7.

Faking Back

Meanwhile, Soviet bloc political warfare operations were ramping up, especially those targeting the United States. CIA analysts noted “a noticeable increase” in the use of active measures between 1957 and the following year, which led to an “intensive investigation of the subject,” according to a 1960 classified study. Between January 1, 1957, and July 1, 1959, the study found, thirty-six Soviet forgeries of international significance emerged. What alerted the CIA and prompted the Agency to go public with a study was that they were not simply looking at stand-alone forgeries, but at advanced and persistent campaigns that endured for months and even years, and deployed carefully crafted messages, repeating and improving them over time.

The CIA was gravely concerned about the Soviets’ newly aggressive political warfare. The director, Allen Dulles, decided to brief Congress on the secret study, and appointed Richard Helms, perhaps the most experienced covert action executive and one of Dulles’s most trusted aides, to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 2, 1961.

Ladislav Bittman, as he was known in Czechoslovakia, in about 1957. Bittman defected from Czech intelligence in 1968 and became one of the most important voices on disinformation. (Elizabeth Spaulding)

Helms was urbane, cool, sure-footed, and tight-lipped, in the telling of friends and colleagues. He was the quintessential career intelligence officer, who would make it all the way to director of Central Intelligence. Helms, a veteran of the OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, was transferred to Berlin in August 1945. He worked on special operations even before the CIA’s Directorate of Plans was created in 1952. For almost the entire decade, he oversaw the Agency’s most aggressive operations, including its Berlin fronts.¹

“Would you rise and raise your right hand?” Senator Keating said to Helms that day. “Do you solemnly swear the evidence you give in this proceeding will be the truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do,” Helms responded.

Helms commenced his prepared remarks by pointing out the long history of the Russian art of forgery. “More than sixty years ago, the tsarist intelligence service concocted and peddled a confection called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” he told the Senate. The Protocols, the most notorious anti-Semitic tract of modern times, was fabricated around the turn of the century and first appeared in 1903, when the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya serialized portions of the document.² In 1921, The Times of London conclusively exposed the text as a forgery, but, as Helms pointed out, the Soviets were still spreading the bogus document as late as 1958. The Holocaust was still a fresh and painful memory, and framing his adversaries as anti-Semites was a powerful opening move.

Helms then compared the act of forging—with which he himself was so well versed—with performing a magic trick. The KGB forgers were the magicians; the CIA investigators, watchful bystanders; and the American public was the audience. The bystander’s task was to spot minor flaws in the execution of the trick. But the problem, of course, was that calling the forgers out would inadvertently help them. “When Soviet sleight of hand improved, one of our problems was demonstrating that the act was a fake without providing the magician with free tips on how to perfect his performance,” Helms told the Senate.³

Helms started out confidently, but he was on very thin ice, and he knew it. He had sworn to tell the truth about deception, and yet his own agency was probably even more prolific and brazen in the “art of forgery,” as he called it, than the KGB was at the time. But Congress didn’t know that, and the White House didn’t either.⁴ Not even his own CIA analysts studying Russian forgeries knew how deeply their own agency was embedded in the business of large-scale forgeries in Germany. But the Russians knew, and Helms knew that they knew what he was hiding from Congress and the American people—that he was himself playing a magic trick that day on Capitol Hill. At first the session was closed, but the transcript, a 127-page booklet, was cleared for publication two weeks later.⁵

Neues Deutschland, an official East German news outlet, featuring the forged Rockefeller letter, February 1957

The full story of this hearing begins on February 15, 1957. Neues Deutschland, East Germany’s official daily newspaper, published by the central committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, had extraordinary news.

