Allen Dulles asked his colleagues at the Princeton Inn to consider how best to destroy Stalin's ability to control his satellite states. He believed that communism could be undone by covert action. The CIA was ready to roll back Russia to its old borders.
"If we are going to move in and take the offensive, Eastern Europe presents the best place to start," he said. "I don't want a bloody battle," he said, "but I would like to see things started."
Chip Bohlen spoke up. Soon to be named the American ambassador to Moscow, Bohlen had been in on the game from the start. The seeds of the CIA's political-warfare program were first planted at the Sunday night suppers he had attended five years before. "Are we waging political warfare?" he asked Dulles rhetorically. "We have been waging it since 1946. A lot has been going on. Whether it has been effective, or done in the best way, is another question.
"When you ask, 'Shall we go on the offensive?' I see a vast field of illusion," Bohlen said.
While the war in Korea still raged, the Joint Chiefs commanded Frank Wisner and the CIA to conduct "a major covert offensive against the Soviet Union," aimed at "the heartland of the communist control system." Wisner tried. The Marshall Plan was being transformed into pacts providing America's allies with weapons, and Wisner saw this as a chance to arm secret stay-behind forces to fight the Soviets in the event of war. He was seeding the ground all over Europe. Throughout the mountains and forests of Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, and Greece, his men were dropping gold ingots into lakes and burying caches of weapons for the coming battle. In the marshes and foothills of Ukraine and the Baltics, his pilots were dropping agents to their deaths.
In Germany, more than a thousand of his officers were slipping leaflets into East Berlin, forging postal stamps carrying a portrait of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht with a hangman's noose around his neck, and plotting out paramilitary missions in Poland. None of this provided insight into the nature of the Soviet threat. Operations to sabotage the Soviet empire kept overwhelming plans to spy on it.
"YOU OWN HIM BODY AND SOUL"
Deeply wary, Walter Bedell Smith dispatched a trusted three-star general, Lucian K. Truscott, an officer with impeccable connections and a distinguished war record, to take over the CIA's operations in Germany and to find out what Wisner's men were doing. General Truscott's orders were to suspend every scheme he deemed dubious. Upon his arrival, he chose Tom Polgar of the CIA's Berlin base as his chief aide.
They found several ticking time bombs. Among them was one very dark secret, described in CIA documents of the day as a program of "overseas interrogations."
The agency had set up clandestine prisons to wring confessions out of suspected double agents. One was in Germany, another in Japan. The third, and the biggest, was in the Panama Canal Zone. "Like Guantanamo," Polgar said in 2005. "It was anything goes."
The zone was its own world, seized by the United States at the turn of the century, bulldozed out of the jungles that surrounded the Panama Canal. On a naval base in the zone, the CIA's office of security had refitted a complex of cinder-block prison cells inside a navy brig normally used to house drunk and disorderly sailors. In those cells, the agency was conducting secret experiments in harsh interrogation, using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing.
The project dated back to 1948, when Richard Helms and his officers in Germany realized they were being defrauded by double agents. The effort began as a crash program in 1950, when the Korean War erupted and a sense of emergency seized the CIA. Late that summer, as the temperature approached a hundred degrees in Panama, two Russian emigres who had been delivered to the Canal Zone from Germany were injected with drugs and brutally interrogated. Along with four suspected North Korean double agents subjected to the same treatment at a military base commandeered by the CIA in Japan, they were among the first known human guinea pigs under a program code-named Project Artichoke, a small but significant part of a fifteen-year search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind.
Many of the Russians and East Germans whom the agency had recruited as agents and informers in Germany had gone sour. After they had given up what little knowledge they had, they resorted to deception or blackmail to extend their short careers. More than a few of them were suspected of working in secret for the Soviets. The issue became urgent when CIA officers came to realize that the communist intelligence and security services were far bigger and significantly more sophisticated than the agency.
Richard Helms once said that American intelligence officers were trained to believe that they could not count on a foreign agent "unless you own him body and soul." The need for a way to own a man's soul led to the search for mind-control drugs and secret prisons in which to test them. Dulles, Wisner, and Helms were personally responsible for these endeavors.
