Ike's Spies (28 page)

According to critics, assigning the
CIA
a covert action responsibility was a twofold mistake. First, it gave license to an agency of the U. S. Government to carry out operations that were clearly illegal and, more often than not, counterproductive. Sabotage and subversion were one thing in wartime, another altogether during a period of general peace.

Truman himself spoke to this point in 1963, when he declared in a syndicated newspaper interview, “For some time I have been disturbed by the way
CIA
has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.…

“I never had any thought that when I set up the
CIA
that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.”
¹²

Kennan echoed Truman's complaint. “It ended up with the establishment within
CIA
of a branch, an office for activities of this nature, and one which employed a great many people,” he declared in 1975. “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.… ” Kennan said he had thought “that this would be a facility which could be used when and if an occasion arose when it might be needed. There might be years when we wouldn't have to do anything like this. But if the occasion arose we wanted somebody in the Government who would have the funds, the experience, the expertise to do these things and to do them in a proper way.”
¹³

The second error in combining intelligence gathering and covert operations was that, inevitably, covert ops (as they came to be known) took precedence over intelligence collection, especially in the mind of the director of the
CIA
. The one was dull, scholarly, painstaking work; the other was exciting and dramatic, providing immediate and tangible benefits and giving its practitioners prestige and glamour. Thus, critics charge, the irresistible tendency in the
CIA
has been to concentrate on the sensational covert action rather than the practical, but far more important, task of collecting and analyzing information.

In its first three years, under Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter as Director of Central Intelligence (
DCI
), the
CIA
engaged in a few selected covert activities. The first was an intervention into the Italian elections of April 1948. There was a great fear in Washington that Italy was on the verge of going Communist, by popular vote, which would have been an absolute disaster for American foreign policy, a policy based on Truman's containment doctrine (announced
in 1947) and the Marshall Plan for European recovery. Dominoes were not yet being used as an analogy, but Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson did speak about rotten apples infecting the whole barrel. If Italy went Communist, Acheson argued, then France would go, and then West Germany, and then the Low Countries, and then Britain. America would stand alone, an island in a Communist world.

The Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 was the event that shocked the free world into action. Nearly everyone remembered Hitler and Munich ten years earlier, and feared that the Red Army was about to march across Europe, as the Wehrmacht had done.

With the stakes so high, no wonder the Truman administration decided to act, especially since this first action was benign (“benign” in the sense that it was done not to overthrow an existing government but to support it). The Russians were known to be pouring money into the treasury of the Italian Communist Party; what could be more natural than an effort to counter that program? The
NSC
recommended to Truman that the United States provide campaign funds for the pro-Western Christian Democratic Party. Truman accepted the recommendation and authorized the
CIA
to contribute about one million dollars to the Christian Democrats. When they won the election, the
CIA
naturally took credit for the victory.
¹⁴

What a bargain! For a paltry million dollars, Italy and Western Europe were saved. Or so at least the
CIA
could and did argue. It was a cautious, conservative venture into covert ops, but it was a start.

The next year, 1949, Congress passed the Central Intelligence Agency Act, which exempted the
CIA
from all federal laws requiring the disclosure or the “functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed by the Agency,” and gave the
DCI
power to spend money “without regard to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds … such expenditures to be accounted for solely on the certificate of the director.”
¹⁵

With unlimited funds available, and no accounting required, the
CIA
began secretly to subsidize democratic organizations throughout Western Europe—labor unions, political parties, magazines, newspapers, professional associations, and so forth. Overall,
the assistance program was a great success, enthusiastically supported by those few congressmen who knew about it and by every President from Truman to Nixon.

But the
CIA
's main reason for existence was not to provide a funnel for pouring money into the hands of America's European allies—it was, rather, to provide early warning of a Soviet attack. What came to seem absurd to later generations—that the Red Army would one day, without warning or provocation, cross the Elbe River and march into Western Europe—seemed in 1948 to be not only possible but even probable. That fateful year of 1948, the year of the Czech coup and the Italian elections and the Marshall Plan, also saw Stalin's attempt to drive the West out of Berlin by imposing a blockade on the German capital. In a now famous telegram, General Lucius Clay, Ike's successor as commander of American forces in Germany, declared, “Within the last few weeks, I have felt a subtle change in Soviet attitude which I cannot define but which now gives me a feeling that it [war] may come with dramatic suddenness.”
¹⁶

The 1948 war scare enhanced the
CIA'S
growing reputation. U. S. Army intelligence flatly predicted an imminent Soviet invasion, “imminent” meaning within a matter of weeks, if not days. The
CIA
dissented. In the agency's view, based on its information, drawn mainly from agents behind the Iron Curtain, the Red Army was not ready to march. There was no need to panic. Time proved the
CIA
analysis correct.

To get advance information on Soviet intentions, the
CIA
began a program of overflights of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Big, lumbering C-47s would parachute agents behind the enemy lines. The agents were political refugees from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere, men willing to risk their lives to fight communism. Their main function was to provide information on Soviet troop movements, mobilization activities, and other military intelligence. This program, according to the agent in charge, “was never cleared with the Department of State, though presumably it was with the President, and only in the early fifties was the Secretary of State informed.”
¹⁷
Of course, the Russians knew about the illegal overflights, which were monitered by Soviet ground crews. Occasionally they shot at some, but the C-47s survived every flight.

