by admin » Wed Nov 04, 2015 4:28 am
Chapter 4: Molehunter
In the early 1950s, Tom Braden was a young assistant to Allen W. Dulles, the CIA's deputy director for plans, the head of the agency's clandestine arm. As Braden recalled it, he and his wife were in their bedroom one evening when Braden relayed some office gossip.
"Beedle doesn't like Allen," he told her. Mrs. Braden understood the remark; it meant that General Walter Bedell Smith, the formidable director of the CIA, did not care for Dulles, the famed World War II spymaster who was eventually to succeed him as director. Braden thinks he added some comments about how the dreaded Smith, whom Winston Churchill compared to a bulldog, was mistreating Dulles.
"The next day," Braden said, "Dulles called me in. He asked, 'What's this about Bedell and me?'"
Adopting an innocent expression, Braden professed not to know what Dulles meant. "I might have given him a less than candid answer," Braden admitted. "He repeated the conversation word for word, and I didn't deny it the second time. It was so accurate."
"You'd better watch out," Dulles warned him. "Jimmy's got his eye on you." Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. [1] But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town.
"Angleton would come into Allen's office first thing in the morning and report what his bugs had picked up the night before. He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people's dinner parties. One house he bugged was Mrs. Dwight Davis. Her husband had been Secretary of War in the Coolidge cabinet. [2] In the early 1950s she was a much-sought-after Washington hostess, a dowager lady who had senators and cabinet members to her table. Jim used to come into Allen's office and Allen would say, 'How's the fishing?' And Jim would say, 'Well, I got a few nibbles last night.' It was all done in the guise of fishing talk."
Braden said he had personal knowledge of these conversations in Dulles's office, because "I was present and heard this, and not just on one occasion. Angleton would report that people said this, and people said that. Some were derogatory remarks about Allen, which Allen enjoyed. I presumed that they came from a bug.
"It seemed to me scandalous. Everybody assumed he bugged CIA staff officers too, not just dowager ladies. I think most people assumed he was doing it." At a bugged dinner party, Braden said, "some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the agency. I didn't think that was right. I think Jim was amoral." [3]
Robert T. Crowley, a former CIA officer who had worked with Angleton, said the CI chief did not arrange wiretaps on his own. "Jim didn't have the resources to do anything like that," he said. "If the director approved, OS [the Office of Security] would do it. Jim would be the beneficiary. He would get the take. But Jim had no technical support of his own."
Nevertheless, stories such as Braden's -- and they are legion -- helped to make Angleton a sinister and mysterious figure inside the CIA, and in the tight social circles in Washington in which he moved.
His nicknames reflected this. In the CIA, his agency pseudonym-- used in cable traffic -- was Hugh Ashmead. But his colleagues referred to him variously as "the Gray Ghost," "the Black Knight," "the Orchid Man," "the Fisherman," "Jesus," "Slim Jim," or less flatteringly, "Skinny Jim" or "Scarecrow." [4] In the dull bureaucracy of Washington, and even in the secret intelligence bureaucracy, few officials had such colorful sobriquets.
But it was more than that. James Angleton's hobbies, his background, his style, his whole life, fit the popular conception of what a CIA chief of counterintelligence ought to be like. The image and the man were made for each other; James Angleton could have stepped right out of Hollywood's Central Casting.
There was, for example, his legendary skill as a fly-fisherman, his well-documented prowess as a grower of, and expert on, orchids, his avocation as a collector of semiprecious gems. To his many admirers, these were not accidental interests; rather they were extensions of his brilliance as a counterintelligence officer. The same patience that was required to land a brook trout in a mountain stream was necessary to reel in a Soviet spy, a false defector, or a double agent of the KGB. It took years, as well as great patience, to grow an orchid, and this too was pure Angleton. One cannot see him in his black homburg bowling with the boys for relaxation. In the same way, the gemstones that he found in the caves and crannies of the Southwest, polished to perfection, and fashioned into cuff links or other gifts for his friends, these, too, were akin to the nuggets of counterintelligence information that he could pan from the river of cables, reports, and debriefings that crossed his desk. The key fact that when placed in context would shine as brightly as any topaz. Or so his admirers saw it.
And the fisherman, like the spycatcher, must understand lures. Angleton studied them carefully. One of his fishing partners was Sam Papich, a tall, tough Serb from Butte, Montana, who had worked in the copper mines like his father before him and who was the FBI liaison man with the CIA for nineteen years. The two men were close, J. Edgar Hoover's ambassador to the CIA and the chief of the CI Staff.
