operations would be feasible elsewhere.”
On his London visit that April, Wisner suggested the use of Wheelus Field, a U.S. air base in Libya, to mount the campaign. The British countered that Malta, a British possession, lay much closer to the objective. Malta became the training and boat base, though some supplies transited through Wheelus. Wisner ruefully told an SIS officer, “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find that the British own an island within easy reach.” British project director David Smiley flew out to the island in the spring. His cover was as deputy chief of staff to the commanding general. On Malta Smiley found an old castle, Fort Binjimma, suitable for a training center. Built during the Napoleonic wars, only a rough trail led to Binjimma, so strange eyes could be detected, while the place was large enough for the trainees and Smiley’s staff. Smiley also procured a boat for agent landings, and SIS rented a villa on Corfu as an observation post. The SIS boss further induced a number of paramilitary experts from wartime days to participate, including Harold Perkins, who ran operations. Smiley supervised the training.
Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia, which had halted its aid to Greek leftist guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948, might participate. Although the Yugoslavs had approached the United States through CIA channels for military aid, and depended on this assistance to forestall any intervention by Russia, they decided they did not wish to increase Soviet hostility by acting against Albania. Exhausted by its civil war, Greece also wanted no part of Valuable/Fiend, though certain Greek generals tacitly assisted the CIA.
For Michael Burke the adventure began at the Algonquin Hotel. This New York landmark was famous in literary annals as the home of the “Vicious Circle,” the luncheon group that had graced its Oak Room in prewar years and included such luminaries as Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, and Harpo Marx, among others. When Burke got a phone call from a man at OPC, he decided the restaurant would serve perfectly for a quiet meeting of spies. They arranged a lunch. The American authors and English character actors who frequented the Oak Room, Burke knew, would have laughed at the idea that the men at the next table were plotting the secret war.
Two men came up from Washington to talk with Burke. They had gotten his name from a friend, a former colleague with the Office of Strategic Services, most likely Frank Lindsay. A college football star at the University of Pennsylvania, during the war E. Michael Burke had served with the navy, been seconded to the OSS, and been sent into Italy with a team in connection with the surrender of that Axis nation. Toward the end of the war Burke had gone on to Yugoslavia and worked with Lindsay to support partisan activities. Another member of his team had been John Ringling North, of the circus family, providing Burke with connections in show business circles. He parlayed them into a postwar job as technical adviser to Warner Bros. studios on their 1946 film tribute to the OSS, Cloak and Dagger. Some believe Burke was the model for the role played by Gary Cooper in that movie. By 1949 Burke had established himself in the film industry but become restless. At the Algonquin lunch he had to suppress his excitement and let his CIA interlocutors talk him into coming to the agency as a contract officer.
The blandishments were spectacular—at least at lunch: multiple martinis, two bottles of fine wine, lobster salad, veal. The CIA men described the project in words that could have come straight from Frank Wisner: this was to be “an exploratory action, a clinical case,” and close to Burke’s experience. He volunteered. But the agency, so new it had scarcely thought through the requirements for clandestine operations, had no idea what cover identity Burke might use. It reassured him that Lindsay, who really had paramilitary experience, held the ultimate responsibility. Not to worry, Burke told the agency men, he’d provide his own cover. Michael Burke moved to Rome and pretended to be opening a new film company.
In Rome Burke began seeing Albanian exiles of different political colorations, with U.S. dollars the inducement to bury their differences. For their part the SIS called upon Julian Amery and Neil McLean, who had worked for SOE in Albania during the war, to sound out their old contacts in Rome, Athens, and Cairo. All were aware of the difficult path ahead. The exiles, Burke recalled, were “more a rallying point than a valid basis for a political revolution.” Nevertheless the emigrés constituted the most important element of the project.
The politics of Project Fiend were byzantine. The most accessible Albanian leaders, those of the Balli Kombetar, or National Front, centered in Rome and Athens, had collaborated with the Germans and Italians in the war (though Balli had also waged partisan warfare against them). One leader had been interior minister under the Germans, directly implicated in a February 1944 massacre. Another had been justice minister for the Italian occupation government. At meetings in Rome in June and July 1949, Burke and Amery nonetheless brought Balli into the operation.
Immediately following those meetings, the Western spies flew to Cairo and called on exiled King Zog. Originally a tribal potentate in central Albania, Zog had seized power in a 1924 coup and several years later made himself king. Zog now had his own Legaliteti political movement, led by Ferhat Abbas. When Zog learned the West had already approached the Balli Kombetar, which opposed the monarchy, he furiously demanded the delegates leave.
Julian Amery saved the day, arguing that the time was not ripe to reestablish a kingdom. King Zog needed allies if he wished to attain that goal.
“He was like Talleyrand,” recalled Wisner’s representative, Robert Low. “I’ve never seen such diplomacy in my life.”
Zog relented.
In Paris on August 26, Albanian exile leaders held a press conference, announcing formation of an Albanian National Committee. This group then secretly toured Britain. There OPC psychological warfare chief Joe Bryan helped the Albanians prepare press releases for their public launching. Bryan got a stay at the Ritz Hotel out of the endeavor, but the arguments among the Albanians proved so acrimonious that he considered the trip wasted.
The Albanians visited the United States more openly, sponsored by the OPC-funded Committee for a Free Europe. Acquiring American entry visas proved especially problematic given their history of collaboration with the Nazis and their lack of passports. Many of these same people had previously been denied entry. But OPC stepped in, arguing the visas were necessary for national security. The CIA did not care to be too closely involved, however; Bob Joyce reported to State, “My friends state that they would prefer not to approach the visa division directly in this case.”
Eventually the Albanians got their documents, survived further misadventures with U.S. immigration officials in Canada, and arrived in America. They appeared in New York and Washington and on September 19, 1949, were received by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Llewelyn E. Thompson. Two of the Albanians opened an office for the national committee in New York. There, on October 3, a senior Balli Kombetar politician, the seventy-year-old Midhat Frasheri, died suddenly of a heart attack at the Lexington Hotel. Robert Low, called in by the police to identify the dead Albanian, had to explain his connection to Frasheri.
