The Cia's Secret Operations

Espionage, Counterespionage, And Covert Action

Harry Rositzke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367306342
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000315479
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

I am grateful to those of my colleagues in this first generation of American "spymasters" who were willing to share their experiences with me even after I retired to my unclassified farm . I am indebted to Howard Roman , who worked with Allen Dulles on his intelligence writings , for his assistance in the preparation of the early chapters, and to Nancy Kelly, my editor at Reader's Digest Press , for the sharp edge of her pruning shears .

1
War, Hot and Cold

In the spring of 1948 the White House saw war with the Soviet Union as imminent.

Soviet-American tensions had been mounting steadily since the Yalta conference in 1945. Even before the war with Hitler ended, the Russians had moved rapidly to integrate both the Allied and enemy states of Eastern Europe into their bloc. One by one, most brutally in Poland, these states were russified, then communized. By the end of 1947 all but one were ruled by one-party governments under Soviet control. An independent but cautious democratic government survived in Czechoslovakia in a coalition with the Communist Party.

Western Europe was in shambles and appeared ripe for revolution. The Italian and French Communist parties led a wave of strikes in 1946, and the Italian Communists were threatening to achieve power by the ballot box. In May 1947 a large-scale Communist insurrection broke out in Greece. Moscow was putting pressure on Turkey to "return" the provinces of Kars and Ardahan to the Soviet Union, and laid claim to the province of Azerbaijan in Iran,

Washington was becoming increasingly uneasy.

On March 12, 1947, President Truman went before a special joint session of Congress to deliver the message that marked the turning point from protest to action against Soviet initiatives. In his long and complex message he asked for military aid to Greece to fight the Communist guerrillas and to Turkey to help resist Moscow's territorial demands. Tucked in the text was a single sentence that was to become known as the Truman Doctrine: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Containment from the beginning addressed itself both to domestic Communist subversion and to the exercise of Soviet national power.

Aid to Greece and Turkey was a direct response to Soviet pressures, the Marshall Plan a few months later an indirect response. The Marshall Plan's offer of goods, grants, and loans was designed to stabilize the weakened nations of Europe and permit their orderly development. The offer was accepted by the nations of Western Europe, but turned down by Stalin for both the Soviet Union and its satellites. Europe became the divided Europe Stalin wanted. He speeded up the consolidation of Eastern Europe (Hungary was brought under party control in June) as the United States quickly became the dominant political and economic force in Western Europe. In Berlin and Vienna the two protagonists were face to face.

Then came the war scare, triggered mainly by two events.

In February of 1948 the Communist Party took over the government of Czechoslovakia through a Soviet-inspired internal coup and destroyed the last independent nation in Eastern Europe. The Prague coup sent shock waves through Washington, American bombers were assigned to British air-fields, and military preparations in occupied Germany were speeded up.

In early March of the same year General Lucius Clay sent an alarming telegram from Berlin reporting "a subtle change" (which he could not define) in the attitude of the Soviet command and warning that war might come "with dramatic suddenness." The Clay telegram brought the threat of war to a point of near hysteria in the minds of Washington's policy and intelligence bureaucracy. The CIA, then just six months old, predicted that a war was not probable within the next sixty days, but could look no further ahead.

The subtle change noted by General Clay in the Soviet attitude was created by Soviet preparations to force the Allies out of Berlin, the sole Western island in the heart of Soviet Europe. In May the Russians began to block communications and movement of supplies between Allied-occupied West Berlin and the Western zones of Germany. Rejecting a proposal to break through the blockade with American ground troops, President Truman authorized the creation of the Berlin airlift. Throughout that fall and winter American transport planes kept the West Berliners from starvation. Scores of Allied airmen lost their lives, but their determination forced the Russians to lift the blockade in May 1949.

The Berlin blockade brought the first face-to-face military confrontation of the Cold War—a term that came into popular use that same year.

The immediate military threat was an armed Soviet attack on Europe. By late 1947 it had become clear that the Soviet troops stationed in East Germany and Poland far exceeded the strength required to occupy the two countries. The Czech coup solidified Soviet control over another section of the invasion corridor. The March crisis forced the Pentagon to a realistic estimate of what these troops could do: They could, in purely military terms, reach the English Channel. The Berlin blockade intensified White House concern that they might.

What the White House and the Pentagon wanted to know were the precise capabilities and actual intentions of the Soviet military forces in northeastern Europe. With the target areas effectively sealed off from normal Western observation, the only recourse was to send in agents. The first charge placed upon the CIA in the spring and summer of 1948 was a straightforward espionage mission—a peacetime mission under wartime conditions.

The intelligence requirements were passed to the operators mostly by word of mouth. I recall our first briefing on the situation in the small crowded conference room of the ramshackle "tempos," a group of temporary World War I buildings in Foggy Bottom that were part of CIA headquarters.