"Jim had the hands of a surgeon, and he made beautiful trout flies," Papich recalled. "Sometimes we'd go fishing together. Jim would walk up and down for quarter of a mile studying the water, vegetation, the insects. Then he'd decide what to do. He could give you a lecture on the life of the mayfly from the larval stage up until time it's a fly. I'm a trout fisherman, too, but he was a master at it. He usually released the fish he caught. To him, it was the challenge."
If Angleton fished for trout with Hoover's man, at the same time quietly strengthening his lines into the bureau, the flowers, too, were intertwined with his life as a counterspy. Merritt Huntington, the owner of Kensington Orchids, in suburban Maryland, knew Angleton for years and admired him both as a spy and as a horticulturist. "Angleton was a typical spook, America's number one spook, a real patriot," he said. "He used orchids as a cover. He had a brilliant, photographic memory. His knowledge of orchids was very extensive."
He used orchids as a cover? "Yes," Huntington said, "he would travel as an orchid-grower. He knew every orchid- grower in Europe. We always knew when big shots from Israel were coming, because Jim would need a bunch of orchids. Cut flowers for the Israelis."
"He was a breeder. He bred and named a couple of orchids. He named one for his wife. A cattleya called 'Cicely Angleton.' [5]
"Jim used to sit for hours and talk about orchids. He never talked about his work. I knew who he was, but he never talked politics. He could disappear for six months, but when he was around he would call. He was never without his trench coat."
Angleton was once quoted as saying that of all the orchids, "the lady slipper is my favorite because it's the hardest to grow." [6]
Sam Papich talked about the flowers, too, and the gemstones. "Jim would often send an orchid to a lady he met; he'd meet a lady, and next day she'd get an orchid, not from the flower shop, but from Jim's nursery. His clothes were usually rumpled. But all the women liked him. He made them all feel very important and beautiful. He wasn't a BS artist but he had a knack of bringing up subjects that were interesting and made people feel at home.
"He went to Tucson and collected stones and made beautiful jewelry. He made rings, bracelets, necklaces." Papich paused. "He had tremendous intellectual curiosity. He worked hard. He did most of his work at night."
It was somehow fitting that a mole hunter should be a nocturnal creature, a man who preferred to work in the dark. And Angleton's physical appearance was part of his mystique -- tall, thin to the point of looking emaciated, dressed in black, conservative clothes.
"He always wore three-piece suits," recalled former FBI counterintelligence man Don Moore. "He didn't even take off his coat and tie to play poker."
A CIA officer who knew Angleton well described him this way: "He was about six feet, with a hawk nose, dark shadows under his eyes, rather pale skin. Like someone who hadn't been in the sunlight very much. He was slightly stooped over. He would have been tall if he stood straight. Fairly large ears, graying hair, parted in the middle and combed straight back." Angleton wore thick horn-rimmed glasses, but his most interesting feature by far was his extraordinarily wide mouth, set in an angular jaw. Oddly, it almost made him resemble one of the fish he might have pursued, perhaps a bass, or a pike. It was a mouth that often wore a small, mysterious smile, the smile of a man who had a secret he would not share.
"He had a large office in Langley," Angleton's colleague recalled, "a desk covered with objets d'art, dark furniture. A little spooky? Not necessarily, but Jim did nothing to dispel that. Jim always looked buried behind a pile of documents all covered with restricted-access labels. He was soft-spoken but his voice carried conviction. He was definite about everything he said. And what he said was the voice of God."
Despite a serious bout with tuberculosis, the counterintelligence chief chain-smoked cigarettes. "He must have smoked three or four packs a day," a colleague remembered. "I've been in a car with him and he could hardly breathe. He'd turn on the air conditioner to try to get his breath."
And he drank. Espionage is a stressful profession, and a lot of CIA officers have problems with alcohol. "Jim would go to lunch about twelve-thirty, and have plenty to drink," one former colleague remembered. "He came back and was very voluble. He never did any work after lunch."
Angleton was a poet, or at least he had been deeply involved in poetry at Yale, an admirer of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and this aesthetic side, combined with the enormous secret power he wielded, made him a unique figure in the CIA and added to the ominous shadow he cast. For it was precisely this blend of poet and spy, of art and espionage -- a craft with a suggestion of violence always present just below the surface -- that added to the hint of menace in Angleton's persona. As a literary intellectual, he must have appreciated the delicious dramatic irony that he embodied. [7]
In a city in which information is power, secret information is the most valuable of all. And it was the belief within the CIA that Angleton possessed more secrets than anyone else, and grasped their meaning better than anyone else, that formed the basis of his power. Angleton understood this very well, and he cultivated an aura of omniscience.
"Angleton would walk around with his briefcase," George Kisevalter recalled. "He'd say, 'I have incredible material here from the bureau.' 'What is it?' 'I can't discuss it here.' If you can't discuss it in the DDO, where can you discuss it? It was ridiculous." But Kisevalter knew that Angleton's power rested on secrecy. "The key was knowing things and keeping the information to himself."
