In the Enemy's House

Howard Blum

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062458278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The New York Times bestselling author of Dark Invasion and The Last Goodnight once again illuminates the lives of little-known individuals who played a significant role in America's history as he chronicles the incredible true story of a critical, recently declassified counterintelligence mission and two remarkable agents whose story has been called "the greatest secret of the Cold War."

In 1946, genius linguist and codebreaker Meredith Gardner discovered that the KGB was running an extensive network of strategically placed spies inside the United States, whose goal was to infiltrate American intelligence and steal the nation's military and atomic secrets. Over the course of the next decade, he and young FBI supervisor Bob Lamphere worked together on Venona, a top-secret mission to uncover the Soviet agents and protect the Holy Grail of Cold War espionage—the atomic bomb.

Opposites in nearly every way, Lamphere and Gardner relentlessly followed a trail of clues that helped them identify and take down these Soviet agents one by one, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But at the center of this spy ring, seemingly beyond the American agents' grasp, was the mysterious master spy who pulled the strings of the KGB's extensive campaign, dubbed Operation Enormoz by Russian Intelligence headquarters. Lamphere and Gardner began to suspect that a mole buried deep in the American intelligence community was feeding Moscow Center information on Venona. They raced to unmask the traitor and prevent the Soviets from fulfilling Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's threat: "We shall bury you!"

A breathtaking chapter of American history and a page-turning mystery that plays out against the tense, life-and-death gamesmanship of the Cold War, this twisting thriller begins at the end of World War II and leads all the way to the execution of the Rosenbergs—a result that haunted both Gardner and Lamphere to the end of their lives.

Part I

The Blue Problem

1

THE INCIDENT IN CHINATOWN CHANGED everything for Bob Lamphere. Without warning, it had come down in an instant to this: gun drawn, an angry crowd pressing in on him, and his target fixed in his sights. A volley of enraged, keening voices rose up behind him, but Bob pushed all the noise out of his mind. His focus narrowed. And his finger increased its pressure on the steel trigger. He was ready—his mind set—to fire.

Until that moment in the winter of 1944, Bob had been convinced that the FBI didn’t offer him what he wanted from the world. Its sensibility grated, with all those rigid regulations (a towrope missing from a government tugboat generated as much paperwork as a murder investigation, he complained), with the powerful insistence on an even more intrusive personal conformity (the required snap-brim hats and starched white shirts, the regulation Bureau briefcase). This wasn’t for him. He’d put in another year or two, he thought, until the war ended, and then there’d be plenty of opportunities for an ambitious young man with a law degree. And as he knew only too well, the Bureau, for that matter, was disenchanted with him. Hoover favored “straight arrows,” and Bob was having a hard time playing that role. There’d be no protests when he moved on. His departure would be dismissed, if anything was said at all, as part of the normal attrition.

IT HADN’T ALWAYS BEEN LIKE that. When Bob, just twenty-three, had joined the FBI back in September 1941, he’d been gung ho, energized by the wistful notion that once his probationary period was over he’d be in the front line of an elite group of derring-do lawmen, continuing in the great tradition of the tommy gun–toting G-men who’d relentlessly chased down John Dillinger. Fawning newspaper reports regularly proclaimed that the FBI were the best that law enforcement had to offer, and Bob, who had no small sense of pride, was certain that was where he belonged.

And, another vanity, he was confident he looked the part: square-jawed, broad-shouldered, thick black hair with a precise part, and, not least, deep brown eyes that would routinely hold a person with a gaze as steady as a marksman’s. He wasn’t a big man, maybe a tad over five-foot-ten if he made an effort to stand erect, a trim welterweight, but he had a presence. Handsome in an even-featured all-American way, a man’s man, someone you just knew at a glance had grown up fishing in mountain streams and hunting deer in deep woods.

Yet while that was true, Bob nevertheless hadn’t had much of a childhood. He’d been raised in Mullan, Idaho, a small hardscrabble mining town plunked down in a high canyon overshadowed by the formidable Coeur d’Alene Mountains. His father, a no-nonsense disciplinarian with a quick temper, was what people in those parts knew as a “leaser.” The way Joe Lamphere had it figured, it made more sense to lease a mine and hire hands to work for him than to have to answer to some know-it-all mine owner. Besides, each time he’d signed on for work in one of the big silver mines, it was never long before he went off on a tear about one thing or another to the shift boss. The man in charge would respond by muttering something dismissive and often crude, Joe would let loose with an angry punch, and the next thing Joe knew, he’d be given his walking papers. Running things himself, then, made a lot more sense, although the economics of it were often precarious.