By coincidence, the same night the British boat Stormie Seas took two parties, totaling twenty partisans, across the Adriatic from Corfu to land in Albania. The “pixies,” as SIS called the Albanians, had been training on Malta since July. This first foray met with disaster: four of the paramilitary men were killed, the others escaped into Greece. Albanian government security forces had evidently known the time and locations of the landings, and they were waiting.
One big problem with Operation Valuable, as it later turned out, was that one of the project’s top men was a Soviet spy. That officer, H. A. R. “Kim” Philby, then beginning his tour as SIS liaison in Washington, held one of the two British seats on the joint coordination committee. But Philby did not reach America until a few days after the first pixie failure so he could not be charged with it, though the subsequent course of the Albanian project had much to do with the machinations of the British double agent.
The immediate problem for the secret warriors was to replace Frasheri at the head of the Albanian political organization. At OPC, Carmel Offie pushed strongly for the nationalist Hassan Dosti, who had collaborated with the Italian fascists during the war. Dosti proved to lack the political support to exercise this role. Offie himself soon left the CIA, an early example of a homosexual drummed out of the agency for fear of potential blackmail.
American and British leaders discussed Project Fiend at the highest level during Ernest Bevin’s September 1949 visit to Washington. A CIA report concluded that “a purely internal Albanian uprising at this time is not indicated, and, if undertaken, would have little chance of success.” Although presumably the CIA analysts were unaware of Valuable/Fiend, they noted nine weaknesses of the Hoxha government while highlighting greatly strengthened Soviet control measures plus continued improvement of Hoxha’s 65,000-man army and 15,000-strong security force. Significantly, the report concluded, “the possibility of foreign intervention, in conjunction with widespread popular unrest and antigovernment hostility . . . represents a serious threat to the regime.”
An Albanian campaign fit squarely with U.S. policy President Truman approved in December 1948, including an intent to “place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power and control, particularly on the relationships between Moscow and the satellite countries.” The goals were given concrete expression in a basic policy paper on Eastern Europe on which Secretary of State Dean Acheson relied when speaking to Bevin. The policy provided for an ideological offensive on all fronts that “should be maintained not only on the overt but on the covert plane.” In particular, “we should increase the support and refuge we may be able to offer to leaders and groups in these countries who are western-oriented.”
In his conversation with Acheson, Bevin asked whether the United States basically agreed with the overthrow of the Hoxha government. Acheson replied in the affirmative.
“Are there,” wondered the British foreign secretary, “any kings around that could be put in?”
The picture seemed less bright after the failed October landings. A December 1949 CIA report worried that loyalty to King Zog might be eclipsed by cleavages among the nationalist factions:
The settlement of differences among the exiled Albanians to provide leadership and coordination is a prerequisite for any effective Albanian resistance against the Hoxha government. Not even this turn of affairs, however, would assure the achievement of any successful resistance without material aid from an outside power. This combination of factors necessary for the overthrow of the Hoxha regime is, as yet, lacking.
Political differences ultimately limited recruiting to strict quotas: 40 percent from the Balli Kombetar, 40 percent from Zog’s Legaliteti, the rest from other factions.
After its disappointing beginning, Valuable/Fiend continued for years, consuming increasing resources. In 1950 the CIA began mounting its own pixie expeditions, forming a unit at Karlsfeld, Germany, called Company 400, an initiative begun by Carmel Offie. The unit started with about fifty Albanians but quintupled over time. The CIA set up bases there and in Greece. Seven Poles with wartime experience in Royal Air Force partisan-support units, led by the former Polish colonel Roman Rudkowski, were hired to fly transport aircraft. During the summer OPC used the planes for leaflet drops, with propaganda materials created by the CIA’s new Psychological and Paramilitary Staff under Tracy Barnes, recently hired away from his law career. Crafters of the leaflets included E. Howard Hunt in an early CIA assignment. The first unilateral CIA pixie insertion occurred by airdrop in late November 1950—nine Albanians drawn from Company 400.
Kim Philby remained in Washington through the summer of 1951, when he came under suspicion and was recalled. Although doubts focused upon Philby as the result of the defections to Russia of two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, CIA’s chief of counterintelligence may have wondered about the Albanian fiascoes as well. In the interim there had been a dozen infiltrations with almost fifty pixies. Virtually all those staged by sea or air had miscarried. In one spectacular failure in July 1951, with Philby already under investigation, three groups were parachuted in by OPC—one was obliterated on landing, one was surrounded in a house and burned alive, while two pixies of the last group of four were killed and the other two captured, with an embarrassing public trial in Albania that fall.
Only overland infiltration seemed to have any success. A group in September 1950 managed to survive for two months inside Albania but could raise no resistance. The most successful pixie was Hamit Matjani, a CIA favorite called the Tiger, who made fifteen incursions. He habitually moved overland and secretly. Matjani’s sixteenth mission, a parachute drop, became his last. The Tiger and his party were ambushed by Hoxha security forces.
Matjani’s last mission had actually been set up by Hoxha’s own security men with Soviet advice. After capturing a radio and two officers of Zog’s bodyguard in the spring of 1952, they forced the captives to use their radio to mislead the CIA with rosy reports of growing resistance and appeals for more aid—the same kind of deception with which the Soviets had succeeded in the Baltic. The SIS, frustrated by boat landing failures in the summer, withdrew completely. The Americans carried on, to drop Matjani to his death in May 1953.
The Hoxha government paraded captives for a week-long show trial in April 1954. Not even the CIA could continue after that. Frank Wisner had simply been wrong when he insisted to Philby at an early stage, “We’ll get it right next time!”
Widespread disillusionment followed the Albanian experience, not least among the former “pixies.” Halil Nerguti complains, “We were used as an experiment. We were a small part of a big game, pawns that could be sacrificed.” Michael Burke, OPC station chief in Rome until 1951, voiced a general opinion when he observed, “In the end it was not possible to do without overt air and military support from England and the United States or somewhere. You couldn’t do it just with the locals.”
