James Speyer KronthalWidows [EXCERPT]
by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento
© 1989 by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento
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CHAPTER ONE: The First DeathI can't wait for 1984, Love JimMRS. LAVINIA THOMAS had been James Speyer Kronthal's housekeeper for many years. She enjoyed working for him. The daffodils in the small garden in front of the white brick town house in Georgetown welcomed her to work that cool spring morning. Usually Mr. Kronthal would be reading the Washington Post and finishing his juice when Mrs. Thomas arrived. It was April I, 1953, at 8:30 A.M. and the paper was still on the front step.
Picking up the paper, Mrs. Thomas went inside. On the console table in the small foyer were several letters to be put out for the mailman and a note from Mr. Kronthal saying he had worked very late and wanted to sleep in. Mrs. Thomas shook her head and wondered about what really went on at her boss's State Department office.
When the telephone rang an hour later there was still no sign of her employer stirring. It was someone from Mr. Kronthal's office who wished to speak to him. Mrs. Thomas explained that he had worked late and did not want to be disturbed. The caller asked her to wake him, that it was important. Mrs. Thomas called to Mr. Kronthal. There was no response. The caller asked Mrs. Thomas to have Mr. Kronthal telephone his office as soon as possible, and hung up.
Later that morning, just as Mrs. Thomas was about to go up and knock hard on Mr. Kronthal's second-floor bedroom door, the front doorbell rang. The two men at the door identified themselves as colleagues of Mr. Kronthal from the Department of State. They moved past Mrs. Thomas into the foyer. One of them said that it was vitally important for Mr. Kronthal to come to a meeting, so they would go wake him. She reluctantly let them precede up the stairs.
They knocked hard on the door, but there was no answer. One of the men turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. Opening the door, they saw a man lying across the bed, fully dressed. James Speyer Kronthal was not sleeping. He was dead. Murdered? Later, all Mrs. Thomas could ask herself and her friends was how this could have happened to such a nice young man.
On paper, James Speyer Kronthal was a perfect recruit for the young, burgeoning intelligence service just beginning to emerge in the United States. He had graduated from two of America's aristocratic educational institutions -- a B.A. from Yale in 1934 and an M.A. from Harvard in 1941. His linguistic abilities included fluency in German, French, and Italian. But it was his work during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner of the CIA, that caught the eye of Allen Welsh Dulles. During the war, Dulles ran the OSS station in Bern, Switzerland, where Kronthal showed him his mettle.
Both men were born to the same upper class, and both shared a similar, nonisolationist attitude toward international politics. As the war ended and the OSS was disbanded, its membership drifted back to the traditional Old Money roles: completing their educations, joining law firms, and managing family investments.
Less than two years later, Americans learned hard lessons about their once-close ally, the Soviet Union. First came the loss of the atomic bomb secrets, then the Armed Forces Security Agency discovered VENONA. This breaking of the Soviets' code revealed that the war alliance was mere expediency and that the Soviets were not America's good friends; they were, in reality, its dedicated enemy. Most Americans soon regarded the Soviets as the new threat. Congress quickly passed, and President Harry Truman signed, the National Security Act of 1947, which chartered the CIA. The infant spy service comprised the cream of the OSS -- mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males from wealthy families with good educations and some experience in wartime espionage. On April 21, 1947, James Kronthal became chief of Bern Station, one of the first seven CIA overseas offices. [1]
On the opposing side, the Soviets had older, more established, very well organized and successful intelligence departments, known informally as "the organs." The postwar U.S. intelligence organizations were so weak that the Soviets virtually ignored them and concentrated instead on penetrating the British counterintelligence and intelligence services, MIS and MI6, and the U.S. military forces deployed throughout Europe after the war. But the advent of the CIA offered the Soviets a rare opportunity to infiltrate a new service from top to bottom. The NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, calculatingly decided not to miss this unique chance to learn from the start about each new employee of the Agency and, of course, attempt to recruit some. [2]
NKVD head Lavrenti Beria expected his resident agents in the United States to learn as much as possible about everyone being assigned overseas by the new CIA. He wanted each of the seven new stations' employees thoroughly evaluated for weaknesses -- especially sex, money, or drugs. James Speyer Kronthal was no exception. Beria understood that the CIA was patterned after the OSS, and Bern proved to be one of the most important OSS stations. Counting on the predictability of the Americans, Beria gave the orders that all Bern personnel receive priority attention.
