My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (23 page)

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I never did the second half of Spyglass. In the summer of 1949, I received a telegram from headquarters which diverted my attention to quite different matters. The telegram offered me the SIS representation in the United States, where I would be working in liaison with both CIA and FBI. The intention was to upgrade the job for a significant reason. The collaboration between CIA and SIS at headquarters level (though not in the field) had become so close that any officer earmarked for high position in SIS would need intimate knowledge of the American scene. It took me all of half an hour to decide to accept the offer.

It would be a wrench to leave Istanbul, both because of its beauty and because it would mean leaving a job considerably less than half accomplished. But the lure of the American post was irresistible for two reasons. At one stroke, it would take me right back into the middle of intelligence policy-making and it would give me a close-up view of the American intelligence organizations. These, I was beginning to suspect, were already of greater importance from my point of view than their British opposite numbers. I did not even think it worth waiting for confirmation from my Soviet colleagues.
The event justified my action. No doubt was expressed anywhere of the unlimited potentialities of my new assignment. It was arranged that I should leave for London at the end of September and, after a month’s briefing at headquarters, sail for America at the end of October.

In London I found that Jack Easton had the general supervision of relations between SIS and the American services, and it was from him that I received most of my instructions. I appreciated, not without misgivings, his command of the elusive patterns of Anglo-American co-operation. But the range of collaboration was so wide that there was scarcely a senior officer in the whole organization who had not got some axe to grind with me. I was lunched at many clubs on business pretexts. The discussions over the coffee and port covered many subjects, but all my hosts had one thing in common—the desire for a free trip to America. I did not discourage them. The more visitors I had in Washington, the more spies I got my finger into. That, after all, was my aim in life.

Apart from these diverting interludes, my briefing caused me serious preoccupation in more than one respect. It became clear from Easton’s succinct expositions of the situation that my path in Washington was likely to be thorny. I was to take over from Peter Dwyer, who had spent several years in the United States. I knew him for a brilliant wit, and was to learn that he had a great deal more to him than just wit. During the war, he had succeeded in the prickly task of establishing close personal relations with many leading figures in the FBI. These relations, maintained after the war, had given the SIS representation in Washington a bias towards the FBI at the expense (so some thought) of CIA. As the FBI, taking its cue from the prima donna Hoover, was childishly sensitive on the subject of CIA, it was extremely difficult for Dwyer to keep a balance without exposing himself to snarling charges of double-crossing his old friends.

One of my new jobs was to tilt the balance in the opposite direction. CIA and SIS had agreed to close collaboration over a wide range of issues which inevitably meant more day-to-day contact
than SIS would have with the FBI. Nothing about this change of policy could be acknowledged, of course. My assignment was therefore to tighten links with CIA and loosen those with the FBI without the FBI noticing. It did not take much reflection to convince me that such a task was impossible and absurd. The only sensible course was to get in with CIA on subjects of common interest and take on the chin the unavoidable resentment of Hoover’s men. A corollary of this was that it would be dangerous to be too clever since the cards would be stacked too heavily against me. It would be better to play it silly and be ready to apologize freely for the bricks which my position would force me to drop from time to time.

My briefing on the counter-espionage side also aroused grave anxiety in my mind. This was given me by the formidable Maurice Oldfield, and included a communication of the first importance. Joint Anglo-American investigation of Soviet intelligence activity in the United States had yielded a strong suggestion that there had been a leakage from the British Embassy in Washington during the years 1944–5, and another from the atomic energy establishment in Los Alamos. I had no ideas about Los Alamos. But a swift check in the relevant Foreign Office list left me in little doubt about the identity of the source from the British Embassy. My anxiety was tempered by relief, since I had been nagged for some months by a question put to me by my Soviet contact in Istanbul. He had asked me if I had any means of discovering what the British were doing in a case under investigation by the FBI—a case involving the British Embassy in Washington. At the time of asking, there was nothing that I could have done. But it seemed, after my talk with Oldfield, that I had stumbled into the heart of the problem. Within a few days, this was confirmed by my Russian friend in London. After checking with headquarters, he was left in no doubt that information from the FBI and my own referred to one and the same case.

A careful study of the files did something to allay my immediate fears. As SIS was not supposed to operate inside the United States, investigation of the leads provided by the source was in the hands
of the FBI. Characteristically, they had put in an immense amount of work resulting in an immense amount of waste paper. It had so far occurred neither to them nor to the British that a diplomat was involved, let alone a fairly senior diplomat. Instead, the investigation had concentrated on non-diplomatic employees of the Embassy, and particularly on those locally recruited, the sweepers, cleaners, bottle-washers and the rest. A charlady with a Latvian grandmother, for instance, would rate a fifteen-page report, crowded with insignificant details of herself, her family and friends, her private life, and holiday habits. It was testimony to the enormous resources of the FBI, and to the pitiful extent to which those resources were squandered. It was enough to convince me that urgent action would not be necessary, but that the case would require careful watching. Something drastic would certainly have to be done before I left Washington. Heaven knew where my next appointment would lie; I might well lose all control of the case.