British officer David Smiley moved on to the elite military Special Air Service, then became a soldier of fortune. CIA ideologue E. Howard Hunt “welcomed” orders for transfer to the Western Hemisphere Division. Michael Burke, promoted from contract to regular CIA officer, went on to Germany where he ran agent drops directly into the Soviet Union.
It fell to the Southeast Europe Division chief, John H. Richardson, to liquidate Project Fiend. A wartime veteran of the Counter Intelligence Corps in Italy, Richardson had been renowned for his skill, tact, and the apparent ease with which he persuaded Italian townspeople to accept Allied military governments. Flying to Rome after the show-trial disaster, Richardson had the most delicate of missions. Joseph Leib, the Rome station chief, still believed in the adventure.
Richardson sat down over drinks with the station chief and got right to the point. Albanian activities would end immediately.
“Then,” asked Leib, “it’s all over?”
“All over.”
“I don’t know what they’ll say about it in London.” An aide accompanying Richardson noted that tears glistened amid the stubble on the overworked man’s face.
Richardson responded gently, “London already knows.”
The fighting in Albania may have been fierce, but some of the dirtiest, muddiest covert warfare took place right in Washington, D.C. There the Central Intelligence Agency quickly outgrew its buildings—four old ones at 2430 E Street, across from what is today the State Department, plus the four “temporary” ones down the slight hill and by the Reflecting Pool. Before long various cells of spooks were scattered in more than two dozen places around town. And as the Cold War heated up, so too did the pressures to do more. The number of ways CIA elements could stumble over one another grew steadily. Especially acute were the possibilities for foul-ups between Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination and the espionage mavens of the Office of Special Operations, headed by Brig. Gen. Robert A. Schow. Every time an OPC station opened in the field—and there were five new ones in the first year alone—the possibilities for confusion increased exponentially.
A host of reasons underlay the resentments between OPC and OSO. For one thing, Wisner’s shop had been born rich: the OPC took over the unexpended funds of the CIA unit it replaced, made deals with the Treasury to use funds in other accounts, and got Marshall Plan money along with its own regular budgets. Agency wags joked about OPCers with their Jaguars while OSO officers drove broken-down Fords, but the humor betokened real differences. With the rush to build a capability for secret warfare, the usual hiring regulations had been suspended for OPC. Wisner frequently offered recruits employment at higher ranks, matching their civilian pay elsewhere.
General Schow’s clandestine service people for the most part were from the Office of Strategic Services and stayed in intelligence through the lean years after 1945, considering themselves true professionals. Wisner’s Wurlitzer had a proportion of former OSS officers, but they were coming back to spying after a time that had witnessed huge changes. They were the amateurs, cowboys with missionary zeal. Engaged in their campaigns of subversion and psychological warfare, Wisner’s people viewed the OSO types as pedestrian, “ ‘washerwomen gossiping over their laundry,’ ” as Frank Wisner colorfully put it.
The OSO remained under a strict CIA chain of command while Wisner played his games, with OPC suspended among Central Intelligence, the State Department, and the Pentagon. And in the field the key conflict remained the fact that both units wanted the same foreign folks on their payrolls. Stalwarts of OSO like Richard Helms felt Wisner’s officers paid little attention to security discipline, coordination, or cover—key aspects of espionage tradecraft. Michael Burke’s New York lunch in the early days of Project Fiend seems to bear that out.
As Admiral Hillenkoetter struggled to establish the CIA, officials of the National Security Council wrestled with how to control it. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal wanted supervision by the NSC executive secretary, at that time Sidney Souers, who had returned to Washington at President Truman’s behest. Souers wanted no part of the job. He acerbically told Forrestal that if he’d wanted to manage intelligence he would still be the DCI. Hillenkoetter suggested that an outside panel be asked to review and report on U.S. intelligence management and missions. The president approved in January 1948. Allen Dulles, the Sullivan & Cromwell lawyer and intelligence activist, agreed to chair the panel. Forrestal made the appointment and, on Dulles’s advice, those of two more members, William H. Jackson and Matthias F. Correa. All three were lawyers with wartime intelligence experience.
Completed over the summer and fall, the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report considered every aspect of U.S. intelligence practice and had much to do with the emergence of an integrated intelligence “community.” It implicitly criticized Hillenkoetter, whose days after that were numbered. But beyond its conclusions on CIA leadership, on the community, on intelligence estimates, and on NSC supervision, the January 1949 report bore specific implications for the Office of Policy Coordination. Of course both Dulles and Jackson were friends of Wisner, and their report explicitly advocated strengthened covert action. Yet at the same time the study pointed to duplication and confusion between the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations. Truman’s NSC ordered State and the Pentagon to collaborate on a paper that would turn the Dulles-Jackson-Correa report into a set of recommendations, completed and adopted by the National Security Council that July. One of these was that the CIA establish an “operations division” to include both OSO and OPC. Thus by the summer of 1949, even as Wisner’s Wurlitzer took the field for covert operations in both Albania and the Soviet Union, President Truman’s goals envisioned folding OPC more closely into the CIA. Reaching that goal turned out to require three years of hard work.
Hillenkoetter responded after about a month with a plan for the new directorate to bring together spies and secret warriors. The initiative required a revision of Truman’s covert operations authority, NSC-10/2, the one that had cost the State Department and Pentagon direct control over Wisner’s Wurlitzer. State took no action at all. The issue languished for months while OPC mounted missions in the field. Meanwhile the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb, marking a radical advance in its military technology. Truman ordered a full-scale policy review resulting in a now-famous paper, NSC-68. U.S. Cold War actions should ascend to a new level of intensity, according to NSC-68, including increased political and psychological warfare. While the cost of NSC-68 was still being calculated, in June 1950 North Korea invaded South Korea, initiating a bitter war. Within days of the attack Admiral Hillenkoetter requested sea duty, a neat solution to his replacement. The admiral soon left the CIA to command a cruiser division off the Korean coast. The onset of the Korean War triggered a whole new problem for the Office of Policy Coordination. Under the NSC-10/2 directive, in wartime the U.S. military would dictate missions for the secret warriors. But Korea, a limited war, did not engage the bulk of OPC resources, nor was it the main stage upon which the secret wars played. Suddenly even Frank Wisner had reason to demand changes in his NSC authority.