The briefing by the colonel from the joint Chiefs of Staff was precise, earnest, and urgent. Fully equipped with maps, overlays, and markers, he sketched a persuasive scenario of a two-pronged assault on Western Europe by Soviet divisions advancing through the northern plain. He named the divisions in East Germany and Poland that would move. He placed arrows along their line of advance. He pointed to the Czech airfields in western Bohemia that would provide air support for the ground troops. He ended with a strong plea for agent coverage in all three areas.

It was an abrupt demand to make upon a handful of amateur operators in a new and untried intelligence service.

Like most of my colleagues in that room I had begun working in the postwar intelligence service two years earlier. Most of us had been with the wartime Office of Strategic Services. When its chief, "Wild Bill" Donovan, said farewell to the men and women of OSS at the nearby Riverside Skating Rink in September 1945, he announced the end of "an unusual experiment": "This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents, could risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations."

A slice of that cross section survived in the tempos. The men were a heterogeneous assortment of origins and temperaments. WASPS rubbed shoulders with first-generation ethnics and an occasional naturalized Russian, Czech, or German. New Deal liberals and the sons of European Social Democrats leavened the middle-of-the-road Americans without political complications. There were a few high-school graduates, but most had finished college, some had graduate degrees. Some had worked behind enemy lines with French, Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav partisans. Others had parachuted into France after D-day, sent agents across the lines as Allied forces moved into Germany, handled agent reports in Bern and Stockholm, worked with the British in counterespionage operations against the German Abwehr, composed and broadcast anti-Nazi propaganda. Almost all spoke some language in addition to English. Some were trilingual.

Among the men I came to know best were two prewar journalists, a state trooper from the Midwest, several sons of missionaries, a lawyer of Arab descent, a former postal clerk, several high-school and college teachers.

The women, many with European backgrounds, had been deskbound during the war: reports officers, counterintelligence analysts, and operational assistants of one sort or another.

We were almost all quite young. Some men, in their early thirties, became the first heads of area divisions in Washington and our first station chiefs abroad. Most, in their twenties, became the first case officers to recruit overseas agents. We were all amateurs in peacetime operations.

I recall a day in early 1947 when a colleague and I went to lunch in the cafeteria in one of the tempos. As we entered, he stopped by the door and looked at the scene—almost a hundred people of every size, shape, and color. Some were nattily dressed, some sloppily. A dozen accents, regional and foreign, cut the air.

"Do you think," he said, "that anyone walking in here could possibly imagine what brings all these people together?"

Why were we there?

I suspect that the main reason most of us stayed on in the government after the war was the appeal of a secret profession or the attractions of a life abroad. Some, of course, stayed on out of inertia, those with no other experience except the OSS, those whose home towns had nothing to offer them but a dull job. Others were stimulated not so much by their wartime experience as by their awareness of what was going on in the turbulent world outside the United States. Many were clearly motivated by a desire to continue serving their country.

None of us was there for job security. We were, for all we knew, temporary employees of a temporary organization unauthorized by Congress. After the dissolution of OSS in September 1945, its secret intelligence and counterintelligence branches were placed under the Secretary of the Army as the Strategic Services Unit and then, in the spring of 1946, in another stopgap agency, the Central Intelligence Group. We all felt that eventually there would be a permanent American intelligence service, but there was none then.

Up to the March 1948 crisis we lived in a state of benign neglect. Very few officials in the Department of State or the Army or the White House even knew of the existence of the SSU or the CIG. We had no legal authority, and no one gave us any guidance. No one sent over any intelligence requirements. The Department of State was reluctant to give any of its foreign service slots or titles to these undiplomatic strangers, and most of our officers abroad were housed by the Army in Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan. The Federal Bureau of Investigation looked upon us with distrust, if not hostility.

It was a curious state of limbo, but we were busy—cleaning out the old OSS records, setting up files and routing systems, processing personnel returning from the field, editing and disseminating the paltry agent reports coming in, checking names against our primitive central registry, screening captured German and Japanese documents, writing up training manuals, report procedures, and agent questionnaires.

My own focus during those confused and unexciting months was on Soviet and Communist matters, the interest that had brought me into the service. Within six months my name, my job, and my affiliation were on file in Moscow.

On reporting for duty in March 1946 I was given a security briefing by an earnest young man who enjoined me against divulging to anyone (including my wife) where I worked and what I did.

In April I sent a routine request to the administrative unit asking them to arrange for subscriptions to several periodicals put out by the Soviet Communist Party. One day in September I found in my in-basket a magazine in a brown wrapper postmarked Moscow. Its address label read:

Harry Rositzke

Chief SPD/S

ssu

2430 E Street

Washington, D.C.

The man who wrote for the subscriptions had obviously not been briefed by the security people in the devious ways of setting up cover addresses for a secret service.