Beria had done very well in postwar Germany penetrating the young Bundesnachrichtendienst -- the West German Federal Intelligence Service -- known as the BND. That penetration would give the Soviets the information they needed on Kronthal to further their cause. By using old records from the OSS, the NKVD established that not only had Kronthal worked for Dulles in Bern, but also that Dulles and Kronthal were friends from the same social circles. That meant Kronthal had important connections. Establishing the true identities of those who worked for the OSS in Bern under Dulles helped the NKVD to determine whether these men were showing up under their true names elsewhere.
While the Soviets were busy trying to figure out whom to recruit in the CIA, President Harry Truman was trying to decide what to do with the new service. He looked upon the new CIA as a gatherer of information, not as a tool for fighting communist expansion in a direct way. Others wanted the CIA to be another OSS, only directed against the Soviets instead of the Nazis.
Operating under Soviet diplomatic cover in Washington, NKVD agents began to check into the backgrounds of the men who were being sent overseas by the CIA. They soon discovered something remarkable. The FBI was selected to perform the security checks on the new employees. The Soviet agents were astonished to learn that all these checks required was an inquiry at the various government agencies to find out if any unfavorable or derogatory information was known about an applicant. In addition, the Bureau would question neighbors, relatives, and classmates, seeking the same type of information. These "background investigations" were a far less rigorous test of loyalty than the NKVD employed for its agents and handlers.
While the FBI conducted its cursory check of Kronthal, the NKVD simultaneously performed a much more thorough one. The man whose resume looked so good to the CIA and FBI was regarded in quite a different way by the Soviets. In Moscow Center, the KGB's headquarters, Kronthal's middle name -- Speyer -- set off alarm bells. NKVD headquarters cabled Washington to find out more about Kronthal's middle name. When word came back that Kronthal's presumptive namesake was James Joseph Speyer, of Speyer and Company, the interest in Kronthal became intense.
The banking house of Speyer had done business with the Tsar. During the 1930s it ranked with Morgan, Kuhn and Loeb in New York, and Lee, Higginson in Boston as one of the major banking firms in the country. The company was originally founded in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1837, with the New York bank opening a year later.
The NKVD was able to learn that in 1913 when Leon Kronthal and his wife, Maude Mabel Ranger Kronthal, became parents, they decided to give their son a middle name after Leon's flamboyant business partner Joseph Speyer. Over the years Speyer treated young Kronthal like a member of his own family. Later this would bring heartbreak to Leon Kronthal, whose relationship with Joseph Speyer deteriorated as his son grew closer to Leon's business partner.
It is not hard to understand why Leon Kronthal and Joseph Speyer did not get along. They were exact opposites. Leon was a hardworking but dull man. Speyer, on the other hand, always dapper, was a womanizer and was the only Jewish member of several exclusive New York clubs. The young Kronthal's association with the Speyers was a great way for him to enter New York society.
Young Kronthal traveled on vacations with the Speyer family. He attended the Lincoln School in New York with Nelson Rockefeller and Michael Straight. [3] The NKVD found that at Yale, Kronthal did not take business courses as his father had urged him to, but majored, instead, in art history.
Yale was a heady experience for James Kronthal. He was young, reasonably attractive, and quite rich at a time when the Great Depression had swallowed up so many fortunes. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of the Yale rowing crew. His personality resembled that of James Speyer rather than that of his father. He found Speyer's company more interesting too; upon graduation, James Kronthal ignored his father's differences with Speyer and joined Joseph Speyer & Co. Leon Kronthal "retired" from Speyer & Co. to found his own company in 1934.
The Soviet NKVD learned that Kronthal had been sent off to Germany by Speyer where he had used the Speyer family connections to sell artworks that the Nazis confiscated from Jews between 1933 and 1940. In addition to becoming the go-between for this financial service, he also became personally acquainted with Nazi leaders such as Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels.