Truman already had Hillenkoetter’s successor lined up. He was Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, the fifty-four-year-old officer who had been wartime chief of staff to Allied supreme commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. From 1946 to 1949 Smith had served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. Now commanding the U.S. First Army, he was a reluctant recruit, repeatedly protesting his ignorance of intelligence work and advancing his health problems as an added objection. Smith had had several operations for ulcers, culminating in 1950 when doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital removed most of his stomach. The Korean War began as the general recuperated. Truman prevailed on Smith, in view of the serious situation, to take on the CIA job. Sworn in on October 7, 1950, this no-nonsense DCI hit the intelligence community like a hurricane.
Walter Bedell Smith had the clout to make things happen and sufficient prestige among the U.S. military to knock down their opposition to CIA’s role. The military intelligence units had resisted acknowledging the primacy of the director of central intelligence or fully participating in the community’s board of directors, then known as the Intelligence Advisory Committee. Smith turned them into “a tame act at a circus,” in the words of Paul Borel, a top CIA administrative officer. Smith performed similarly with respect to the Office of Policy Coordination, simply announcing he had taken full control. In view of his weak intelligence background, General Smith had demanded a deputy who made up for that shortcoming; the man appointed was William Harding Jackson, co-author of the 1949 CIA panel study and Frank Wisner’s friend and former law partner. Jackson, Wisner, and CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston drafted new language for the NSC-10/2 directive, which they took to General Smith. Smith threw the paper in the trash. Wisner objected that he remained bound to the 10/2 panel. Smith told him to forget it—as DCI, the general said, he had all the authority necessary to direct OPC. The arrangements made in 1948 had been overtaken by events and were no longer valid.
As for Wisner’s problem with wartime military control, in mid-December General Smith persuaded the National Security Council to suspend the relevant paragraph of the NSC-10/2 directive. He promised to draft a fresh revision and gave Wisner the task. The OPC chief consulted the interagency panel where, it should be noted, he had good friends: Bob Joyce still represented State while Gen. John Magruder, once head of the pre-CIA Strategic Services Unit, stood in for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Admiral Leslie Stevens, member for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been naval attaché at the Moscow embassy when Bedell Smith headed that mission. Smith’s review of the budget for 1951 sharpened the issue, for he found OPC planning covert operations far beyond anything envisioned in 1948, just because no one else was doing it. Seeking NSC guidance, Smith sent the White House a paper on the pace and scope of covert action. The JCS objected, and their paper went to the White House as well. It came back studded with scathing marginal notes in Truman’s own hand, one of the few times Harry Truman ever commented in writing on intelligence matters. Meanwhile General Magruder told Secretary of Defense George Marshall that DCI Smith sought a fair solution. To avoid an open battle, Marshall had subordinates and JCS officers meet Bedell Smith and the 10/2 panelists to hammer out an answer. The Joint Chiefs went along with a formula under which they continued to send orders in wartime, but the contents were to be determined by the director of central intelligence. This arrangement would be codified in the revised directive NSC-10/5, which Truman approved in the fall of 1951.
There remained the internal struggle between the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations. Director Smith made a start at untangling the conflict by designating personal representatives whom he dispatched to the most important CIA stations abroad. These persons were in neither the OPC nor the OSO chains of command, but they were to be kept in the picture by both divisions and could alert General Smith when problems arose. Meanwhile at headquarters Smith moved to impose coordination by making both offices report to a common boss: in January 1951 he created the Directorate for Plans (hereafter to be called the Directorate for Operations or DO). No doubt at the behest of Bill Jackson, General Smith brought in Allen Dulles, who for several months had been advising him as a consultant, as deputy director for operations (DDO).
Brains at CIA came up with the idea of bringing better cooperation between Wisner’s Wurlitzer and the Office of Special Operations by collocating them. In March 1951 Wisner and the OSO chief, Gen. Willard G. Wyman, agreed. The gambit caused migraine headaches among administrative staff, faced with the need to make it work. The solution had matching branches of the two units along the same halls, directly across from each other. Management emptied successive floors within CIA buildings and moved OPC and OSO units to the new locations. But the wish could not make the reality: no one crossed the hallways. A different Smith, Joseph Burkholder Smith, joined OPC as a young officer in September 1951. He recalls that “OPC and OSO personnel, though located on opposite sides of the hall, did not cross each other’s thresholds.”
Meanwhile, DCI Smith’s personal-representative arrangement did not work. The operating divisions kept cutting them out of the action. Only a few months after Dulles took over the DO, a formal complaint came from the field that Wisner’s Wurlitzer was poaching on OSO turf. A fresh formula had to be devised. General Smith ordered William H. Jackson to survey both divisions. In May 1951, after completing his OPC study, Jackson recommended a single chain of command down to the station level. But Jackson’s survey of OSO ran head on into Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, executive assistant to the DCI, who thought that OSO ought to be responsible for all contacts with agents or groups for any purpose, whether espionage or covert action, with OPC confined to activities that did not involve contact. Division chief Willard Wyman agreed and used a visit to Far East field stations that fall to reinforce the OSO message. When Wyman departed to take up an army assignment in Korea in December, Kirkpatrick succeeded him. The appointment became the latest of the personnel changes that eventually transformed the CIA: William H. Jackson left his post as deputy director of central intelligence, though he stayed on a few months as a consultant; Allen Dulles, who had been a consultant, replaced Jackson; and Frank Wisner moved up to become deputy director for operations. Col. Kilbourne Johnston took over as OPC chief.