On one occasion, the CI chief buttonholed Kisevalter in an elevator at CIA.
"You've got to see this film," Angleton said. "It bears out my thinking."
"What film?" Kisevalter asked.
"The Manchurian Candidate." [8]
The secrets that Angleton did not share not only enhanced his power within a secret agency, they gave him the advantage in bureaucratic infighting. Secrecy served as an unassailable fallback position in any argument.
A CIA case officer who had worked closely with Angleton understood this. "When I was sent to London, Angleton was one of those who approved," he said. "You weren't going to go unless Jim also anointed you. But as time went on I just began to think that his conclusions were wrong. I'd listen to all his convoluted theories and say, 'But Jim, that is not in accord with the facts.' Jim would say, 'There are certain things I can't tell you.' I always felt it was because he couldn't justify his case."
Although wary of Angleton, Tom Braden understood the wellsprings of his power. "Angleton had the charm of Sherlock Holmes," he said. "The detective. Someone who knew something you didn't."
If Angleton cloaked himself in an air of mystery and intrigue, if he was the most sharp-witted merchant in the bazaar of CIA secrets, there was one truth he could not escape for all of his power. His job was unenviable.
It was James Angleton's job to suspect everyone -- and he did. That is the road to insanity, and there are those former colleagues who thought that he was indeed mad at the end. But these are clinical conclusions that should not be lightly or casually rendered, even by those who knew and worked with him. It is much easier to conclude that somewhere along the line, a lifetime of suspicion had corroded his judgment.
But it should also be said that suspicion is a necessary evil, or at least a necessary function, in an intelligence agency. The CIA and its operations are obvious targets for penetration by opposition intelligence services. Thus, there must be, within the CIA, a mechanism for defending against Soviet penetration of CIA operations and of the agency itself. That effort is called counterintelligence.
Practitioners of CI argue endlessly, in Talmudic fashion, over the precise and best definition of their art. From their debates, however, some general agreement has emerged. Perhaps the most succinct definition has been offered by Raymond G. Rocca. A tall, thin, scholarly man with gray hair and a goatee, he served as Angleton's deputy both in the OSS in Italy and in the CIA. "Counterintelligence," he said, "deals with the activities of other intelligence services in our own country or against our country abroad. In other words, CI is precisely what it says: counter intelligence. The term defines itself."
Scotty Miler, who, like Rocca, served as Angleton's deputy, agreed. "The goal of CI is to protect your institutions and operations from penetration, including deception," he said. [9]
Since Miler was Angleton's deputy chief of the Special Investigations Group (SIG), it was his job, of course, to ferret out the penetration in the CIA, whose existence the CI Staff did not doubt once Golitsin had defected and warned of "Sasha." And a major task of counterintelligence, under any definition, was first and foremost to detect and apprehend any mole or moles inside the agency.
The CI Staff was responsible not only for identifying Soviet agents planted inside headquarters in Langley, but for protecting CIA operations in the field from KGB penetration. If a case officer in the field proposed to recruit an agent, the geographic division responsible for the country involved would check the CIA's files for any information about the person. The CI Staff would request such "traces" from the files of other U.S. intelligence agencies; in rare cases it might discreetly request information from other, friendly intelligence services. The name traces might result in information that would discourage a planned recruitment.
There is a shibboleth in the intelligence world that case officers fall in love with their agents. The case officers want to believe in the people they have recruited and the information the agents provide. The CI Staff are professional skeptics. They are paid to doubt.
Robert Crowley, a former clandestine operator for the CIA, an iconoclast, and a man of great wisdom with a gift for metaphor, compared the role of the Counterintelligence Staff to that of a credit manager in a a large company. "The salesmen, who are the case officers, want to advance their careers by racking up big sales. They're aggressive, work on commission, and are eager for new business. The credit manager takes a hard look at the customer, checks his balance sheet and his credit reference, and says: 'Don't ship.' Naturally, the salesmen don't like it."
For this reason, there was an inbuilt tension between the CI Staff and the operating divisions of the Directorate of Operations, or Clandestine Services. The divisions divided the world into geographic areas. Although the names of the divisions have changed over time, the CIA's clandestine directorate has traditionally had a Soviet division and other geographic divisions for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
In theory, a division chief outranked a staff chief, but the division chiefs were reluctant to test their power against Angleton's, because they knew his was greater. [10] Angleton made up for whatever rank he lacked on the organization chart by his close bond with the CIA directors under whom he worked, in particular Dulles and Richard Helms. Like the two directors, Angleton had served in the OSS, and those roots ran deep in the agency. [11] The CI chief was a charter member of the Ivy League "Old Boys" who ran the CIA like a private club well into the 1970s. By wartime service, social background, schooling, and temperament, the Ivy Leaguers were drawn together and, with some exceptions, were the key decision-makers in the agency. They were comfortable with each other.