In contrast to her husband’s fitful rages, Lilly Lamphere was a preternaturally calm, almost taciturn presence, as seemingly bland and unassuming as the flat Minnesota country near the banks of the Leaf River where she’d been raised. Or, perhaps, as some relatives speculated, her seeming withdrawal from family life, if not the world, was simply a defense against Joe’s pugnacious bluster. When she wasn’t cooking, she’d be deep into some book; she had run the post office in quiet Trout Lake, Minnesota (there were more fish in the lake than people in the town, the locals were fond of saying), for several years when they’d first been married, and had taken to spending the vacant hours escaping into whatever book she could find. Lilly had a fondness for Jane Austen, but the Bible was her favorite; you could turn to any page and learn something, she liked to say.

With his two incompatible parents locked into their own disparate worlds, Bob grew up as the overlooked middle child. The way he remembered it, he was pretty much always on his own. Which suited him fine. There was nothing he liked better than heading up into the hills, wandering about on the ridgeline with his .22 rifle and his mongrel hunting dog, “out of sight of people from dawn to dusk.”

Still, Bob was both of his parents’ son. He had his dad’s temper, all right. He got into his share of fights at school; the immigrant Finnish miners’ sons in Mullan saw him as an outsider, and even though he was outnumbered he wouldn’t take their guff. It was rough going for a while. But after he took some boxing lessons, putting in strenuous hours on the heavy bag and sparring nearly to the point of utter exhaustion day after day in the ring, he was able to give as good as he got.

It was a rough-and-tumble skill that came in handy when he was older and worked summers in his father’s mine. His father made it a point that Bob should pull the worst jobs, sticking him deep in the hole so nobody could say that Joe Lamphere was playing favorites. Nevertheless, there were always a few ornery miners who’d try to give the boss’s son a hard time, and Bob would invariably only take so much before he’d call them on it. Fists would fly, and at the end, more often than not, he’d be the one left standing.

From his mother, Bob had inherited a love of reading. History, particularly books about the Civil War, kept him occupied as he lay in bed before falling off to sleep. And the more he read, the more Bob came to realize that books, an education, could be his path out of a life in the mines. He’d spent too many summers twisting the sweat out of his socks each night after climbing up from the dark, suffocatingly hot hole not to want something else for himself. So he set his sights on getting into college—Bob liked to challenge himself—and he did well enough in high school to be accepted into the University of Idaho’s accelerated law program: in five years, he’d earn both his law and his bachelor’s degree.

But then in 1940, out of the blue, his mother took sick and, as if in an instant, she was gone. And now Bob could see no reason for sticking around in Idaho. The way he rationalized things, his father, who had grown sickly over the last few years, wouldn’t last long without his wife; it would be a kindness if Bob spared his old man the burden of financing his final year of law school. Bob would enroll somewhere else, find himself a job, and pay his own tuition. Yet even bolstered by all this comforting, altruistic logic, part of him knew he was just ready to get out of Idaho. He was eager to put some distance between all he’d endured while growing up and his future.

Bob wound up in Washington, D.C., a quaintly genteel Southern city in the early 1940s that nevertheless seemed a cosmopolitan world away from the isolated northern Idaho hill country. He found a clerk’s job in the Treasury Department, a menial, entry-level bit of paper pushing. But it paid him enough to cover the tuition for night classes at National Law School, and while his nine-to-five workday was set in stone, the job was undemanding, so he could find time to study, too.

His days and nights were full. Bob, in fact, was too busy to return to Mullan for his father’s funeral—and, anyway, his father, knowing his time was running out, had written to tell his son not to interrupt his studies for his sake when the time inevitably came. In 1941, Bob not only got his degree, but, without the help of a cram course, passed the D.C. bar on his first try.

And now Bob began to think seriously about what he’d do next. He set off brimming with confidence; the world of government, as he envisioned it, was his oyster. After all, the New Deal had lavishly expanded the federal bureaucracy; there had to be plenty of jobs available for a young lawyer. Yet once he began knocking on doors throughout official Washington, Bob quickly began to understand that a law degree was one thing, and connections—political, school, and family—were another. And a lot more valuable.

But as fate would have it, just as he was wondering if it might make sense to return to Idaho, where people at least knew the Lampheres, one of his professors happened to mention that the FBI had sent word to the law schools in the district: the Bureau was looking for candidates.

“THIS APPLICANT PRESENTS A FAIR appearance and during the interview he was chewing about four sticks of gum. He is timid in approach and his personality is leaning toward the negative side. . . . The recommendation is unfavorable.”

That was how the Bureau’s initial interviewer sized Bob up. But from Bob’s perspective (or so he’d suggest years later, when all his subsequent success went a long way toward invalidating this dismal appraisal), Mr. Wilcox, with typical Bureau rigidity, had just been trying to shove him into a box where he’d never fit. Where the FBI saw timidity, Bob saw a quiet confidence; he didn’t feel any need to bang any drums on his own behalf. As for his “negative personality,” Bob put that down to his tendency to weigh both sides of any proposition. And as for his chewing gum, well, Bob would concede, with a mature embarrassment, that you could take the boy out of Idaho, but you couldn’t take Idaho out of the boy. Yes, he’d later acknowledge, at twenty-three he still had to get used to big city ways.