Lyman Kirkpatrick also wanted DO staff kept to a minimum to avoid managers getting in the way of operators. Deputy Director Dulles reported this view to Smith—operations should be subordinated to espionage. But Bedell Smith had a predilection for covert operations. They were, in a favorite Smith phrase, “my dish of tea.” On his deathbed the director recounted taking one especially nefarious suggestion to Harry Truman doubting its legality. On the spot the president wrote out an undated blanket pardon for his spy chieftain. In January 1952 General Smith signed a directive prepared by DDO Wisner mandating merger of the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations. The order ended months of rumors that had been grist for watercooler conversations throughout headquarters. At the moment of consolidation, the Office of Policy Coordination had forty-seven field stations and about six thousand personnel, slightly more than half of them overseas contractees. About half the OPC people worked for the Far East Division.
As an experiment, the small Latin America branches of both OPC and Special Operations joined together starting in August 1951, branch by branch, becoming the Western Hemisphere Division of the DO. That would be the first. Gen. Lucien K. Truscott, CIA’s chief in Germany, saw Smith in early March and presented him with a scheme for integrating field stations of the two offices. Officials continued OSO’s bitter rearguard struggle. One objection was that key spies’ cover could be blown in the integration, another that staffs would resist the changes. Kirkpatrick tried again in May, proposing that the DO should have components for espionage, psychological warfare, and paramilitary activities, and that current chiefs would continue to lead their units. Kilbourne Johnston rejected that notion out of hand.
Finally Director Smith sent Kirkpatrick off to settle differences among warring spooks in the field and ordered Kirk’s deputy, Richard M. Helms, to draft the new merger plan. One interpretation is that Helms followed direct orders from the DCI, another that Smith enlisted him to overcome the last vestiges of OSO opposition, yet a third that Helms understood resistance to be futile. Richard Helms would one day sit in the director’s chair; his biographer has called him “the man who kept the secrets.” In his memoirs Helms is completely silent about his role in the integration of the DO. Quintessential spy chief as opposed to secret warrior, Helms commented favorably on the people: “I was reminded of how much there was to be said for the way some OPC officers achieved so many of their objectives while hammering their service into shape.”
General Smith issued the order in mid-July 1952, much of its text verbatim from the Helms paper. The July 15 directive, partly justification and part ordinance, argued that OSS and British experience during World War II as well as that of the CIA over the preceding three years showed the best arrangement to be a “single chain of command with a single set of administrative procedures,” with the DDO as the director’s deputy for all CIA clandestine activities. The Directorate for Operations would add staffs for long-range planning and review. The chief of operations under the DDO would act as chief of staff, eliminating duplication, and would be responsible for the field. The DO would have staff elements for secret intelligence and counterespionage, political and psychological warfare—the same functions formerly the province of the Office of Special Operations and the Office of Policy Coordination—plus paramilitary operations, technical support, and administration. The DO’s paramilitary staff would be a fresh unit taking this function away from the former Wurlitzer.
Lyman Kirkpatrick, in Thailand to reconcile OSO and OPC station chiefs who had a little war going between themselves, suddenly got instructions to explain the DO changes and continue the trip, alerting others to the order. Kirkpatrick would become chief of operations of the DO, which meant functioning as deputy to Frank Wisner, the DDO. But Kirkpatrick never assumed the post. Before leaving Thailand, on July 20 Kirk suddenly fell ill. He turned out to have polio. After lengthy rehabilitation, he returned to the CIA in 1953 as inspector general. Richard Helms became acting chief of operations and would be formally appointed on February 26, 1953.
At the heart of the denied areas stood the Soviet Union itself. Even before there was a CIA, the Central Intelligence Group’s orders were to collect data about Russia as unobtrusively and extensively as possible. The rush to make contacts among exiles and others with knowledge of the Soviet Union gave the emigrés a great incentive to produce information for American consumption, true and false. Pandering became so widespread the term “paper mill” was applied to networks that produced bogus intelligence. One emigré told the Gehlen people that nine-tenths of what the Americans were buying had been manufactured.
Still, CIA had no alternative except to deal with the exiles. The principal organizations were OUN and NTS. The Ukrayinska Viyskova Orhaniztsiya (UVO)—better known by its English-language rendering OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—the main Ukrainian nationalist grouping, had been founded by refugees in Paris in the early 1920s. From its beginning the Soviets considered OUN a threat. In the Ukraine, OUN established resistance groups and carried out occasional sabotage until World War II intervened. At that time nationalist Stepan Bandera was serving a life sentence for his murder of a Polish minister. Bandera escaped during the Germans’ 1939 invasion of Poland to be elected head of OUN. Two years later the Germans invaded Russia, and Bandera and other OUN leaders appealed for Ukrainian freedom. Some saw the Ukrainians as associating themselves with German occupiers. Bandera became disillusioned with the Germans and was imprisoned by them, but he agreed to resume cooperation toward the end of the war. In late 1943, protected by German security, Bandera participated in a conference of ethnic minorities that set up an Anti-Bolshevik Front. In mid-1944 Bandera and other Ukrainians formed a Supreme Liberation Council to fight the Soviets.
During the Russo-German war OUN was armed by the Germans. Many Ukrainians fought in the auxiliaries. An entire division of the Nazis’ Waffen SS, Sixteenth SS “Galicia,” was composed of Ukrainians. Whole units of Ukrainians, German officers included, later formed the core of the UPA partisan army, the force behind the band of soldiers who appeared in Germany in 1947. Ukrainians claimed to have 50,000 soldiers in September 1944, scattered across the Ukraine, southern Poland, and eastern Czechoslovakia. From that summer, when the last German troops were driven from south Russia, OUN fought on its own. This was partisan warfare on a grand scale, and it did not end with V-E Day. Courier links increasingly broke down after May 1946, but in 1947 OUN leaders still claimed as many as 100,000 partisans under arms in eight large formations.
In 1946 Soviet officials demanded the extradition of Bandera, by then ensconced in the American occupation zone of Germany, as a war criminal. Instead he was kept under surveillance in an operation the CIC knew as Anyface, to prevent attempts against him. Warned to hide even though the CIC had information potentially implicating him in war crimes, Bandera disappeared. Americans told the Russians they had no idea of his whereabouts. Meanwhile Bandera’s organization, with the help of British intelligence, reinvented the wartime Anti-Bolshevik Front as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational proto-fascist and essentially anti-democratic union that long outlasted the secret war against Russia.