It presented to the world the “authentic text” of a secret letter from the chief of America’s largest oil trust, the Standard Oil Corporation, to the president of the United States. “Rockefeller Gives Directive for Supercolonialism of the U.S.A.,” the headline blared, implying that the White House was simply a puppet of powerful capitalist interests. The story revealed a cynical American plan to achieve world domination: Nelson Rockefeller purportedly instructed President Dwight D. Eisenhower to use first economic aid to make countries dependent on the United States, and then political power and military alliances to force a repayment in blood. To make the long, personal letter an easier read, Neues Deutschland interspersed the text with pull quotes and subheadings, offering instant interpretations:

American Prestige Catastrophically Fallen

“What is Good for Standard Oil is Good for the U.S.A.”

“Iranian Foreign Policy under U.S. Control”

“Economic ‘Help’ Draws Military Pacts After It”

Controlling Political Moves of Neutral States

Bring Colonies of Others Under U.S. Control

The paper boasted that it possessed the English original, in full, and from a “categorically reliable” albeit unnamed source.⁶ Neues Deutschland printed a translation of the entire letter in German, around 3,500 words in total, as well as excerpts of the English original copy, to establish credibility. An editorial in Neues Deutschland referred to an important remark from Lenin: it would be the task of Communists to reveal to the masses the secret origins of wars. “We were guided by this remark when we published the text of the secret letter,” one editor wrote. “From the pen of the scion of the blood-stained Rockefeller dynasty the world learns the secret of how people are robbed of their national sovereignty and independence and brought under the sway of the U.S. monopolies in order to help in a U.S.-instigated war for world domination.”

The Rockefeller letter appeared at first glance to be shrewdly crafted. The letter mentioned talks at Camp David between President Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller, which had in fact taken place and been covered in the press. The letter also contained statements that the purported author, Rockefeller, had actually made: “Although, for instance, economic and technical aid to underdeveloped countries last year amounted to more than one billion dollars, more than half of this sum was actually devoted to three countries in which military and political rather than economic considerations were the determining factors.”

The real Rockefeller, then a special assistant to the president and a champion of development assistance, had made a similar argument to Eisenhower two years prior, according to a report in The New York Times.⁷ KGB forgers had lifted language from the Times in order to imitate Rockefeller more credibly. But the letter contained a number of sloppy errors: the typing was slipshod, with several strikethroughs, ragged margins, errors in punctuation, spelling, and grammar, and, as CIA analysts pointed out with horror, “a rather uneven typing touch.” Nelson Rockefeller’s actual correspondence, by contrast, was always clean, proper, and free of errors, and the oil magnate disliked the pronoun “I,” an important detail that the forgers had apparently missed.

Within twenty-four hours of the letter’s appearance in East Berlin, Radio Moscow picked up the story, with translated readings of the letter immediately aired in Greece, Vietnam, the Middle East, Iran, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Indonesia, and across Latin America. Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin translations and broadcasts followed three days later, with twenty-one additional broadcasts in the next three days after that. An Indonesian announcer reported that the letter showed that “the imperialist interests of Rockefeller and other U.S. billionaires decide the direction of the foreign policy of the U.S. government, which is the fascistic executor of their wishes.”⁸

Neues Deutschland, citing the broad global resonance of its Rockefeller “revelation,” including the most recent printing, in the Syrian daily Al-Qabas, upped the ante. Again quoting its “absolutely reliable source,” still without specifying any details, Neues Deutschland published another scandalous and secret American memorandum under the headline “The Enemy of Arab Freedom.”⁹ Dubbed the “Dulles Memorandum,” the document was a letter allegedly written by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles for President Eisenhower. The Dulles Memorandum spelled out the real, hidden objective of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: to suppress Arab national independence movements and establish the United States as the colonialist heir to France and Britain, in order to access oil and to open nuclear-capable military bases in the Middle East.

And the new memo circulated the globe just like the Rockefeller letter: first TASS, the Russian News Agency, played the Dulles memo, then Pravda and Radio Moscow, Turkey, Iran, and stations across the Middle East, then China’s Radio Peking, and later in India. The global campaign persisted for nine months after the two initial forgeries surfaced in Berlin. The CIA counted more than one hundred replays of the two letters, more than eighty of them through Radio Moscow.