It was during this period that Kronthal showed a sexual proclivity for young boys. He was entrapped by the Gestapo, and it took Goering's personal intervention to get him out of trouble. But the Germans kept very good records, and the Kronthal arrest record was carefully filed away.
The information on Kronthal later came into the hands of the NKVD through its penetration of General Gehlen's BND by Heinz Felfe.
The moral of Kronthal's homosexual stumble is that knowledge of personal transgressions has a way of moving with a natural force from one intelligence service to another without regard to ideology or the sanctity of the sources. So when the NKVD took an interest in Kronthal, his history gave them a field day.
The NKVD kept digging. They learned that although Kronthal's work with Speyer & Co. had been financially rewarding, the emotional cost of profiting from other people's stolen wealth -- people who were sent to death camps -- had been enormous. Kronthal had decided to quit his job and return home to attend Harvard to get a graduate degree in art history. It was at Harvard that Kronthal became acquainted with a young Harvard Law School freshman named James Jesus Angleton. Years later, Angleton would rise to the highest ranks of the CIA as the man in charge of preventing its penetration by the Soviets -- or any other country's service.
Both Angleton and Kronthal had similar personalities and both were deeply suspicious of the motives of those who pursued wealth without regard to political consequences. These suspicions arose because both men had been associated with families that did just that.
After Pearl Harbor, both Angleton and Kronthal answered the call to the colors. Kronthal ended up in the Signal Corps. In 1944, after some combat service, he was assigned to the OSS. It was here that he met the men who would later form the heart of the CIA.
Because of his experience in Germany before the war, Kronthal was very useful to Allen Dulles at the OSS station in Bern. From Dulles's viewpoint, James Kronthal was an ideal subordinate. Not only did he know all the "right" people, but he also possessed a considerable amount of the guilty knowledge associated with the activities of the station chiefs older brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Like Kronthal, the Dulles family had done business in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the early days of Hitler.
After the Germans were defeated, Kronthal proved how flexible a man he could be. On behalf of the OSS and its successors, he busied himself recovering the art that the Nazis had stolen during their ascendancy. Allen Dulles, fulfilling the paternal role that Joseph Speyer had once provided, largely left Kronthal on his own to handle these expensive and precious art treasures. Finding his personal life more freely fulfilled in the ruins of Europe,
Kronthal simply did not want to go home and rejoin the banking business. His homosexuality would be too much of a burden to carry in that milieu.Kronthal's appointment in 1947 as the head of the CIA's new Bern Station was the perfect solution to this unhappy young man's problem. Not only was Bern in charge of CIA operations in Switzerland, but also in much of the rest of Western Europe.
By now the NKVD had learned all they needed to know about James Speyer Kronthal. Moscow Center set two objectives: one was to blackmail him into becoming a Soviet agent, and the second was to make certain he was promoted up through the ranks of their new-found nemesis -- the CIA.
The NKVD was not interested in the information Kronthal could provide from Bern in the short term. It was clear to Beria that Kronthal had the potential to go places in the CIA. The aim with Kronthal was to recruit him to become an "agent in place" at the highest levels of the CIA. Perhaps someday, if politics and luck came together, KronthaI might even head the American clandestine services.
Chinese boys were supplied to Kronthal in Switzerland. He was secretly filmed and then blackmailed. Moscow Center wanted him totally under its control. Although Moscow already had access to the information Kronthal was providing CIA headquarters from Bern, by forcing him to send regular "packets" of information to Moscow Center, the Soviets made sure that Kronthal committed treason. The NKVD had him firmly in its grasp, and there was no turning back. Kronthal had done the one thing that could ruin his life. The Soviets had him.
In May 1952, Kronthal's Bern tour ended. He returned to Washington and was assigned to help plan a reorganization of the CIA to meet future needs and growth. His earlier apprehensions about returning home were now compounded by his betrayal of America. He was not a willing double agent.
The pressures had aged Kronthal dramatically during his overseas tour. He was a man under great strain. On the surface, however, his perfect resume was only enhanced by the addition of five apparently impeccable years in Bern. Kronthal was destined for greatness in the CIA. At Moscow Center, the NKVD believed victory was near.