Partisan struggle continued in the Ukraine, including those parts relocated within Poland and Czechoslovakia by Stalin’s border changes. Ukrainians had suffered terribly in the Great Patriotic War—three million sent to Germany as forced labor, half that number still missing, two and a half million killed. There were plenty of reasons for them to support OUN and very few to welcome Stalin’s return. Stalin’s response was vigorous. He posted strong Red Army forces to the Ukraine. Party activists sent to the Ukraine and Moldavia (now Moldova) included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Konstantin Chernenko. Postwar work in south Russia became a stepping stone to power for many Soviet leaders. Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov went to command the Odessa Military District in July 1946. Zhukov had distinguished himself in the war and was perhaps Stalin’s best general. Speculation at the time centered on the possibility that he was being demoted. Others maintain Zhukov’s mission involved threatening Turkey, from which Russia wanted concessions. But State Department intelligence reports in 1947 observed that Zhukov was being used to stabilize the Ukraine. In fact, the local Communist Party headquarters at Odessa had burned down during riots there the preceding winter.
With Zhukov in command, military operations now assumed major proportions. Soviet and Eastern European reports in 1946 several times claimed the “liquidation” of hundreds of partisans, whom the Soviets typically tried to associate with the Nazis. In the spring of 1947 the Polish army, officered by Russians, began evacuating local populations. There were also coordinated attacks in the tri-border region by Polish, Czech, and Soviet forces. But OUN remained powerful. The partisans struck back when they machine-gunned the Polish vice minister of defense.
While Czech security strove to seal the border, they proved unable to prevent Ukrainian infiltration. That fall the Czech defense minister, Gen. Ludvik Svoboda, estimated that hundreds of partisans were still at large. The Poles claimed the elimination of six UPA “brigade groups” with two thousand partisans killed or captured. As for the Soviets, in a January 1948 speech reported by Pravda, Khrushchev declared, “The Ukrainian people have destroyed an insignificant bunch of Ukrainian nationalists and will annihilate the remnants of them.” Referring to the partisans in his memoirs, Khrushchev concedes the “flare-ups” of fighting “sometimes amounted to war,” and that partisan activity “became so serious that the Polish forces had to conduct full scale military operations.”
But Khrushchev’s January 1948 speech cloaked a struggle far from over. Members of the unit that escaped to Germany estimated OUN/UPA armed strength at between 50,000 and 200,000 soldiers. They also revealed details of the structure of the partisan forces: administratively organized into “regiments,” with fighting units of platoon (40 men), company (150 men), and battalion (500 to 800 partisans) size. Most combat units were of company size and armed with light weapons, a half-dozen or more machine guns, and equal numbers of mortars.
This data about UPA capabilities did not prevent State Department intelligence from concluding that resistance no longer seemed serious. But it also did not prevent Ukrainian appeals. A conference of emigrés in New York appealed to President Truman on August 31, 1947: “Ukraine is fighting for its freedom by means of its powerful insurgent army. We endorse her fight for freedom on the grounds of the Atlantic Charter. We believe that Russian aggressiveness would lose its power if [the] Ukraine were liberated and acquired self rule.”
In Washington there was growing interest in operations in the denied areas. A 1948 NSC study advocated ties with anti-Soviet groups as a prime means of acquiring information. The OPC began to move in 1949, with Frank Wisner demanding the Gehlen Organization get agents into Russia. Division chief Franklin Lindsay labored to get the project going. At the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, Lindsay’s opposite number, Harry Rositzke, looked at Pentagon wish lists as pie in the sky—they included up to two thousand agents on the ground in Russia.
But the hour was late in the Ukraine. Many UPA partisan companies were down to cadre strength. Although one unit conducted a daring five-week raid into Romania, Brig. Gen. Roman Shuchewycz, commander of the insurgent army, on September 3, 1949, ordered deactivation and conversion to an underground. The CIA’s Ukraine operation began two days later, when two agents dropped by parachute after a flight from Germany across Central Europe.
Like so many others, this CIA project became a joint effort with the British. The Office of Policy Coordination differed with London over which emigré factions to back. SIS chose OUN. Officers at OPC believed the tide of history had turned against the partisans and preferred the Russian social democratic group National Labor Alliance, or NTS (Natsionalno Trudovoi Soyuz). The NTS formed in Belgrade in 1930, among emigrés of the first wave opposed to both Soviet and tsarist rule. It espoused parliamentary democracy. Like OUN, the NTS maintained courier services into Russia and tried to establish networks. Like Bandera, it had collaborated in the early days with the German wartime administration. But unlike OUN, NTS made no effort at partisan war. Rather, under Dr. Georgi S. Okolovich, the NTS ideologist Vladimir Poremski developed a “molecular theory,” in which widening sectors of society would oppose the Communists and ultimately overthrow Soviet rule.
These views were advanced in pamphlets, in the NTS newspaper Posev, and on broadcasts of Radio Free Russia, the NTS station. An administrative headquarters was located in Paris and a field center in Frankfurt with more than two hundred personnel. The NTS recruited and trained its own agents near Frankfurt at Bad Homburg. The Russian emigrés already had relations with the Counter Intelligence Corps and Army G-2 as well as the Gehlen Organization and SIS. So it was easy for NTS to connect with the Office of Policy Coordination.
Soon the Russian project was in full swing. Frank Wisner’s boys and the Gehlen Org did preliminary screening, recruiting the Russians under the same terms offered the Balts. Published estimates of the number of “special forces” agents trained before 1954 range up to five thousand. Most were members of labor units like the Albanian Company 400. This program functioned as a farm system, identifying suitable candidates for missions to denied areas. The number trained in the United States between 1948 and 1954, much lower, included at least two hundred persons with Nazi connections, people whom the State Department had to admit on grounds of national security.