Members of a Strategic Air Command B-52 combat crew race for their always ready-and-waiting B-52 heavy bomber; 1960s. KGB disinformation targeted the SAC in innovative ways. (U.S. Air Force)

The military tensions between the two superpowers were about to increase. In the first week of October 1957 alone, the U.S. Strategic Air Command initiated a 24/7 nuclear alert in response to the perceived Soviet missile threat—and the USSR launched Sputnik, the first satellite. On November 7, the National Security Council sent a grim confidential report to Eisenhower on deterrence and survival in the nuclear age.¹⁰ To lessen the vulnerability of the Strategic Air Command to a surprise attack, the White House experts recommended that the time by which an adequate number, “possibly 500,” of nuclear-armed bombers should be under way ought to be reduced to between 7 and 22 minutes. Public fear of atomic war was ripe then, and the Soviets were alarmed.

On November 22, 1957, Khrushchev gave an interview to three prominent American journalists, including William Randolph Hearst, Jr., editor-in-chief of Hearst Corp. and heir to his father’s publishing empire. Hearst had won a Pulitzer Prize for an interview with Khrushchev two years prior, so the Soviet leader knew the exchange was a high-profile messaging opportunity.

The key message Khrushchev wanted to get across was on “military psychosis.” A significant part of America’s active strategic bomber force was airborne twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, armed with hydrogen and atomic bombs, and, Khrushchev feared, ready to devastate his homeland. “This is very dangerous,” Khrushchev told the American journalists. He was particularly concerned about the number of aircraft in the air at all times, and that “many people” would be piloting the armed bombers. “There is always the possibility of a mental blackout when the pilot may take the slightest signal as a signal for action and fly to the target that he had been instructed to fly to,” Khrushchev said. Even an isolated nuclear bomb would trigger immediate retaliatory action, so one psychologically unstable pilot could effectively start a nuclear holocaust. “Does this not go to show that in such a case a war may start as a result of sheer misunderstanding, a derangement in the normal psychic state of a person, which may happen to anybody?”

Khrushchev’s “military psychosis” argument made intuitive sense, was hard to counter, and made deploying more nuclear weapons appear reckless—in short, it was perfect raw material for disinformation.

By April 1958, the Soviet Union introduced “urgent measures” to the UN Security Council, requesting “an end to flights by United States military aircraft armed with atomic and hydrogen bombs in the direction of the frontiers of the Soviet Union.”¹¹ The Soviets warned that continuing the flights might lead to a “breach” of world peace. Two weeks after the resolution was tabled, and five months after the Khrushchev interview, on May 7, 1958, Neues Deutschland published a remarkable letter, allegedly from a U.S. defense official, Frank Berry, to the secretary of defense, Neil McElroy. Berry was America’s most senior official in charge of military health and medical issues. That Wednesday, the front page of Neues Deutschland read: “Sensational Admission of the American Ministry of War: Certifiably Insane Pilots in Control of U.S.A. Atomic Bombers.”¹²

In the letter, which Neues Deutschland ran in its entirety, in English, Berry claimed that 67.3 percent of flight personnel in the U.S. Air Force suffered from “psychoneurosis.” The document stressed that this was an “impressive” figure that could not fail to cause alarm. The Berry letter then referred to an unnamed expert report that singled out officers and airmen in the Strategic Air Command, claiming that members of these crews were “inadequately controlled by the subject’s will,” and pilots were prone to hysterical syndromes and “fits of unaccountable animosity.” The document named a number of U.S. nuclear bases, and alleged chronic overstrain of the pilots’ nervous systems—not just due to intercontinental flight schedules but also as a result of the ample consumption of alcohol, the use of opium and marijuana, sexual excesses and perversions, and “extreme fatigue due to constant card playing.”