Beyond the natural friction between the geographic divisions -- the operators -- and the CI Staff chief, a larger issue lurked just below the service: the mole hunt. As the search for traitors intensified in the early 1960s, the atmosphere of mistrust, particularly within the Soviet division, which bore the brunt of the investigations, became pervasive. No one knew where suspicion would strike next.
And this, of course, raised a puzzling, troublesome issue inside the CIA. Any organization rests on trust, perhaps the more so in a secret agency engaged, at times, in dangerous work. Yet the counterintelligence function is a necessary check against penetration by an opposition service. How can the two needs be reconciled? What would happen over time to an agency that simultaneously required institutional trust and institutional suspicion?
It is unlikely that these questions ever surfaced within the CIA during the era of the mole hunt. The Clandestine Services and the CI Staff were run by hard-eyed men (and very few women) who were busy dealing with day-to- day practical problems. The search for penetrations coincided with the height of the Cold War, a time of maximum activity by the CIA. And if anyone did take the time to ponder these philosophical questions, he would not have dared to raise them with the Scarecrow.
***
James Jesus Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, on December 9, 1917, eight months after the United States entered World War I. His father, James Hugh Angleton, had served in the Army in Mexico under General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, chasing Pancho Villa, and had married a seventeen-year-old Mexican woman, Cannen Moreno. (Angleton was baptized a Catholic and named Jesus after his maternal grandfather.) James had a younger brother and two younger sisters. The family lived in Boise, and later in Dayton, Ohio, where the senior Angleton was an executive of the National Cash Register Company. In 1933, when James Angleton was a teenager, his father took the family to Italy, where he had bought the NCR franchise, and in time he became president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Rome. [12] The Angletons lived well, much of the time in a palazzo in Milan.
James Angleton spent his summers in Italy and attended Malvern College, a British preparatory school. In 1937, he entered Yale, where he served on the editorial board of the Yale literary magazine, and with E. Reed Whittemore, Jr., who was to become a well-known poet, he launched Furioso, a poetry journal that had a considerable impact. While a student at Yale, Angleton also came to know, and admire, Ezra Pound. [13] Angleton was graduated from Yale in 1941, and in 1943, while serving in the infantry, he was recruited by the OSS. Sent to London, he worked in counterintelligence for the first time in the X-2 section, where his boss was his former Yale professor Norman Holmes Pearson. That same year, Angleton married Cicely d' Autremont of Tucson, Arizona, the daughter of a wealthy Minnesota mining family; Angleton had met her while she was a student at Vassar.
Angleton rose rapidly in the OSS, and after the Allied landing, he was sent to Rome, where, by the end of the war, he had become chief of counterintelligence in Italy. One of his jobs was to help the Italians rebuild their own intelligence services. The extensive contacts he made in Italy during the war were to serve him well when he joined the CIA in 1947.
The following year, he was involved in the CIA's massive effort to influence the 1948 Italian elections. The agency poured millions into the operation to defeat the Communists and support the Christian Democrats, who won.
But Angleton's primary interest, his real love, was counterintelligence, and in 1954 he was authorized by Dulles to set up and head the CI Staff. Part of the Angleton mystique was that he was seldom seen, even by members of his own staff. So reclusive a figure was Angleton that during his reign as CI chief, a standard joke arose about him in the agency. In a crowded elevator at headquarters, if the door opened and closed and no one could be seen getting on or off, the other riders would look at each other, nod knowingly, and say: "Angleton."
And, in truth, the CI chief preferred the seclusion of his office, Room 43 in the C corridor on the second floor of the headquarters building. From that power base, Angleton was to become the dominant figure in CIA counterintelligence for twenty years.
But under Dulles, he added another string to his bow. In an unusual arrangement, he was placed in charge of the "Israeli account," so that operations and intelligence involving the Mossad, or the other Israeli spy agencies, were channeled solely through Angleton.
If Angleton did not trust the pro-Arab case officers in the CIA's Near East division, there is evidence that he also distrusted Jews as biased in favor of Israel. George Kisevalter tells of a revealing incident that took place in 1970, when he was teaching a senior intelligence course at "Blue U," the CIA's school for spies in Arlington, Virginia. [14] In the course, Kisevalter was explaining the workings of foreign intelligence services to a class of CIA, military, and foreign service officers who were preparing to go overseas. He wanted an expert on Israeli intelligence, so he asked for John Hadden, who had recently completed a six-year tour as CIA station chief in Israel. "I sent a request in writing to Hadden," Kisevalter said. "'Office of Training requests you deliver lecture on Mossad.' Angleton initialed it. Hadden delivered a gorgeous lecture on the Mossad. At the next course for senior officers I requested Hadden again. Angleton said 'No, come see me.' So I did. Angleton said, 'I won't allow this. We are not going to do it in-house.'"