The SIS took the lead in actual infiltration. According to Kim Philby, Anglo-American cooperation on denied-area schemes was chilly. On the Ukrainian situation, Philby recalls the CIA arguing that Stepan Bandera was anti-American, that OUN represented extreme nationalism with fascist overtones, and that anyway its roots were among the “old” emigration. A meeting in Washington, Philby asserts, between the responsible CIA officers and the SIS chief for Northern Europe, Harry Carr, ended with the sides openly accusing each other of “wholesale lying.”
Philby claims the accusations were justified, on both sides!
London witnessed a conference at the highest level between the CIA and SIS in April 1951. Allen Dulles, now deputy director for plans and touring Europe to familiarize himself, seized the moment to coordinate with SIS. Dulles’s staff encouraged the British to abandon Bandera. At the London conference Harry Carr flatly refused despite a weakened position—two SIS missions sent into Russia during 1950 had both disappeared without a trace.
The CIA and the British remained deadlocked, with the practical result that support continued for both the Ukrainians and the NTS. In 1951 the British dropped three parties of six agents each: into the Ukraine, the foothills of the Carpathians, and southern Poland. None ever reported back. At least one team consisted of veterans of the Nazis’ SS “Galicia” Division. A CIA four-man unit was unproductive, as were several missions the secret warriors dispatched to the Ukraine and Moldavia. Remnants of OUN and Bandera forces held out in the Carpathians until 1952, but the bands were slowly tracked down.
Intelligence agents operated at grave disadvantage. The population was closely controlled and state security everywhere. It was only in 1951, apparently, that the CIA learned the printing processes the Russians used to produce internal passports and other documents. Planes to drop agents into denied areas were flown by the British through Cyprus and by the CIA through Greece and western Germany. But the partisans had been broken by the time agent teams began to arrive, so the underground proved unable to provide shelter.
The dilemmas were quite direct for Michael Burke. In 1951 the CIA contract officer, recalled from the Albania project, obtained a line slot at Frankfurt, Germany, on the Russian infiltration program. Burke missed the Mediterranean easiness of Rome and would not be much enamored of German rigidities, but the mission had precedence. He took charge of the CIA’s biggest field operation, as Burke put it, “a large disparate body of Americans with varying skills and talents, dispersed in a dozen locations throughout the country, a myriad of ongoing activities of varying quality, and dozens of indigenous men and women agents ranging from individual couriers to organized resistance movements.”
In May 1951 the CIA sent another army officer to Germany as Director Smith’s personal representative. Gen. Lucien K. Truscott, Jr., thoroughly represented the Old Army. He had learned to play the bugle from the bugler in his father’s cavalry regiment, then grew up to join the army, winning a battlefield commission in World War I. A forty-six-year-old Texan and a professional’s professional, Truscott and Bedell Smith had both been at Fort Leavenworth in the mid-1930s, and in World War II Truscott had served briefly on Eisenhower’s staff, which Smith headed. Truscott became one of the most successful U.S. commanders in Sicily, Italy, and France. He had had some unconventional warfare experience—with Lord Mountbatten at the Combined Operations Command at the time of the Dieppe raid and other commando actions—and went on to help found the American Rangers. Truscott had retired in 1947. Walter Bedell Smith induced him to return to Germany, where he had been an occupation commander shortly after the war.
Truscott had a natural ability for intelligence and a good nose for security. He quickly became concerned with agent losses in Russian operations. Investigating the CIA’s relationships with the Gehlen Org and the NTS Russians, he found many ways the missions might be compromised. With Germany the CIA’s biggest show—the station at Frankfurt comprised fourteen hundred officers at this time—weaknesses were serious business. When OPC and OSO consolidated in 1952, Truscott gained the power to issue orders in the agency’s name. He initiated a formal inquiry. When Allen Dulles came through on a tour of CIA stations, Truscott used his briefing to warn of the collapse of infiltration operations. The general’s prestige and known connections with Director Smith were such that he could make even Allen Dulles, who once walked out of a Truscott talk, sit down and listen to the rest of the gloomy news.
In late December 1952 came the collapse of yet another CIA-SIS joint operation, which ought to have given the Americans pause. This concerned Poland, where for years the spooks assumed they were in contact with an anti-Soviet underground called WIN (Wolnosc I Niepodleglosc, or Freedom and Independence). The roots lay in World War II when Polish resistance to the Nazis had been crushed in the 1944 Battle of Warsaw as Soviet armies stood by and watched. Stalin then proceeded to contrive a Soviet satellite state in Poland. The WIN consisted of Poles, mostly resistance veterans, as an anti-Soviet underground. But its first commander had been arrested and tried in a 1947 Soviet crackdown after the Americans and British cooperated in spiriting out of the country the former prime minister and other Polish nationalists. Why the intelligence services did not conclude that WIN had been destroyed right there remains a mystery. Around that time Harry Carr of SIS had approached Gen. Wladislaw Anders, Poland’s wartime field commander on the Allied side, who naturally had WIN connections, and sought to forge links to the underground.
Poland seemed a logical theater for CIA political warfare, certainly a place to argue for democracy as against communism. WIN seemed the ideal instrument. Frank Lindsay powered up the Wurlitzer. The Poles sent couriers to the West, letters to emigré families, and radio messages to the Western intelligence services; they had, they said, five hundred WIN operatives, twenty thousand who could be mobilized, and a hundred thousand sympathizers. The WIN messages asked for money and supplies. The British and Americans did not know these messages were from the Russians, who were running WIN as a deception game.