To almost everyone's surprise, the Communist offensive, when
it came in June 1950, was not in central Europe but in Asia, and was not mounted by the Russians but by the North Koreans. The
CIA
failed to predict the attack, but its excuse was unassailable—General Douglas MacArthur, commanding American forces in the Far East, refused to allow the
CIA
to operate in his theater, just as he had shut out the
OSS
during World War II. When the war started, MacArthur reluctantly gave the
CIA
permission to operate in Korea, and agents were air-dropped behind enemy lines, mainly Koreans but including some Americans. One such agent was a former high-ranking Chinese Nationalist officer who parachuted onto the mainland in the late summer of 1950. His detailed reports on the number and distribution of Chinese Communist troops along the Manchurian-North Korean border gave a fair warning of the imminent Communist crossing of the Yalu River in November 1950.

Nevertheless, MacArthur was caught by surprise again. His own overconfidence was the major reason, but he later denied having seen any
CIA
reports of a Chinese buildup along the Yalu. Truman contradicted the general. He stated publicly that he had seen and read
CIA
reports on Chinese troop concentrations along the Yalu.
¹⁸

MacArthur was by no means the
CIA'S
only foe within the American power structure. J. Edgar Hoover was predictably unhappy with the newly created agency. When the
CIA
exercised its rights and replaced the
FBI
network in Latin America, Hoover told his men there to destroy their intelligence files rather than bequeath them to the
CIA
. It was a real “scorched earth” policy, according to Howard Hunt, who had to pick up the pieces in Mexico City.
¹⁹
Hoover also promoted charges that the Communists had penetrated the
CIA
, with old do-gooders and one-worlders from the
OSS
leading the way.

Partly to counter such charges, in 1950 Truman appointed Walter Bedell Smith, Ike's wartime chief of staff, as
DCI
. Smith was about as right-wing as a professional army officer was ever likely to get. “I know you won't believe this,” an ex-
CIA
agent later declared, “but Smith once warned Eisenhower that [Nelson] Rockefeller was a Communist.”
²⁰

Precisely because he was so extreme on the Communist issue, Smith was a brilliant choice as
DCI
. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had launched his anti-Communist crusade earlier in 1950, and had
indicateci in a number of ways that when he had finished with the State Department he intended to turn his attention to the
CIA
. Smith's appointment helped pacify McCarthy, as did the appointment of other right-wingers, such as Charles Black, husband of former child movie star Shirley Temple, and James Burnham, later an editor on William Buckley's
National Review
. Buckley himself was McCarthy's chief intellectual defender, co-author of
McCarthy and His Enemies
.
²¹

Smith brought more to the job than an ability to appease McCarthy. Blunt, curt, outspoken, a strong and heavy user of curse words, Smith was a bureaucrat's bureaucrat. He knew precisely when to make a decision, when to say no, when to say maybe, when to buck the decision on up to his boss. Although he was almost unknown outside the top military and governmental circles, where it counted his reputation was almost as high as that of Eisenhower himself.

Smith did not suffer fools gladly, nor delays, nor excuses, nor shoddy performance. He did suffer from ulcers that produced almost continuous and nearly unbearable pain, which helped explain why his face seemed always to be pinched together in a crabby grimace. Physically small and too thin, he nevertheless terrified his subordinates and associates. The overall impression was of a very sour, very aggressive, very self-confident, very intelligent man. Summing up Smith's personality, Ike once told this writer, referring to Smith's ethnic stock, “You have to always keep in mind that Beetle is a Prussian.”
²²
As President, Ike took great delight in seeing Beetle go to Moscow as the American ambassador. “It served those bastards right,” Ike commented, as he grinned at the idea of the Kremlin having to put up with Smith.
²³

The
CIA
, under Smith, became more aggressive in collecting information, in pressing its views on the President, and in conceiving and conducting covert operations. It was not, however, given over completely to the right-wing, or otherwise surrendered to McCarthy and his friends. This was primarily because of Allen Dulles, who Smith selected in 1951 as his deputy director.

Like Smith, Dulles had emerged from World War II with a reputation, among insiders, as one of the best men America produced in the struggle against the Nazis. Fifty-eight years old at the time of his selection, Dulles' background was well-nigh perfect for his new job. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he had studied at Auburn,
New York, Paris, and Princeton, where he graduated in 1914. After short stints teaching at missionary schools in India, China, and Japan, he joined the diplomatic service in 1916, serving in Vienna and Berne as an intelligence officer. He moved up rapidly, as did his older brother John Foster Dulles, in part no doubt because their grandfather had been Benjamin Harrison's Secretary of State, while an uncle had held the same post under Woodrow Wilson. The Dulles brothers were together in Paris in 1919 as members of the American delegation to the Versailles Peace Conference.

In 1920, Allen Dulles married Clover Todd, the daughter of a Columbia University professor. They had one son, who was wounded and permanently disabled in the Korean War. In 1926, after service in Berlin, Constantinople, and Washington, Dulles left the diplomatic service to join his brother in the famous Wall Street firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, specialists in international law corporate practice. With Sullivan and Cromwell, Dulles worked on a daily, intimate basis with the political and industrial elite of Europe and the United States.

In their work at Sullivan and Cromwell, the Dulles brothers came to know the world and its commerce as well as any men living. Although they shared a common workload, they were not much alike. William Macomber, who worked for both, said that “Allen from the beginning was less intellectual and more outgoing. He had a more developed personality, a warm personality.” John Foster Dulles was more old-fashioned, a gentleman of the old school. “He always measured with a handkerchief on a globe, that's how he measured the distance. He always sharpened his own pencils. Incredible. He always finished the job with a pocket knife. When he was a little boy his father or his grandfather would ask if he were carrying his knife; and if he was carrying it he got a penny, if he weren't carrying it he owed a penny. He was brought up to think it important for a man to carry a pocket knife.”