Yet someone in the Bureau must have had some appreciation of Bob’s qualities, because, despite the interviewer’s grumpy evaluation, on September 16, 1941, he received a letter signed by J. Edgar Hoover: “You are hereby offered an appointment as a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, in grade CAF 9, with salary at the rate of $3200 per annum.”

THERE WERE FIFTY FLEDGLING G-MEN in Bob’s class at Quantico, the Marine base in Virginia where the FBI had its training center. He was the youngest, and yet he was, he’d acknowledge with a contrarian’s pride, “more than a bit brash” when thrown into the competitive instructional exercises. It was, as he recalled, a group cut pretty much from the same calico cloth: small-town boys mostly from the Midwest, white, Protestant, and, like their revered Director Hoover, staunch patriots and no less staunch political conservatives.

And their timing in joining the Bureau, they congratulated one another, pumped with their newfound camaraderie, was propitious. They had signed on at a great moment in history, the winds of war and unrest blowing across the globe. Nazism, fascism, communism—these hostile “isms” were the new enemies that would replace the John Dillingers. Heroes-in-the-making, they were, to a man, eager to join the fight against the insidious forces determined to infiltrate and subvert America.

But before they could be dispatched into this seething, complicated new world, they had to be trained for the task. It was a demanding process. Classes were from nine a.m. to nine p.m., Monday through Saturday, with just a half-day on Sunday as a grudging concession to the Sabbath. They shot .38 pistols and tommy guns until they could routinely cluster their shots in the center of the target, flipped their opponents onto gym mats with exotic jujitsu moves, lifted fingerprints off the most unpromising surfaces, learned how to testify in a clear, concise English in the courtroom, and made sure to say “Yes sir” and “No sir” to practically everyone they encountered.

And throughout the whole grueling process, two articles of faith, two inviolable tenets, were constantly drummed in. One: you’d better not screw up. If you displeased a superior, or, heaven help you, Mr. Hoover, your career would be over in an ignominious instant. (There was no civil service protection, and, as a consequence, there were no second chances. There was only the director’s iron prerogative.) And, two: the FBI was the best of the best, and you were expected to be better than all other lawmen, in every category. Nothing less would be tolerated.

Yet all the training, all the indoctrination, only made the waiting all the harder. When the sixteen weeks were finally over, after Bob had passed the final exam and had been given his credentials, his gold badge, and his .38, he rejoiced. At last, his great, new, important adventure was about to begin.

2

BOB, THE STERN-JAWED NEOPHYTE AGENT, was sent in the early days of the anxious wartime winter of 1942 to the Washington field office. It was a time when the home front remained on edge, still unnerved by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and wondering what might come next. While across the Atlantic, the war in Europe was shaping up to be a long, no-holds-barred brawl, with the prospects for victory seeming more and more beyond the Allies’ grasp. Bob was eager to do his part.

Straight off, he was apprenticed, as he was promisingly informed, to “an experienced agent.” Yet what were his mentor’s experiences? As far as Bob could tell, he had measured out his years in the Bureau filling out forms and obeying countless regulations, and now he’d been designated to pass on this dull knowledge to his protégé.

It was a grim apprenticeship. Bob learned how to sign in and out of the office each day with an automaton’s precision, to make sure there was always a Number 3 card on file to show what case he was working on at the moment, to fill out the 302s detailing his daily progress on any investigation, to update each month the serial numbers of any firearms he owned, and on and bureaucratically on.

Worse, the constant monitoring, the lack of independence, let alone the lack of trust, were not just gnawing but, Bob felt, offensive. Coffee breaks—a telling example—were prohibited; in this draconian world, they were viewed as nothing less than fraud, the theft of government time. If you had knowledge that one of your fellow field agents was breaking even the most minor of rules, you were duty bound to report him (yet those who did were branded with the epithet of “submarine”—i.e., they attacked with stealth—by their more laissez-faire colleagues). If you were not at home and reachable at the phone number on file, the Bureau required you to call in every two hours. Even the unexpected good fortune of spending a night at a girlfriend’s house was no excuse; you still had better call to leave the number with the office before settling in. And don’t even think you could get away with an evening off the leash: the Bureau would randomly telephone an agent’s home, checking to see if he was in—and woe be it the next day to the man who had been negligent enough to go off without leaving a contact number.

Bob loathed all these stringent rules, and the more he felt squeezed by them, the more he wanted to rebel. Taking orders was one thing, but this was tedious and demeaning. The Bureau, he felt, was constantly looking over his shoulder, monito...