"I protested. I asked, 'Why not?' Angleton replied: 'How do you know how many Jews are in there?' 'What difference does it make?' I asked. 'Are you going to throw them out of the agency?' I went to Jocko Richardson, who was chief of training. Richardson said, 'What the hell's the matter with him?' But there was no lecture on the Mossad."
For Angleton, counterintelligence remained the major concern, and even the Israeli account was a means to that end. John Denley Walker, who succeeded Hadden as station chief in Israel, said, "Angleton was indeed in charge of Israeli affairs, but his major interest was CI. He wanted Israeli intelligence to spot possible Soviet plants among Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union."
Once Golitsin arrived on the scene, talking of a mole, and with specific, albeit fragmentary, clues to his identity, the search for penetrations became Angleton's overriding goal. In Golitsin, Angleton had found a soulmate. Here at last was a man, fresh from the KGB, who played a precise counterpoint to Angleton's fugue.
To Angleton and his large CI Staff, it made perfect sense to assume that the KGB had succeeded in planting a mole or moles inside the CIA. Logically, in the presumption of moles in the agency there was an analogy to the argument that life must occur elsewhere in the universe. Those who posit the existence of extraterrestrial beings point to the statistical improbability that in the boundless expanse of space, life should exist only on the planet Earth. In much the same fashion, the CI Staff argued that the intelligence services of other nations -- notably the British -- had been penetrated by the Soviets. Why should the CIA be exempt? Just as the federal government has its massive radio telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, listening for radio signals from other worlds that may or may not exist, so the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff watched and waited and listened for the faint sound of burrowing moles. It was only sensible to assume they were there.
Angleton also had personal reasons to press the search for penetrations with such ferocity. He had been taken in by the supreme mole of the century, Kim Philby, and he was not about to make the same mistake twice.
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby had joined MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, in 1940, and by the end of the war he had risen to chief of the Soviet section of MI6, which meant that Moscow knew everything of importance that the British secret service was doing or planning to do against the Soviet Union. In 1949, Philby was assigned to Washington as the MI6 liaison with the CIA. Angleton dined regularly with Philby at Harvey's, a downtown restaurant in the capital also much favored by J. Edgar Hoover. The CIA's ace counterintelligence chief never once suspected that the man sitting across the table and exchanging secrets with him was in fact a dedicated Soviet agent from the start.
In May 1951, Philby's recent house guest in Washington, Guy Burgess, fled to Moscow with Donald Maclean, a fellow official of the British foreign office, and Philby was suspected as "the third man" who had tipped off the two Soviet spies. But the British could not prove their case against Philby, and were reluctant to press charges against a member of Britain's Old Boy establishment. It was not until late January 1963 that Philby, realizing the net was closing in at last, bolted from Beirut to the safety of Moscow. [15]
To Angleton, the Philby debacle was a humiliating experience, and it had an enormous, wrenching impact upon him. Although much has been made of the effect of Philby's treachery on Angleton, there were at least two cases in the CIA itself, never publicly disclosed by the agency, that convinced the CI chief that he had reason to be concerned about turncoats.
One was the mysterious affair of Bela Herczeg, who had been born in Hungary and served in the OSS and then in the CIA as a case officer in Vienna and Munich. Herczeg vanished in 1957, and Angleton was certain that he had defected to the Mossad. The CIA case officer's disappearance was doubly embarrassing for Angleton, since the counterintelligence chief handled Israeli affairs for the CIA.
Herczeg, who was Jewish, had gotten out of Hungary before World War II and come to the United States. He was down South training as an Army paratrooper in 1943 when Nicholas R. Doman, an OSS officer in charge of operations against Hungary, spotted his name on a list. Doman, who had met Herczeg in Hungary before the war, was looking for agents; he cut orders to have him brought to Washington and recruited him into the OSS. He sent Herczeg to Bari, Italy.
"He was being trained as part of a team of agents to be dropped into Slovakia," Doman said, "but he got sick, and it saved his life. He never made the jump. All but two or three of the team were mopped up by the SS and executed."
After the war, Herczeg was assigned to a U.S. intelligence team that was tracking down Nazis. He interrogated Ferenc Szalasi, the notorious Fascist Prime Minister of Hungary, who was executed. Herczeg later joined the CIA and worked for the agency from 1952 to 1957 in Austria and Germany. But friction soon developed between him and his superiors.