In the United States, 1952 was an election year. The upcoming presidential election meant changes were coming to the CIA, and the NKVD was concerned. Walter Bedell Smith's declining health meant that he would probably step down as the head of the CIA. The NKVD pressured Kronthal to provide them with information on who was in line for the Director's job. It was critical to the Soviets. The exposure of their moles in 1951 -- Burgess and Maclean, Soviet agents in the British government -- meant that the Americans would obviously cut off the British from sensitive intelligence. The Soviets had to get more men in the CIA. The CIA had now become their primary opponent.
The NKVD was not pleased with the information Kronthal provided. But the kind of information they wanted did not exist. Eisenhower had not given a hint what his intentions were for the CIA. General Smith wanted General Lucian Truscott to replace him at CIA. But Truscott turned down the job when Eisenhower offered it to him. Eisenhower then turned to Allen Dulles. For Kronthal, his old mentor becoming head of the service was a personal tragedy. He knew the NKVD would pressure him to wangle a top job from Dulles. It meant that Moscow Center now had a gold mine in Kronthal.
Kronthal's work on an internal reorganization of the CIA was almost finished. His Soviet handler told Kronthal, who was never very good at politics, to press for his appointment to head the clandestine services. Dulles so trusted Kronthal that he was prepared to give him any post he wanted.
But the pressures caused by his fear of being exposed as a homosexual and a Soviet agent were beginning to tell. Kronthal became paralyzed by his fear of exposure. He could not bring himself to fight off other colleagues who were aggressively seeking the same position.
Then chaos struck the Soviet Union. On March 2, 1953, Stalin died -- or may have been murdered. His death was not announced until three days later. Beria was fighting to maintain control over the intelligence organs. The pressures on Kronthal increased. Now, more than ever, Beria needed his agent in place. Beria moved to seize power too quickly. While he had the NKVD in his pocket, it was not a sufficient power base from which he could seize control of the Communist Party and the Politburo. Beria began to pull back and wage an internal war at home with the new leadership while pressuring his agents abroad to produce crucial intelligence.
On March 31, 1953, Dulles decided to find out for himself what position Kronthal wanted in the Agency. Dulles had to make the final top assignments in the CIA, so he invited his old friend over that evening for a working dinner. They lived only two blocks from each other.
What happened between the two men that night is lost to history. There is no evidence that Dulles ever discussed his last conversations with Kronthal that night with anyone else. What is known is that after dinner Kronthal walked to his Georgetown town house at 1662 32nd Street, N. W., sometime before midnight. At home, Kronthal wrote two letters. One letter was addressed to Allen Dulles and the other to Richard Helms. In addition, Kronthal left the brief note for his housekeeper, asking her not to disturb him.
At 9:30 A.M., when Kronthal failed to report to his office on the Mall, the CIA telephoned (under State Department cover) and asked Mrs. Thomas to wake him up. According to police reports, Mrs. Thomas called out but got no answer. She was hesitant to wake him because of his note. But within two hours, Gould Cassal and McGregor Gray arrived at the house from the CIA's Office of Security.
Over Mrs. Thomas's objections, the two men went to Kronthal's bedroom and found his fully clothed body lying on a daybed. His jacket was off, but he still had on a shirt and tie. An empty vial was on the floor. The two security men followed standard procedure and called the CIA's unofficial liaison in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.
Lt. Lawrence Hartnett had gotten such calls before. He was in charge of cleaning up messes like this one. His job was to cover up what the CIA wanted hidden when it came to Washington police matters. In return, Hartnett was given terrific local intelligence. His files on Washington-based politicians rivaled J. Edgar Hoover's in volume. He had enough details on the local power structure to remain on the force as long as he wanted.
Hartnett carried the ball. He told the press that investigators had found a handwritten letter to a male friend indicating that Kronthal was "mentally upset because of pressure connected with work." This letter, to Richard Helms, and another to Dulles were delivered to their addressees rather than held as evidence by the police. The death was quickly hushed up. An autopsy placed the time of death around midnight, but a chemical analysis failed to determine the cause of death or the contents of the vial found next to Kronthal's body. The cause of death was listed as "apparent suicide."
While the notes to Dulles and Helms were found unmailed in KronthaI's house, he did manage to mail one letter before he died.