In February 1949 the British bowed out of the affair. OPC then furnished all the money for WIN, more than a million dollars over three years. In 1951 Lindsay recruited John Bross, another of those former lawyers and OSS types, who had been a Jedburgh commando, to run the Polish business as his deputy. Bross also knew about CIA’s German base since he came to the agency from a job as legal counsel to the U.S. high commissioner in Germany. Like others, Bross was completely fooled—once at a meeting he threw out the number 37,000 as a figure for Polish underground troops fighting the Soviets a month after the feared war for Europe began. In 1952 WIN asked for a list of the targets the CIA wanted destroyed in the event of that war, certainly something Russian intelligence would need to know. The CIA sent the list. Bross became queasy when WIN followed up by asking for an American general to be parachuted to the alleged underground to buck up its morale. Bross put his foot down. The Russians, knowing the game was up, blew the operation for its propaganda value. A star agent first recruited by the British revealed himself as a Russian spy, recounting how WIN had deceived the West. Then the Soviets staged a show trial of other WIN figures, hapless Poles whom the Russians had pulled in with this false-flag operation.
This latest failure, and the consolidation of the CIA’s Directorate for Operations, were the end for Frank Lindsay. Burned out with the chain of disaster, Lindsay announced his departure. Allen Dulles asked him to write a paper on the lessons learned in all these covert actions. Dulles and Lindsay went over the draft one weekend day at Dulles’s home. The conclusions, uniformly negative, reflected Lindsay’s understanding of the Russians’ tight security everywhere behind the Iron Curtain. Dulles could not abide this, but Lindsay stuck to his guns. He left for the Ford Foundation. His replacement as chief of DO’s Eastern Europe Division would be John Bross. The CIA’s secret war ground on.
There were many reasons for concern. Until 1951 the Soviets had the advantage of information from Philby, but he was not their only source. From 1950 on they received reports from Heinz Felfe, a senior officer of the Gehlen Org, plus Canadian spy Gordon Lonsdale. The Russians also used the flow of refugees and Displaced Persons, a main source of recruits for OPC and the SIS, to insert spies into Western operations. Among the most valuable was Capt. Nikita Khorunshy, who defected in Berlin in 1948, telling CIC his reason was love for a German girl. Like many Russian DPs, Khorunshy moved to Frankfurt. There he became associated with NTS. The emigrés relied on his recent knowledge of conditions in Russia and hired Khorunshy for their training school at Bad Homburg. Thus the Soviets had a spy at the very center of the operation run against them. Using intelligence from Khorunshy, they were able to supply agents with the specific qualifications sought by the Western services, spies who compromised their CIA missions. Khorunshy meanwhile, beginning in 1951, funneled the Soviets with a stream of data on individuals trained through the NTS–Gehlen Org–OPC network. He also suggested and provided the knowledge for an assassination attempt against NTS chief Okolovich. The betrayal of a 1953 team he had trained at Bad Homburg finally uncovered Khorunshy.
The CIA lost another sixteen agents in at least five missions during 1952 and 1953. British losses are still unknown, as are those of the Office of Special Operations, which ran its own agents into the denied areas. Each time the base dispatched one of CIA’s aircraft to carry a team, it took a tremendous chance the plane would be downed behind the Iron Curtain. Agency officers agonized facing the go/no-go decisions for these flights. Although Khorunshy was arrested in 1954, the Soviets captured a solo agent plus yet another CIA team. Mike Burke estimated an agent’s chances with all the best backup the CIA could furnish at no better than 50 percent. Whatever the odds, losses mounted with very little to show.
For their part, the Russians adopted Khorunshy’s scheme to murder Dr. Okolovich. In February 1954 they sent two East Germans plus Capt. Nikolai I. Khoklov to Frankfurt to execute the NTS leader. Operation Rhine, as the Russians called their plot, miscarried when Khoklov repented and confessed to Okolovich instead of killing him. The extent to which NTS had by this time become subordinated to the CIA is suggested by the ease with which the Americans then took Khoklov away from NTS.
Michael Burke had had enough. Returning to Washington in April 1954, he went to dinner at Frank Wisner’s P Street home. Allen Dulles also attended. Burke worried about the long flights over Eastern Europe needed to deposit agents in Russia. On the most recent intrusion the CIA plane had been intercepted by two Russian fighters over Hungary during its return. The plane had escaped into nearby clouds, but the sign was ominous—Russian radar coverage had become so wide and air units so numerous that the flights were exceedingly dangerous. Opinion at the CIA base turned against more attempts. Burke worried that headquarters avoided telling operators of dangers to their missions. He needed reassurance—not only that CIA’s commitment remained strong but that the president wanted the missions. His bosses gave Burke only standard arguments. Facing a headquarters tour, supporting a growing family, Michael Burke gave up the CIA. He went to the circus instead. Burke became an executive with Ringling Brothers, later with Madison Square Garden, and ended up as general manager of the New York Yankees. The CIA could not afford to lose officers like him.
Meanwhile the “Khoklov affair” became only one of a series of Soviet measures against emigré figures. Okolovich was beaten during an abortive kidnapping. NTS ideologist Poremski survived another miscarried murder attempt. The Russians were more successful with Ukrainian leader Lev Rebet, assassinated in 1957. Also killed were two senior Radio Free Europe broadcasters. This campaign climaxed on October 15, 1959, when Stepan Bandera died outside his Munich apartment building, dosed with cyanide from an ingeniously constructed gun.
Secret warfare against Russia ground to a halt. On a trip from Munich to Washington in 1953, Allen Dulles told one of his senior specialists on Soviet affairs, “At least we’re getting the kind of experience we need for the next war.”
Michael Burke, for one, could move on. Not so for many of the emigrés recruited by the CIA. One of the legacies of this secret war, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, went on to support dictators and help subvert democratic governments, the very antithesis of America’s commitment to democracy. Along the way many idealistic people mobilized by the secret wars lost their lives. Reflecting on this period three decades later, State Department Balkans expert John C. Campbell commented: “What did we offer these people? We did not have any means really of supporting a revolt which might break out. I think we were responsible for the loss of some good, patriotic people from those countries because we gave them money and instructions.”
* Central Intelligence code names, or cryptonyms, have a two-letter combination preceding the name itself. The first element, in this case “BG,” identifies a geographical area or functional purpose to which the name is assigned. Such alphabetic elements are frequently confusing, and this narrative will avoid them wherever possible. Also, the CIA term of art for an operation is “project,” a word this narrative will use in that sense.