George Kisevalter remembered Herczeg. "I had met him in Vienna when he was stationed there, working against the Hungarians. We had dinner once in a restaurant around the corner from the CIA station on the Mariahilfer Strasse. He was an ex-Hungarian, socially prominent, a fine horseman. A big, burly individual. He insisted I try the fogas, a wonderful fish from Lake Balaton, he said. He was on leave in West Germany around 1957 and defected to the Israeli service.
"In 1958, Joe Bulik, a case officer, comes to see me in Berlin on official business from headquarters. He says, 'Angleton wants me to ask you whatever you know about Herczeg. He's gone.' Angleton knew he'd gone over to the Israelis. Angleton wanted to know did I know how he went, and where. I knew nothing. There was nothing much I could tell Bulik. Angleton was upset, of course. It's a friendly service, but people don't just switch intelligence services."
Angleton's deputy, Scotty Miler, also said that Herczeg had defected to the Israeli intelligence service. "The Mossad admitted this to the agency," Miler said. "It was, of course, of especial concern to Angleton, since he handled Israeli affairs. And also there were worries about Soviet penetration of the Mossad. Angleton briefed me about the case in general terms, just so I'd be aware of it."
I tracked down Bela Herczeg in Budapest in 1990. He was seventy-eight and in poor health, but he confirmed that he had vanished from the Vienna station more than forty years before. He denied he had gone to work for the Mossad, however. "I disappeared," he said. "I never got in touch with the agency." He declined to say why he had vanished, although he made a veiled reference to "policy differences" with his CIA superiors. "I did not work for the Israelis," he said.
While Angleton was scouring the world looking for him, Herczeg had returned quietly to the United States, he said, where he worked as a money trader in New York, then as a Toyota salesman for several years in Coral Gables, Florida. He moved back to Hungary around 1982.
Nicholas Doman, who remained in touch with his old OSS colleague, said Herczeg had in fact gone to Israel, and then to Australia "after he quit the agency." But he said Herczeg had never spoken of working for the Mossad. "He was generally frank with me because of our OSS connections. He never told me that." He confirmed, however, that Herczeg "had a falling-out with the CIA and he had always bitterly complained about the agency."
If Angleton was upset by the Herczeg affair, which the agency managed to keep secret, he had even more cause for alarm in the case of Edward Ellis Smith, the first CIA man ever stationed in Moscow. Smith, who was born into a solid Baptist family in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and grew up there, was graduated from the University of West Virginia in 1943, during World War II. He joined the Army, served in Europe during the war, and earned three Bronze Stars for valor. After the war, he worked in Washington in G-2, the Army intelligence branch, and learned Russian at the Naval Intelligence School. In 1948 he went to Moscow for two years as an assistant military attache. By September 1950, he was back in Washington assigned now to the CIA.
In 1953, the CIA's Soviet division arranged for the first time to send a man to Moscow. With his knowledge of the Russian language, intelligence training, and previous posting in the Soviet capital, Smith, then thirty-two, was an obvious choice. He left the Army, and the agency dispatched him to Moscow under diplomatic cover, as an attache in the Foreign Service.
Smith had a specific assignment. A year earlier, Pyotr Popov, the GRU lieutenant colonel, had contacted the agency in Vienna. He was being run for the Soviet division by George Kisevalter. Popov, code-named GRALLSPICE, was the CIA's first asset inside Soviet intelligence. The acquisition of an agent-in-place within the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence service, was a major event at Langley. To provide support for the Popov operation, a special unit was created inside the Soviet division, designated SR-9. [16] It was Edward Ellis Smith's task to select dead drops in Moscow to allow the CIA to communicate with Popov, in the event that he was sent back to GRU headquarters from Vienna. [17]
"Smith was looking for drop sites and setting up for Popov," Kisevalter confirmed. "His selection of dead drops was terrible. Popov did not like the sites Smith chose. 'They stink,' he complained. Smith, thank God, didn't know it was Popov he was setting up for."
On a trip back to Moscow, Popov had checked out the dead drops selected by Smith. When he returned to Vienna and met with the CIA at a safe house, he was upset. "What are you trying to do, kill me?" he asked. Popov complained that the drops were inaccessible; it would have been suicide to use them. [18]
Smith was fired by the CIA, but the case, although hushed up, involved a good deal more than the discontent over the drop sites. According to Kisevalter and other former CIA officials, Smith was sexually compromised by his maid, who was a "swallow," a female agent of the KGB.
"The KGB called him 'Ryzhiy,' the redhead," Kisevalter said. "That was their crypt. He had light red hair, reddish. Not flaming red. The redhead's girl was Valya, the maid. He was bragging about his maid making good martinis, and we didn't like it one bit. They [the KGB] forced one meeting with Smith. We don't know what he gave them at the first meeting. They were setting up for a second meeting. They attempted to make other meetings."