SSU stood for the Strategic Services Unit, our designation at the time, and SPD/S for Special Projects Division/Soviet, a staff section that had been set up for me after I discovered on my return from Germany that no one at headquarters had any special responsibility for Soviet matters. Our major operating units were regional divisions such as the Far East and European divisions. There was no division for the Soviet Union that early in the game.

There were, on paper, three sections of SPD/S: for Soviet intelligence, for "international communism", and for the Soviet Union itself. The first two were staffed by one man and one woman in each. The third was without anyone; our Russian speakers were then all on overseas assignments. It was this section, however, that became the nucleus of the Soviet operating division. Its mission was solely to establish intelligence agents within the Soviet Union.

In my first six months on the job, I spent most of my time recruiting suitable people for my three sections—and reading. I combed through our wartime registry to unearth whatever it held on the Soviet Union, on the Soviet intelligence services, and on the normal functioning of legal and underground Communist parties.

Most of the captured German and Japanese documents on the Soviet Union were only mildly informative, dull, or out-of-date. Two counterintelligence writeups of Soviet espionage cases, however, I found both fascinating and instructive. The first was the Japanese version of the career of Richard Sorge, the brilliant German journalist who became the confidant of the German ambassador to Tokyo and ran a network of highly placed agents on the side. A single piece of his reporting—that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union in the east—permitted Stalin to transfer to his western front a number of divisions that may have been crucial to his successful resistance against the Germans. The German intelligence writeup of the now famous "Red Orchestra" spy network in Western Europe featured the life of its chief, Leopold Trepper, a brilliant and brash Galician Jew who worked under the nose of the Gestapo to supply Moscow with remarkably detailed military and logistic information from Nazi-occupied Europe.

There were few other solid reports: a detailed academic analysis of the secret Berlin headquarters of the Third Communist International that ran espionage and covert action operations throughout Europe until Hitler wiped it out; the interrogations of Communist Party officials who had worked underground before and during the war; some organizational analyses of the various Soviet security and intelligence services.

At night, and on weekends, when I was not hoeing a half-acre garden to strengthen a weak sacroiliac joint, I read Marx and Engels, most of Lenin, some of Stalin, a dull writer indeed. Out of my academic urge to understand what might make a bright young man become a Communist I tried to put into simple English the main propositions of Marxist-Leninist thought. I came up with nineteen—from the materialist view of history to the "guaranteed" final achievement of a Communist society. I began to lecture on Communist theory and Soviet intelligence to our own trainees and to classes in the State Department and the Pentagon. We were all breaking new ground.

Meanwhile, the President's advisers were busy working out the unification of the armed services and a new command structure for our national security apparatus. On September 18, 1947, two years almost to the day after General Donovan's farewell speech to the OSS, the Central Intelligence Agency was established by act of Congress.

CIA came into being as part of the overall restructuring of the American military establishment. The National Security Act of 1947 created the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Council. It was the most far-reaching and controversial legislation ever passed by Congress affecting the nation's ability to conduct its foreign affairs. A minor part of the controversy centered on what to do about a national intelligence authority. Some wanted it lodged in the Department of State, others in the new Department of Defense. Others wanted an independent agency reporting directly to the President through the new National Security Council. The last group won out.

We were no longer plagued by uncertainty. We were now an official American intelligence service, a directorate (the Office of Special Operations) within the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA itself was set up for the primary purpose of collating and evaluating the information coming into Washington from all the various intelligence sources—the Department of Defense, the State Department, the National Security Council, and the intelligence arms of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Its main job was, and Is, to prepare research and analysis reports on crucial situations abroad for the President and his policy advisers.

The inclusion of secret intelligence operations within the new agency was a matter of some debate before the National Security Act was passed. There were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority both to collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the President. The objections were overruled, and CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities.

No direct allusions to espionage or counterespionage appeared in the National Security Act, but a minor subsection of the act authorized CIA "to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." That meant secret intelligence operations. Our service was born in secret.

Within a year the National Security Council even more secretly assigned another function to CIA: to carry out covert action operations in addition to its intelligence gathering.

In the brief two years between the dissolution of OSS and the founding of the CIA the world was changing as rapidly and dramatically as it had during the war. Scores of nations were going through political transformations—by civil wars, coups d'etat, forced occupations, rigged elections, mob action, troop mutinies. Some were i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Author's Preface
• Author's Preface to the Encore Edition
• —1 War, Hot and Cold
• —2 To Russia by Air
• —3 The Second Circle
• —4 To Russia by Visa
• —5 Recruiting Russians
• —6 The Third Circle
• —7 Espionage: the Global Beat
• —8 Counterespionage
• —9 Covert Action: Propaganda
• —10 Covert Action: Paramilitary
• —11 Covert Action: Political
• —12 The CIA at Home
• —13 The CIA at Bay
• —14 The Future of Secret Operations
• Index
• About the Author