First Khrushchev had articulated the theory of military psychosis. Then Neues Deutschland provided the scientific evidence. Now it was time for examples and case studies.

Five weeks after the Berry letter surfaced, the KGB got lucky. Vernon Morgan, a twenty-one-year-old native of Elizabeth, Indiana, was a mechanic second class at the U.S. Air Force’s 86th Bomb Squadron in Alconbury, England. Just after midnight on June 13, Morgan, who was not a trained pilot, climbed into a B-45 twin-jet Tornado, a light bomber. Morgan managed to get the Tornado off the ground in the middle of the night, but shortly after becoming airborne, it tilted to the right and, with a flaming explosion, crashed into the main railroad line between London King’s Cross and Edinburgh near the village of Abbots Ripton, just a few minutes before an express train was due. A political firestorm ensued in the UK. “Leftist British leaders have voiced fears that some airman might steal a plane with a hydrogen bomb in it and cause a catastrophe in just such a crash,” The Washington Post reported.¹³ Within three days, Soviet newspapers and Radio Moscow had reported the incident and cited the crash as an illustration of the risks indicated by the Berry letter.

The intense press coverage in Britain showed that the nocturnal Tornado crash, the military psychosis theme, and the fear of accidental nuclear war resonated in Europe. Three weeks later, the Soviets fired their next salvo.

On July 3, 1958, the Russian ambassador in London, Jacob Malik, gave a speech to book publishers and editors at the Paternoster Club on Great Queen Street.¹⁴ Malik spoke about the dangers of nuclear war, and mentioned that American officials had acknowledged that nuclear bombers could be airborne at any moment. The Soviet ambassador then told his audience that he had received a letter from a U.S. Air Force pilot stationed in England. The anonymous pilot allegedly told the Soviet embassy that he intended to drop an atomic bomb in the next few days.

One of the journalists in the room asked whether the letter could be made public. Malik at once said he would have to check with Moscow. Just a few hours later, in the early evening, the embassy handed over copies to an American and a British news agency. Written in awkward English, it was posted from Ipswich, addressed to Malik, and signed by “W.” Despite a lack of indications that the letter was authentic, memories of Morgan’s crash were still fresh and the letter’s contents so sensational that the story could not be ignored. “W,” the alleged American Air Force pilot, announced that he and his crew would go rogue and would drop a “deadly load” during a routine flight, in order to show “how horrible an atomic war could be.” They had chosen a target in the North Sea, so that “not too many people” would be killed. “D-day,” the letter said, would be sometime in the first week of July.¹⁵ The pilot then offered “all the secret information we know” to Soviet intelligence. The crew wished then to enter the USSR’s airspace near Leningrad. “W” even requested that the Soviets warn the Red Army’s anti-aircraft defenses “not to open fire on us and let us know where we can land.”

The letter was intended to lend credibility to the Soviets’ insinuation that NATO pilots were mentally unstable. But this time, luck was not on their side. One person who read the press coverage of the mysterious letter was an unemployed farmhand and ex–Royal Air Force pilot who had been discharged for mental instability. William Stanley Whales, of Ipswich, held a grudge against the RAF for discharging him after fifteen years of service. The frustrated Whales decided to claim the letter in order to raise the public profile of his complaints against the RAF. Whales got in touch with the local correspondent of the British Press Association and signed a phony seven-page confession, claiming he had simply looked up the name of the Russian ambassador in the Ipswich public library.