But Smith, realizing he was in deep trouble, confessed to his superiors that he had fallen into a KGB "honey trap." According to Pete Bagley, who was later in charge of counterintelligence for the Soviet division, "Smith reported the approach by the KGB in 1956 and was brought back and they questioned him and were not happy with his answers and they fired him."
No word of the disaster in Moscow leaked out. The CIA was able to keep the lid on the fact that the first officer it ever sent to Moscow had been ensnared by the KGB. The agency, however, had not heard the last of the Smith case, as will be seen.
Edward Ellis Smith moved to San Francisco and built a distinguished career as a bank executive, author, and Soviet expert, his indiscretion in Moscow a secret that remained buried in the past. His books included a study of the Okhrana, the czarist secret police, and a biography of Stalin's early years. [19] Ironically, Smith concluded that Stalin had been a czarist police agent inside the Russian revolutionary movement.
Smith was elected to the board of governors of the exclusive Commonwealth Club in 1972. Ten years later, a few minutes after midnight on Saturday, February 13, 1982, Smith was killed in Redwood City by a hit-and-run driver in a white Corvette that witnesses said roared through a red light at high speed. Police said Smith carried a briefcase containing notes for a book with references to the CIA and the KGB, but a police spokesman said there was no reason to think that the death was anything but accidental. "There's nothing clandestine involved," he said. The next day, the driver, Donald Peck, thirty, who had served two prison terms for burglary, turned himself in. A witness said Peck was drunk, but no blood-alcohol tests were available, since he had waited a day to surrender. He later pleaded no contest to hit-and-run driving in return for dismissal of vehicular-manslaughter and drunken-driving charges. On November 3, Peck was fined $750 and sentenced to one year in jail.
The CIA's Counterintelligence Staff had been dismayed by the KGB's entrapment of Edward Ellis Smith. "The problem was more serious than we ever resolved," said Scotty Miler. "He admitted he had been compromised. But he did not make full admission of what he might have given the Soviets."
To James Angleton, the Smith case only proved the point. The agency had already been penetrated, its first man in Moscow compromised. The counterintelligence chief did not need to be convinced there were moles. The problem was to find them.
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Notes:
1. Braden, who recounted the incident to friends. later heard that "Angleton denied that story about the bug. He never denied it to me but to friends of mine who knew Angleton and liked him. Angleton said to tell me that the story was simply not true." But was it true? "Yes," Braden replied, "that's what Angleton did." Braden left the agency four months before Angleton became the first chief of the newly created, centralized Counterintelligence Staff on December 20, 1954. But prior to that date, Angleton headed one of several smaller covert staffs then in existence and designated with the letters A through D. "He was there," Braden said. "He was doing the bugging while I was there. Titles didn't matter much in those days."
2. Although Secretary of War, an Army major general, and an investment banker, Dwight F. Davis was better known as the man who donated the Davis Cup to international tennis. He was himself three times national doubles champion. He died in 1945. His second wife, Pauline, the Washington hostess, was the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of the Navy. Mrs. Davis died in 1955.
3. Braden served in the CIA for five years, from 1949 to 1954, rose to a division chief, and later became well known as a newspaper columnist, television host (of CNN's Crossfire), and author. As chief of the agency's International Organizations division, he channeled CIA money to a broad range of anti-Communist cultural groups overseas, and, through the AFL-CIO, into labor unions in Europe. Later, a book he wrote about his large family, Eight Is Enough (New York: Random House, 1975), became the basis for a television series in the 1970s and 1980s.
4. Despite a widely believed myth to the contrary, one name that Angleton was not known by was "Mother." The first use of that term occurred in a two-part series in the National Review in 1973 written by Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer, that described in fanciful terms a spooky agency character named "Mother," who resembled Angleton. Miles Copeland, "The Unmentionable Uses of a CIA," National Review, September 14,1973, and "There's a CIA in Your Future," October 26, 1973. In his book Without Cloak and Dagger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), Copeland elaborated on his conceit, describing "Mother" flanked by two greyhounds in an office at CIA styled like a hunting lodge with a twenty-foot-high beamed ceiling. Then author Aaron Latham wrote a novel about Angleton entitled Orchids for Mother (Boston: Little, Brown, 1977). Copeland confirmed that his use of the name "Mother" was entirely fictional: "You are right about my use of 'Mother' as a nickname for Jim Angleton. This name, along with a lot of other things I've said in books and articles, was hokum to ease problems I was having in getting past the mental defectives who used to be in charge of clearing manuscripts of loyal alumnae [sic]." Letter, Miles Copeland to author, October 10, 1990, Copeland, seventy-seven, died January 14, 1991, in Oxfordshire, England.
