"Secrecy now beclouds everything about the CIA--its cost, its efficiency, its successes, its failures," Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana said in March 1954.
Allen Dulles answered to a very few members of Congress. They protected the CIA from public scrutiny through informal armed services and appropriations subcommittees. He regularly asked his deputies to supply him with "CIA success stories that might be used at the next budget hearing." He had none up his sleeve. On rare occasions, he was prepared to be candid. Two weeks after Mansfield's critique, Dulles faced three senators at a closed-door hearing. His briefing notes said the CIA's rapid expansion of covert operations might have been "risky or even unwise for the long pull of the Cold War." They conceded that "unplanned, urgent, one-shot operations not only usually failed, but also disrupted and even blew our careful preparations for longer-range activities."
That kind of secret could be kept safe on Capitol Hill. But one senator posed a grave and gathering threat to the CIA: the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy and his staff had developed an underground of informants who had quit the agency in anger toward the end of the Korean War. In the months after Eisenhower's election, McCarthy's files grew thick with allegations that "the CIA had unwittingly hired a large number of double agents--individuals who, although working for the CIA, were actually Communist agents whose mission was to plant inaccurate data," as his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, recounted. Unlike many of McCarthy's charges, this one was true. The agency could not withstand a whit of scrutiny on the issue, and Allen Dulles knew it. If the American people had learned, in the heat of the red scare, that the agency had been duped all over Europe and Asia by the Soviet and Chinese intelligence services, the CIA would be destroyed.
When McCarthy privately told Dulles face-to-face "that CIA was neither sacrosanct nor immune from investigation," the director knew its survival was at stake. Foster Dulles had opened his doors to McCarthy's bloodhounds in a public display of sanctimony that devastated the State Department for a decade. But Allen fought them off. He rebuffed the senator's attempt to subpoena the CIA's Bill Bundy, who out of old-school loyalties had contributed $400 to the defense fund of Alger Hiss, the suspected communist spy. Allen refused to let the senator scourge the CIA.
His public stance was a principled one, but he also ran a down-and-dirty covert operation on McCarthy. The clandestine campaign was outlined in a CIA officer's secret testimony before McCarthy's Senate committee and its twenty-eight-year-old minority counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, which was unsealed in 2003. It was detailed in a CIA history declassified in 2004.
After his private confrontation with McCarthy, Dulles organized a team of CIA officers to penetrate the senator's office with a spy or a bug, preferably both. The methodology was just like J. Edgar Hoover's: gather dirt, then spread it. Dulles instructed James Angleton, his counterintelligence czar, to find a way to feed disinformation to McCarthy and his staff as a means of discrediting him. Angleton convinced James McCargar--the officer who had been one of Wisner's first hires--to plant phony reports on a known member of the McCarthy underground at the CIA. McCargar succeeded: the CIA penetrated the Senate.
"You've saved the Republic," Allen Dulles told him.
"THIS FUNDAMENTALLY REPUGNANT PHILOSOPHY"
But the threat to the CIA grew as McCarthy's power began fading in 1954. Senator Mansfield and thirty-four of his colleagues were backing a bill to create an oversight committee and order the agency to keep Congress fully and currently informed about its work. (It would not pass for twenty years.) A congressional task force led by Eisenhower's trusted colleague General Mark Clark was getting ready to investigate the agency.
At the end of May 1954, the president of the United States received an extraordinary six-page letter from an air force colonel. It was an impassioned cry by the first whistle-blower from inside the CIA. Eisenhower read it and kept it.
The author, Jim Kellis, was one of the agency's founding fathers. An OSS veteran who had fought guerrilla warfare in Greece, he had gone to China and served as the first station chief in Shanghai for the Strategic Services Unit. At the CIA's birth, he was among its few experienced China hands. He went back to Greece as an investigator for Wild Bill Donovan, who as a private citizen had been asked to investigate the 1948 murder of a CBS reporter. He determined that the killing came at the hands of America's right-wing allies in Athens, not ordered by the communists, as was commonly believed. His findings were suppressed. He returned to the CIA, and during the Korean War he was in charge of the CIA's paramilitary operations and resistance forces worldwide. Walter Bedell Smith had sent him on troubleshooting investigations in Asia and Europe. He did not like what he saw. A few months after Allen Dulles took command, Kellis quit in disgust.
"The Central Intelligence Agency is in a rotten state," Colonel Kellis warned Eisenhower. "Today CIA has hardly any worthwhile operations behind the Iron Curtain. In their briefings they present a rosy picture to outsiders but the awful truth remains under the TOP SECRET label of the Agency."