On May 15, 1952, Dulles and Wisner received a report on Project Artichoke, spelling out the agency's four-year effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, the newly discovered LSD, and other "special techniques in CIA interrogations." Part of the project sought to find an interrogation technique so strong that "the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning." A few months later, Dulles approved an ambitious new program code-named Ultra. Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York hotel. Like the suspected double agents sent to the secret brig in Panama, these men were expendable conscripts in the battle to defeat the Soviets.
Senior CIA officers, including Helms, destroyed almost all the records of these programs in fear that they might become public. The evidence that remains is fragmentary, but it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s. Members of the clandestine service, the agency's security office, and the CIA's scientists and doctors met monthly to discuss the progress of Project Artichoke until 1956. "These discussions included the planning of overseas interrogations," the agency's files show, and the use of "special interrogation" techniques continued for several years thereafter.
The drive to penetrate the iron curtain had led the CIA to adopt the tactics of its enemies.
"A WELL THOUGHT-OUT PLAN, EXCEPT..."
Among the CIA operations that General Truscott killed off was a project to support a group called the Young Germans. Many of its leaders were aging Hitler Youth. The membership rolls had grown to more than twenty thousand in 1952. They enthusiastically took the CIA's weapons, radios, cameras, and money and buried them all over the country. They also began drawing up their own extensive hit list of mainstream democratic West German politicians to be assassinated when the hour was at hand. The Young Germans became so blatant that their existence and their enemies list blew up into a public scandal.
"That became cause for a great deal of concern and a major flap when the secrecy was broken," said John McMahon, a future deputy director of central intelligence, then a young CIA officer on Truscott's staff.
On the same day that Dulles was speaking at the Princeton Inn, Henry Hecksher was writing a heartfelt plea to CIA headquarters. For years, Hecksher, soon to become chief of the Berlin base, had cultivated a unique agent inside East Germany, Horst Erdmann, who ran an impressive organization called the Free Jurists' Committee. The Free Jurists were an underground group of young lawyers and paralegals challenging the communist regime in East Berlin. They compiled dossiers on the crimes committed by the state. An International Congress of Jurists was set to convene in West Berlin in July 1952, and the Free Jurists could play an important political part on a world stage.
Wisner wanted to take control of the Free Jurists and turn them into an armed underground. Hecksher protested. These men were sources of intelligence, he argued, and if they were forced into a paramilitary role, they would become cannon fodder. He was overruled. Wisner's officers in Berlin selected one of General Reinhard Gehlen's officers to transform the group into a fighting force made up of three-man cells. But every member of every cell they created knew the identity of every other member of every other cell--a classic lapse in security. After Soviet soldiers kidnapped and tortured one of their leaders on the eve of the international conference, every one of the CIA's Free Jurists was arrested.
Toward the end of 1952, in the last months of Smith's tenure as director of central intelligence, more of Wisner's hastily improvised operations began coming apart. The fallout left a lasting impression on a newly anointed CIA officer named Ted Shackley, who started a supercharged career at the agency as a second lieutenant shanghaied from his job training military police in West Virginia. His first assignment was to make himself familiar with a major Wisner operation to support a Polish liberation army, the Freedom and Independence Movement, known as WIN.
Wisner and his men had dropped roughly $5 million worth of gold bars, submachine guns, rifles, ammunition, and two-way radios into Poland. They had established trusted contacts with "WIN outside," a handful of emigres in Germany and London. They believed that "WIN inside" was a powerful force--five hundred soldiers in Poland, twenty thousand armed partisans, and a hundred thousand sympathizers--all prepared to fight the Red Army.
It was an illusion. The Polish secret police, backed by the Soviets, had wiped out WIN back in 1947. "WIN inside" was a phantom, a communist trick. In 1950, a clueless courier was sent to alert the Polish emigres in London. His message was that WIN lived and thrived in Warsaw. The emigres contacted Wisner's men, who leaped at the chance to build a resistance group behind enemy lines, and parachuted as many patriots as possible back into Poland. At headquarters, the CIA's leaders thought they had finally beaten the communists at their own game. "Poland represents one of the most promising areas for the development of underground resistance," Bedell Smith said at a meeting of his deputies in August 1952. Wisner told him that "WIN is now riding high."