5. "Wait a minute," Huntington offered, "and I'll look it up for you in the registry of the Royal Horticultural Society. That's the international registry for plants. It's in London. The RHS volumes are published every five years." He rummaged around for a moment, got out the latest volume, and opened it. "Let's see, yes, 'Cicely Angleton' is the name of a cattleya registered with the Royal Horticultural Society in London. It was registered in 1973. Yep, here he is: 'James Angleton, 4814 33d Road, North Arlington, Virginia.'" Cattleya, a genus of orchids native to tropical America, is named for William Cattley of Barnet, England, the nineteenth-century patron of botany. With their large, bright flowers, cattleyas are the most popular of orchids. There are about sixty species.
6. Aaron Latham, "Poet, Florist, Angler, Spy," Washington Post. May 20,1987, p. C1. Latham had interviewed Angleton shortly after he was dismissed as CI chief in December 1974.
7. In a British television interview, Angleton once referred to "a wilderness of mirrors," a phrase taken from T. S. Eliot's poem "Gerontion" and applied, as an apt description of counterintelligence itself, by author (and later CBS correspondent) David C. Martin, who used it as the title of his book about Angleton's search for KGB spies, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
8. The plot of The Manchurian Candidate, a 1962 film based on a novel of the same title by Richard Condon, supposes that the North Koreans have brainwashed an American prisoner of war and programmed him to return to the United States and assassinate a presidential nominee.
9. In its final report in 1976, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, D., Idaho, defined counterintelligence as "an intelligence activity dedicated to undermining the effectiveness of hostile intelligence services." It defined counterespionage as an aspect of counterintelligence that attempts "to detect and neutralize foreign espionage." "Foreign and Military Intelligence," Book 1, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2d Session, April 26, 1976, pp. 163, 620.
10. The divisions and the CI Staff were subordinate to the Directorate of Plans (which became the Directorate of Operations in 1973). The CI Staff, therefore, was a staff of the DDP, the deputy director for plans (the DDO since 1973), and not of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), which is the formal title of the director of the CIA.
11. So close were Dulles and Angleton that after Dulles died in 1969, his sister, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, asked Angleton to give away his pipes to Dulles's best friends in the secret world, Don Moore, the Soviet counterintelligence chief for the FBI, who hadworked for many years with both the CIA director and Angleton, got two of Dulles's favorite briars, "I chose them because they came in a leather case that had the initials 'A.W.D,' on the side," Moore said.
12. For biographical details on Angleton, see Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), the first comprehensive biography of the counterintelligence chief; Robin W. Winks, "The Theorist," an illuminating chapter on Angleton and his intelligence career, in Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New York: Morrow, 1987), pp. 322-438; and Seymour M. Hersh, "Angleton: The Cult of Counterintelligence," New York Times Magazine, June 25, 1978.
13. Pound, the controversial poet and Fascist sympathizer, was, like Angleton, a native of Idaho. He moved to Italy in 1924, and during World War II he broadcast propaganda, directed at Allied troops, for the Mussolini government. Indicted for treason and brought back to the United States for trial, he was judged mentally incompetent and confined to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington for twelve years. He returned to Italy after his release and died there in 1972 at the age of eighty-seven.
14. "Blue U" was the informal name given to an eight-story two-tone-blue office building, designed with an unusual concave front, at 1000 North Glebe Road in Arlington, a northern Virginia suburb of Washington. Courses were given there in locks and picks, flaps and seals (how to open letters clandestinely), and photography, among others.
15. Like George Blake, Philby took a Russian wife, Rufa, was given the rank of general in the KGB, and lived comfortably in an apartment in Moscow, where he was interviewed by author Phillip Knightley four months before Philby's death in May 1988. See Phillip Knightley, The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1989).
16. At the time, the division was called the Soviet Russia division (SR), hence SR-9. Later the name was changed to the Soviet Bloc division (SB). There were other changes and consolidations. In recent years, the division has been known as the Soviet/East European division (SE).
17. Dead drops are hiding places where an agent can leave rolls of film or documents to be retrieved at a later time by a case officer. The drop sites must be easily accessible but not so obvious that a janitor or children playing in a park would stumble upon them by accident. Typically, the CIA used spaces behind radiators in building lobbies, or hollow bricks, or a nook behind a loose stone in a wall.
18. Popov's complaints about the dead drops are described in an autobiography by Peer de Silva, the CIA officer who ran the support operation for the GRU agent. But de Silva did not identify Smith as the man who chose the drop sites. Peer de Silva, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 69.
19. See Edward Ellis Smith, "The Okhrana": The Russian Department of Police (Palo Alto: Hoover Institution, 1967) and The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967).