Whales’s timing was good, as a wave of anti-nuclear-arms protests was sweeping the UK. His claim generated much publicity itself, and was covered in the major newspapers in the United States and Britain. Without knowing it, the former Royal Air Force crew member was deflating the threat—and countering a Soviet disinformation operation by highly effective means. Suddenly the Soviet embassy found itself in the rather awkward position of having to defend a forged letter, written by a made-up mentally unstable airman, against the false claims of a real mentally unstable airman. When consulted by The New York Times, a Soviet embassy spokesperson in London dismissed Whales’s claim as “imaginary.”¹⁶

Early the following week, Russian disinformation specialists decided to double down on their operation, and Malik, the Soviet ambassador, released two more letters to British officials and journalists. One of them was allegedly from the same “W” who had written the first letter, reiterating his nuclear threat: “If there is no delay, I will drop the bomb within the next five days.” The other was from one of W’s crew members: “We have many persons of high rank on our side and will have no real trouble in flying off the bomb.”¹⁷

By July 1958, the Soviet barrage of forgeries directed against the United States was brazen and aggressive—perhaps as much so as the CIA’s own operations in Berlin. The CIA therefore decided to fight back against the Soviet forgeries from within the United States. Only weeks after the pilot letters appeared, Dulles, the CIA director, secretly reached out to one of The Washington Post’s most influential columnists, Roscoe Drummond. With the Berry campaign in full swing, Drummond wrote several columns about Soviet forgeries. In one column, “Spreading the Poison,” Drummond discussed in detail how fake documents could be revealed as such. The columnist highlighted, for example, English-language inconsistencies: the Rockefeller letter, for one, used the phrase “the hooked fish needs no bait,” which is British rather than American, as well as the adage “ramming home” (of an idea), which would be “driving home” in American parlance. Drummond revealed secret details, for instance that a clandestine radio transmitter, called “Our Radio,” which broadcast in Turkish and claimed to be located in Turkey, was in fact a Soviet device located in Leipzig, East Germany. Drummond also highlighted arcane technical evidence: the typeface of the Rockefeller letter forgery, surfaced in Neues Deutschland, could not have been written on an American typewriter, and was in fact typed out on a prewar machine made in East Germany.¹⁸ Drummond obliquely noted that the forged document had been “analyzed by technicians,” but he did not say whose, and indeed never mentioned that Dulles had provided him with a classified internal study.

Drummond received the material “enthusiastically,” Dulles reported at an internal CIA meeting two days before the first column appeared.¹⁹ Dulles was happy with the result, and thought Drummond’s column “succeeded admirably” in revealing the Soviet forgeries²⁰—because he had simply reproduced the CIA’s secret list of forensic artifacts.²¹

The KGB was undeterred. On October 2, 1958, Neues Deutschland ran an article claiming that a U.S. Air Force officer stationed in Kaiserslautern had leaked a secret order from General Thomas Power, head of the Strategic Air Command, that prohibited U.S. crews from flying aircraft carrying atomic or hydrogen bombs over U.S. territory (no such order was issued). TASS reported on the Power order hoax on the same day; so did Radio Moscow, which broadcast the story into Britain, and tied it to the Berry letter. The next day, the clandestine radio station España Independiente—which claimed to be located in Spain, but was actually in Bucharest, Romania; it was the oldest Soviet clandestine radio operation, launched in 1941—spread the fake news story in Spanish without crediting any source.²² On November 20, Radio Moscow replayed the story, this time in Arabic, Turkish, and Japanese, again tying the Power order to the foresight of Frank Berry, whose purported warning had started the campaign. By then, the joke at the CIA was that in the Soviet mind, Frank Berry’s prophetic powers rivaled those of Marx and Lenin.²³

But it was the KGB who had the last laugh on this matter. Less than a week after Malik surfaced the letter at the Paternoster Club, the CIA’s LCCASSOCK front, also at peak performance then, launched its disinformation attack against the Socialist Party’s 5th Congress in Berlin, which Khrushchev was attending. The KGB and CIA were watching each other’s disinformation operations in real time. And Russian intelligence soon decided to retaliate with an operation right out of a John le Carré novel, which would effectively turn CIA analysts into a disinformation tool to be used on the CIA’s leadership. The full effect of this covert, highly targeted effort took several months to filter through the CIA’s bureaucracy.