The truth was that "CIA wittingly or unwittingly delivered one million dollars to a Communist security service." (This was the WIN operation in Poland; it is unlikely that Dulles told the president about the ugly details of the operation, which blew up three weeks before Eisenhower's inauguration.) "CIA unwittingly organized an intelligence network for the Communists," Kellis wrote, referring to the debacle created by the Seoul station during the Korean War. Dulles and his deputies, "fearing any aftereffects on their reputation," had lied to Congress about the agency's operations in Korea and China. Kellis had personally investigated the question on a trip to the Far East in 1952. He had determined that "CIA was being duped."
Dulles had been planting stories in the press, burnishing his image as "a scholarly affable Christian missionary, the country's outstanding intelligence expert," Kellis wrote. "For some of us who have seen the other side of Allen Dulles, we don't see too many Christian traits. I personally consider him a ruthless, ambitious and utterly incompetent government administrator." Kellis pleaded with the president to take "the drastic action needed to clean up" the CIA.
Eisenhower wanted to counter the threats to the clandestine service and clean up its problems in secret. In July 1954, shortly after the conclusion of Operation Success, the president commissioned General Jimmy Doolittle, who had worked on the Solarium project, and his good friend William Pawley, the millionaire who had provided the fighter-bombers for the Guatemala coup, to assess the CIA's capabilities for covert action.
Doolittle had ten weeks to report back. He and Pawley met with Dulles and Wisner, traveled to CIA stations in Germany and London, and interviewed senior military and diplomatic officers who worked in liaison with their CIA counterparts. They also talked to Bedell Smith, who told them that "Dulles was too emotional to be in this critical spot" and that "his emotionalism was far worse than it appeared on the surface."
On October 19, 1954, Doolittle went to see the president at the White House. He reported that the agency had "ballooned out into a vast and sprawling organization manned by a large number of people, some of whom were of doubtful competence." Dulles surrounded himself with people who were unskilled and undisciplined. The sensitive matter of "the family relationship" with Foster Dulles arose. Doolittle thought it would be better for all concerned if the personal connection were not a professional connection: "it leads to protection of one by the other or influence of one by the other." An independent committee of trusted civilians should oversee the CIA for the president.
The Doolittle report warned that Wisner's clandestine service was "filled with people having little or no training for their jobs." Within its six separate staffs, seven geographic divisions, and more than forty branches, "'dead wood' exists at virtually all levels." The report recommended a "complete reorganization" of Wisner's empire, which had suffered from its "mushroom expansion" and "tremendous pressures to accept commitments beyond its capacity to perform." It observed that "in covert operations quality is more important than quantity. A small number of competent people can be more useful than a large number of incompetents."
Dulles was well aware that the clandestine service was out of control. The CIA's officers were running operations behind their commanders' backs. Two days after Doolittle presented his report, the director told Wisner that he was worried that "sensitive and/or delicate operations are carried out at lower levels without being brought to the attention of the appropriate Deputy, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence or the Director of Central Intelligence."
But Dulles handled the Doolittle report the way he usually dealt with bad news, by burying it. He would not let the highest-ranking officers at the CIA see it--not even Wisner.
Though the full report remained classified until 2001, its preface was made public a quarter century before. It contained one of the grimmest passages of the cold war:
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.
The report said the nation needed "an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique, and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy." For the CIA had never solved "the problem of infiltration by human agents," it said. "Once across borders--by parachute, or any other means--escape from detection is extremely difficult." It concluded: "The information we have obtained by this method of acquisition has been negligible and the cost in effort, dollars and human lives prohibitive."
It placed the highest priority on espionage to gain intelligence on the Soviets. It stressed that no price was too high to pay for this knowledge.
"WE DIDN'T RAISE THE RIGHT QUESTIONS"
Dulles was desperate to place an American spy inside the iron curtain.
In 1953, the first CIA officer he had dispatched to Moscow was seduced by his Russian housemaid--she was a KGB colonel--photographed in flagrante delicto, blackmailed, and fired by the agency for his indiscretions. In 1954, a second officer was caught in the act of espionage, arrested, and deported shortly after his arrival. Soon thereafter, Dulles called in one of his special assistants, John Maury, who had traveled in Russia before World War II and spent much of the war at the American embassy in Moscow representing the Office of Naval Intelligence. He asked Maury to join the clandestine service and to train for a mission to Moscow.
None of Wisner's officers had ever been to Russia, Dulles said: "They know nothing about the target."
"I don't know anything about operations," Maury responded.
"I don't think they do either," Dulles replied.
Such men could hardly provide the president with the intelligence he wanted most: strategic warning against a nuclear attack. When the National Security Council convened to talk about what to do if that attack came, the president turned to Dulles and said: "Let's not have another Pearl Harbor." That was the task the president assigned to the second secret intelligence commission he created in 1954.