In a letter to his sister, Susan, Kronthal made a clean breast of his homosexual proclivities and made reference to the "tremendous difficulties" they posed. Susan, already aware of her brother's sexual persuasion, was not alarmed or fretful over these revelations. However, Kronthal's confession that he was not really in the Department of State but, as she had suspected, in the CIA, caused her great concern. The last sentence in James Kronthal's final testament to his sister was, "I can't wait till 1984. Love, Jim."
Susan became the first of a generation of relatives to be stonewalled and lied to by U. S. intelligence agencies over the details of a loved one's death or disappearance. Susan's futile attempts to find out more of the facts surrounding her brother's death led her to believe that the CIA was covering up or withholding information that she thought she had a right to know. But the facts surrounding his death were stamped "Secret" and withheld from her, just as they would be kept from the family members of other, future Cold War casualties.
Kronthal had become an embarrassment and a liability to both sides. He knew firsthand the cost of making a deal with the devil; it must have been clear to his sister that he had little hope or faith that his countrymen would have the wit or wisdom to do any better than he did.
For Beria, the loss of James Kronthal was a major failure. The opportunity to penetrate the CIA at its highest level had been squandered. At Moscow Center the damage report on the Kronthal case made it clear that the Center had pressed him too hard for basically useless or unobtainable political information.
Murder or suicide in the Kronthal case could not be determined. If the Soviets had concluded that he had been identified as a mole by the CIA, they would have killed him. The "organs" did not have any compunctions about arranging to kill any "asset" who had outlived his or her usefulness. They readily killed millions of Russians. A foreigner was not worth any hesitation. If the CIA had learned about Kronthal's "problems," it is possible that Dulles himself would have approved an "executive action," not just to eliminate the problem, but also to send a message to the Soviets that the Agency knew the man had been compromised and turned. Certainly the speed with which the Office of Security arrived at the Kronthal home adds some support to that alternative. More likely, however, is the possibility that Kronthal confessed to Dulles that night over dinner. The next day, when Kronthal did not show up at work, a concerned Dulles concluded that something was very wrong and dispatched the security men.
For the Soviets, only one thing mattered. Kronthal was lost and had to be replaced. With Stalin gone, the winds of change were sweeping the country, and the NKVD had to have information to survive. The only real external intelligence threat left was the CIA.
Long before Kronthal's compromise and recruitment, the NKVD had begun an arduous and methodical program to penetrate the CIA. It was not a high-wire act like the Kronthal effort, but it did get the job done. The NKVD put together dossiers on thousands of Americans who had played a part in the joint war effort. Their World War II files on Americans were picked clean for potential recruitments. If an American showed an interest in the Soviet way of life or sympathy for the Soviet struggle, he became a candidate. He would be nurtured like a calf; he would be given help with his education and be guided toward a career in intelligence. It would be from this cadre that the CIA moles would be selected, trained, and sent on lifelong missions.
The file on Kronthal is buried deep in the archives of the CIA. It is a file on what is probably the first Soviet penetration of the infant intelligence service. It is a story known by only a handful of people who are alive today. The file of James Speyer Kronthal is a metaphor for what the Soviets have done to our intelligence services for a generation. James Kronthal was the first Soviet mole in the CIA. His previously untold story is the introduction to how the Soviets made a conscientious decision to penetrate the CIA and succeeded. His story would haunt CIA director after CIA director. The idea of penetration would never be far from Dulles's mind for the rest of his tenure. All the CIA directors that followed -- John McCone, Admiral William Raborn, Richard M. Helms. James Schlesinger, William Colby, George Bush, Admiral Stansfield Turner, William Casey, and William Webster -- would be held accountable for keeping the KGB out of the CIA.
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Notes:
Chapter One: The First Death1. The other stations were in London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Lisbon, and Shanghai.
2. Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) -- The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs -- the forerunner to the KGB.
3. An American whom Sir Anthony Blunt, a Soviet spy in British intelligence, recruited to work for the Soviets while they were both at Cambridge University in the 1930s. See Peter Wright and Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p. 213. Further documentation can be found in Straight's own book and in Mask of Treachery by John Costello (New York: Morrow, 1988).