In March 1960, the CIA finished a 200-page report, “Sino-Soviet Bloc Propaganda Forgeries,” that had been in the works for years. The report was classified as secret and only released nearly forty years later. The study contained a detailed breakdown of the Berry campaign and several other Communist forgery and propaganda actions. The KGB knew, thanks to Drummond’s CIA-informed, detail-dripping columns in The Washington Post and other sources, that American intelligence was closely watching Russia’s globally expanding disinformation operations. The vast Russian spy station in Karlshorst, in East Berlin, also knew of LCCASSOCK; the KGB even knew of Schlagzeug, the CIA-funded jazz magazine that was published on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

So, in December 1958, Karlshorst retaliated. Russian disinformation operators forged the CIA’s own forgery: they reproduced an accurate Schlagzeug mailing envelope and used it to mail out their own booklet to 4,000 West German addresses. The Russian operators mailed it out “black,” and changed only one detail: the return address proved, on CIA investigation, to be an empty lot in West Berlin—a clever way of signaling to the Americans that they knew who was really behind the jazz magazine. The booklet was nominally printed by the real Publishing House for German Youth, the Kulturverlag der Deutschen Jugend, and devoted to a “culture program” that contained songs, skits, and plays to use for an amateur theatrical performance—in other words, the KGB was more or less openly ridiculing LCCASSOCK as an amateur performance. The Russian spymasters even asked a young Socialist author, Werner Bräunig, to compose a song on mentally unstable U.S. Air Force pilots, complete with a score for piano accompaniment:

THE FLYING PSYCHONEUROSIS

BY WERNER BRÄUNIG

There flies Jim from Alabama,

there flies Jack from Tennessee

high above the city

wearing heated pants,

with the bomb aboard

and the psychoneurosis,

and on the automatic pilot is printed: Liberty.

And what can happen—

how does that concern us?

That does not concern us at all!

There flies Jim from Alabama

high over the State of Wisconsin

and there is a city

and people walk in rows,

and there is a (psychoneurotic) crack

and he shoots them up—

there were a few people killed

And if such a thing can happen—

doesn’t this concern someone?

Doesn’t this concern us at all?

There flies Jim from Alabama

Over you, and over me.

With death in his head,

and then he sees red,

and he pushes the button

and it’s over for you and for me!

  And because that can happen tomorrow,

it does concern us!

Mankind! It even concerns you!

The Washington CIA analysts who reverse-engineered the campaign saw the song as a “direct tribute to the Berry Letter.” But these analysts were unaware of the covert operations run by Berlin Operations Base, and so considered Schlagzeug a “bona fide West German periodical” in the secret document that they passed up to the CIA leadership. But the KGB’s musical taunt was not lost on the Agency’s executives in charge of covert action.

Richard Helms understood. He was Frank Wisner’s chief of operations in the Directorate of Plans, which swallowed the Office of Policy Coordination in August 1952. Helms oversaw the CIA’s covert actions for the next six years, meaning that he had himself renewed LCCASSOCK’s funding and cover many times²⁴ and was well aware of specific operational details of the various Berlin front organizations in the late 1950s, including Schlagzeug.²⁵ Then, in early 1961, Dulles selected Helms to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Soviet-made forgeries.

Helms, in full command of the details of the entire Berry forgery campaign, briefed the Senate on these details, down to the level of grammatical errors in specific forgeries and the fake claim by Whales, the real mentally deranged RAF officer in Ipswich. His entire congressional briefing was based on the same secret CIA study on Soviet forgeries, which relayed many details of the KGB’s Schlagzeug taunt, including the full text of Bräunig’s song. Those CIA officials who knew of LCCASSOCK also would have noticed an ominous absence: Radio Moscow did not report on the Schlagzeug jab; it was meant for the CIA’s ears only. Helms saw no need to communicate this humiliation to Congress; he dropped any mention of the CIA’s own forgery and influence campaigns from the Senate testimony. Helms pulled off his own shell game, and got away with it.