Eisenhower told James R. Killian, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to lead a group seeking ways of preventing a Soviet bolt from the blue. He pressed for techniques the Doolittle report strongly recommended: "communications and electronic surveillance" to provide "early warning of impending attack."
The CIA redoubled its own efforts to listen in on the enemy. It succeeded, in its own fashion.
Up in the attic of the Berlin base headquarters, a washed-up baseball player turned lawyer turned spy named Walter O'Brien had been photographing papers purloined from the East Berlin post office. They described the underground routes of the new telecommunications cables used by Soviet and East German officials. This espionage coup turned into the Berlin Tunnel project.
The tunnel was regarded at the time as the CIA's greatest public triumph. The idea--and its undoing--came from British intelligence. In 1951, the British had told the CIA that they had been tapping into the Soviets' telecommunications cables through a network of tunnels in the occupied zones of Vienna since shortly after the end of World War II. They suggested doing the same in Berlin. Thanks to the stolen blueprints, it became a real possibility.
A secret CIA history of the Berlin tunnel, written in August 1967 and declassified in February 2007, laid out three questions that faced William K. Harvey, a hard-drinking, gun-toting ex-FBI agent who took over as chief of the Berlin base in 1952: Could the agency dig a 1,476-foot tunnel into the Soviet zone of East Berlin and hit a target two inches in diameter--and twenty-seven inches underneath a major highway--without being caught? How could it get rid of the spoils--some three thousand tons of sandy soil--in secret? And what kind of cover story would serve to disguise the construction of an installation for the dig in a squalid district of refugees' shacks at the edge of the American zone?
Allen Dulles and his British counterpart, Sir John Sinclair, agreed in December 1953 on terms of reference for a set of conferences on the tunnel operation, which was to be code-named JOINTLY. The talks led to a plan of action the following summer. A building covering a full city block would rise amid the rubble, with antennae bristling from the roof, and the Soviets would be given to understand that it was a station for intercepting signals intelligence from the atmosphere--the magician's trick of diverting the eye. The Americans would dig the tunnel eastward, to a point beneath the cables. The British, relying on their experience in Vienna, would drive a vertical shaft from the end of the tunnel to the cables and then install the taps. A London office that grew to 317 officers would process the spoken conversations recorded by the CIA. In Washington, the agency would set 350 personnel to work transcribing teletype transmissions intercepted in the tunnel. The Army Corps of Engineers did the digging, with technical assistance from the British. The biggest problem, as ever, proved to be translating the words intercepted by the operation: "We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed," the CIA history noted, for the agency's language capabilities in Russian and even in German were sorely lacking.
The tunnel was completed at the end of February 1955, and the British began to set the taps one month later. Information began flowing in May. It came to tens of thousands of hours of conversations and teletypes, including precious details about Soviet nuclear and conventional forces in Germany and Poland, insights into the Soviet Ministry of Defense in Moscow, and the architecture of Soviet counterintelligence operations in Berlin. It provided pictures of political confusion and indecision among Soviet and East German officialdom, and the names or cover identities of several hundred Soviet intelligence officers. It delivered news--even if it took weeks or months of translation--at a cost of $6.7 million. Once it was revealed, as the CIA anticipated it would be one day, the tunnel was seen as a sign that "the U.S., almost universally regarded as a stumbling neophyte in espionage matters, was capable of a coup against the Soviet Union, which has long been the acknowledged master in such matters," the CIA history poignantly reported.
The agency had not expected the operation would be blown quite so soon. It lasted less than a year--until the following April, when the tunnel was uncovered. For the Kremlin had known about it from the start, before the first shovel of earth was turned. The plan was uncovered by a Soviet mole in British intelligence, George Blake, who had switched his allegiances while a prisoner of war in North Korea and who had let the Soviets in on the secret back in late 1953. The Soviets valued Blake so highly that Moscow let the tunnel operation run for eleven months before exposing it in a blaze of heavy-handed publicity. Years later, even after realizing that the other side had known of the tunnel from the start, the CIA still believed it had dug a gold mine. To this day, the question remains: did Moscow deliberately feed deceptive information into the tunnel? The evidence suggests that the CIA gained two invaluable and untainted kinds of knowledge from the taps. The agency learned a basic blueprint of the Soviet and East German security systems, and it never picked up a glimmer of warning that Moscow intended to go to war.
"Those of us who knew a little bit about Russia viewed it as a backward Third World country that wanted to develop along the lines of the West," said the CIA's Tom Polgar, the Berlin base veteran. But that view was rejected at the highest levels in Washington. The White House and the Pentagon presumed that the Kremlin's intentions were identical to theirs: to destroy their enemy on the first day of World War III. Their mission was therefore to locate Soviet military capabilities and destroy them first. They had no faith that American spies could do that.