The Soviet and Polish intelligence services had spent years setting their traps. "They were well aware of our air operations. When we would drop these agents in," McMahon said, "they would go out and make contact with people we knew would be helpful to us. And the Poles and the KGB were right in back of them and would mop them up. So it was a well thought-out plan, except we were recruiting agents of the Soviet Union. It turned out to be a monumental disaster. People died." Perhaps thirty, maybe more, were lost.
Shackley said he never forgot the sight of his fellow officers realizing that five years of planning and millions of dollars had gone down the drain. The unkindest cut might have been their discovery that the Poles had sent a chunk of the CIA's money to the Communist Party of Italy.
"CIA had clearly thought they could operate in Eastern Europe the way the OSS had operated in occupied Western Europe during the war," said the CIA's Henry Loomis, a future chief of the Voice of America. "That was clearly impossible."
In Washington, Frank Lindsay, who had run operations in Eastern Europe from headquarters, resigned in anguish. He told Dulles and Wisner that scientific and technical means of spying on the Soviets would have to replace covert action as the CIA's strategy against communism. Quixotic paramilitary missions to support imaginary resistance movements could not push the Russians out of Europe.
In Germany, McMahon had spent months reading all the cable traffic coming in to the station. He came to a stark conclusion. "We had no capability there," he said years later. "Our insight into the Soviet Union was zero."
"THE AGENCY'S FUTURE"
The CIA was now a worldwide force with fifteen thousand people, half a billion dollars in secret funds to spend each year, and more than fifty overseas stations. By sheer willpower, Bedell Smith had shaped it into an organization that looked much the way it would for the next fifty years. He had forged the Office of Policy Coordination and the Office of Special Operations into a single clandestine service to serve abroad, created a unified system for analysis at home, and achieved a measure of respect for the CIA at the White House.
But he had never made it a professional intelligence service. "We can't get qualified people," he lamented in his last days as director of central intelligence. "They just simply don't exist." And he had never made Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner bend to his authority. A week before the 1952 presidential election, Bedell Smith tried one last time to bring them under control.
On October 27, he convened a conference of the CIA's twenty-six most senior officers and proclaimed that "until CIA could build a reserve of well-trained people, it would have to hold its activities to the limited number of operations that it could do well, rather than attempt to cover a broad field with poor performance" from "improperly trained or inferior personnel." Galvanized by Truscott's investigations in Germany, the general ordered the convening of a "Murder Board"--a jury that could kill off the worst of the CIA's covert operations. Wisner immediately fought back. He said that shutting down dubious operations would be a long and painful process, and it would take many, many months--well into the next administration--for Bedell Smith's order to be carried out. The general was defeated and the Murder Board defused.
Dwight D. Eisenhower won the presidency on a national-security platform that called for the free world to liberate the Soviet satellites, a script written by his closest foreign-policy adviser, John Foster Dulles. Their victory plans called for a new director of central intelligence. Chosen over Bedell Smith's protests, confirmed without opposition in the Senate, and cheered on by the press, Allen Dulles finally won the job he coveted.
Richard Helms had known Dulles well for eight years, ever since they traveled together to the little red schoolhouse in France where Bedell Smith had accepted the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich. Helms was forty now, a tightly wired man, not a slicked-back hair out of place nor a stray paper on his desk when the lights went out at night. Dulles was sixty, shuffling in the carpet slippers he wore in private to ease his gout, ever the absentminded professor. Not long after Eisenhower's election, Dulles buzzed Helms into the director's chambers, and the two men sat down for a chat.
"A word about the future," Dulles said, filling the air with great clouds of pipe smoke. "The Agency's future."
"You remember the conniving and blood-spilling that went on when we were trying to sort things out in 1946? What would Central Intelligence be responsible for? Would there even be a service?" Dulles wanted Helms to understand that as long as he was the director of central intelligence, there was damned well going to be a service devoted to daring, difficult, dangerous missions.
"I want to be absolutely sure you understand how important covert action operations are right now," Dulles said. "The White House and this administration have an intense interest in every aspect of covert action."
Over the next eight years, through his devotion to covert action, his disdain for the details of analysis, and his dangerous practice of deceiving the president of the United States, Allen Dulles did untold damage to the agency he had helped to create.