But American machines might.
The Killian report was the beginning of the triumph of technology and the eclipse of old-fashioned espionage at the CIA. "We obtain little significant information from classic covert operations inside Russia," the report told Eisenhower. "But we can use the ultimate in science and technology to improve our intelligence take." It urged Eisenhower to build spy planes and space satellites to soar over the Soviet Union and photograph its arsenals.
The technology was within America's grasp. It had been for two years. Dulles and Wisner had been too busy with operational matters to pay attention to a July 1952 memo from their colleague Loftus Becker, then the deputy director for intelligence, on a proposal to develop "a satellite vehicle for reconnaissance"--a television camera launched on a rocket, to survey the Soviet Union from deep space. The key was building the camera. Edwin Land, a Nobel laureate who had invented the Polaroid, was sure that he could do it.
In November 1954, with the Berlin Tunnel under way, Land, Killian, and Dulles met with the president and won his approval to build the U-2 spy plane, a powered glider with a camera in its belly that would put American eyes behind the iron curtain. Eisenhower gave the go-ahead, along with a glum prediction. Someday, he said, "one of these machines is going to be caught, and then we'll have a storm."
Dulles gave the job of building the plane to Dick Bissell, who knew nothing about aircraft but skillfully created a secret government bureaucracy that shielded the U-2 program from scrutiny and helped speed the plane's creation. "Our Agency," he proudly told a class of CIA trainees a few years later, "is the last refuge of organizational privacy available to the U.S. government."
Bissell paced down the CIA's corridors with long strides, a gawky man with great ambitions. He believed that he someday would be the next director of central intelligence, for Dulles told him so. He became increasingly contemptuous of espionage, and disdained Richard Helms and his intelligence officers. The two men became bureaucratic rivals and then bitter enemies. They personified the battle between spies and gadgets, which began fifty years ago and continues today. Bissell saw the U-2 as a weapon--an aggressive blow against the Soviet threat. If Moscow "couldn't do a goddamn thing to prevent you" from violating Soviet airspace and spying on Soviet forces, that alone would sap Soviet pride and power. He formed a very small and secret cell of CIA officers to run the program, and he assigned the CIA's James Q. Reber, the assistant director for intelligence coordination, to decide what the plane should photograph inside the Soviet Union. Reber rose to become the longtime chairman of the committee that chose the Soviet targets for the U-2 planes and the spy satellites that succeeded them. But in the end, the Pentagon always set the requirements for reconnaissance: How many bombers did the Soviets have? How many nuclear missiles? How many tanks?
Later in life, Reber said that the cold war mentality blocked the very idea of photographing anything else.
"We didn't raise the right questions," Reber said. If the CIA had developed a bigger picture of life inside the Soviet Union, it would have learned that the Soviets were putting little money into the resources that truly made a nation strong. They were a weak enemy. If the CIA's leaders had been able to run effective intelligence operations inside the Soviet Union, they might have seen that Russians were unable to produce the necessities of life. The idea that the final battles of the cold war would be economic instead of military was beyond their imagination.
"THERE ARE SOME THINGS HE DOESN'T TELL
THE PRESIDENT"
The president's efforts to investigate the capabilities of the CIA led to a leap of technology that revolutionized the gathering of intelligence. But they never got to the root of the problem. Seven years after its creation, there was no oversight or control of the CIA. Its secrets were shared on a need-to-know basis, and Allen Dulles decided who needed to know.
No one was left to look into the agency after Walter Bedell Smith quit the government in October 1954. By sheer force of personality, Bedell Smith had tried to rein in Allen Dulles. But when he left, the ability of anyone but Eisenhower to control covert action went with him.
In 1955, the president changed the rules by creating the "Special Group"--three designated representatives of the White House, State, and Defense, charged with reviewing the secret operations of the CIA. But they had no ability to approve covert action in advance. If he chose to do so, Dulles might make passing mention of his plans at informal lunches with the Special Group--the new undersecretary of state, the deputy secretary of defense, and the president's national-security assistant. But more often he did not. A five-volume CIA history of Dulles's career as director of central intelligence noted that he believed they had no need to know about covert action. They were in no position to judge him or the agency. He felt that "no policy approval was required" for his decisions.
The director, his deputies, and his station chiefs abroad remained free to set their own policies, plot their own operations, and judge the results for themselves, in secret. Dulles advised the White House as he saw fit. "There are some things he doesn't tell the President," his sister confided to a State Department colleague. "It is better that he doesn't know."