My last call in London was at the Chief’s office. He was in the best of form, and amused me with malicious accounts of the stickier passages in Anglo-American intelligence relations during the war. This turned out to be more than just pointless reminiscence. He told me that the news of my appointment to the United States appeared to have upset Hoover. I was then rated a fairly senior officer in the service, which Dwyer (most undeservedly) was not. Hoover suspected that my appointment might herald unwanted SIS activity in the United States. To allay his fear, the Chief had sent him a personal telegram, assuring him that there was no intention of a change of policy; my duties would be purely liaison duties. The Chief showed me the telegram, then gave me a hard stare. “That,” he said, “is an official communication from myself to Hoover.” There was a pause, then he continued: “Unofficially . . . let’s discuss it over lunch at White’s.”

With my briefing as complete as could reasonably be expected, I sailed on the SS
Caronia
towards the end of September. I had a memorable send-off. The first thing I saw on the foggy platform at Waterloo was an enormous pair of moustaches and behind them
the head of Osbert Lancaster, an apparition which assured me of good company on the voyage. Before we sailed, I was called to the ship’s telephone. Jack Easton was on the line to tell me Dwyer had just telegraphed his resignation. It was not clear why, but I had been warned. Finally, a case of champagne was delivered to my cabin with the card of a disgustingly rich friend. I began to feel that I would enjoy my first Transatlantic crossing.

I made my first slip almost immediately after entering American territorial waters. An FBI representative had come out in the pilot’s launch to greet me. I gave him a glass of Tio Pepe which he sipped unhappily while we made polite conversation. I was later to learn that the men of the FBI, with hardly an exception, were proud of their insularity, of having sprung from the grass-roots. One of the first senior G-men I met in Washington claimed to have had a grandpappy who kept a general store at Horse Creek, Missouri. They were therefore whisky-drinkers, with beer for light refreshment. By contrast, CIA men flaunted cosmopolitan postures. They would discuss absinthe and serve Burgundy above room temperature. This is not just flippancy. It points to a deep social cleavage between the two organizations, which accounts for at least some of the asperity marking their exchanges.

My FBI friends saw me through the landing formalties and bedded me down in a hotel with a view of Central Park. Next day at Pennsylvania Station, I boarded the train for Washington. The sumach was still in flower and gave me a foretaste of the famous fall, one of the few glories of America which Americans have never exaggerated because exaggeration is impossible. Peter Dwyer met me and explained, over our first bourbon, that his resignation had nothing to do with my appointment to succeed him. For personal reasons, he had long wanted to settle in Canada, where a congenial government post was awaiting him. The news of my posting to Washington had simply determined the timing of his northward move to Ottawa. So we started on a pleasant footing. Nothing could exceed the care and astuteness with which he inducted me into Washington politics.

It is not easy to make a coherent picture of my tour of duty in the United States. Indeed, such a picture would give a wrong impression of the type of work I was engaged in. It was too varied, and often too amorphous, to be reduced to simple terms. Liaison with the FBI alone, if it had been conducted thoroughly, would have been a full-time job. It was the era of McCarthy in full evil blast. It was also the era of Hiss, Coplon, Fuchs, Gold, Greenglass and the brave Rosenbergs—not to mention others who are still nameless. Liaison with CIA covered an even wider field, ranging from a serious attempt to subvert an East European regime to such questions as the proper exploitation of German documents relating to General Vlasov. In every question that arose, the first question was to please one party without offending the other. In addition, I had to work in with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and with individuals in the Department of External Affairs who were dickering with the idea of setting up an independent Canadian secret service.

Where to begin? As the end of my story chiefly concerns the FBI, I should perhaps concede to CIA the beginning. The head of the organization when I arrived was Admiral Hillenkoetter,
^*
an amiable sailor who was soon to give way to General Bedell Smith,
^†
without leaving much of a mark on American intelligence history. The two divisions with which I had most to do were the Office of Strategic Operations (OSO) and the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC). In plain English, OSO was the intelligence-gathering division and OPC was charged with subversion. There was also a little work with the planning division, associated with the name of Dick Helms,
^†
who recently succeeded Admiral Raborn as head of the whole organization and promptly fell foul of the Senate.

The driving force of OSO at the time was Jim Angleton, who had formerly served in London and had earned my respect by
openly rejecting the Anglomania that disfigured the young face of OSO. We formed the habit of lunching once a week at Harvey’s where he demonstrated regularly that overwork was not his only vice. He was one of the thinnest men I have ever met, and one of the biggest eaters. Lucky Jim! After a year of keeping up with Angleton, I took the advice of an elderly lady friend and went on a diet, dropping from thirteen stone to about eleven in three months.

Our close association was, I am sure, inspired by genuine friendliness on both sides. But we both had ulterior motives. Angleton wanted to place the burden of exchanges between CIA and SIS on the CIA office in London—which was about ten times as big as mine. By doing so, he could exert the maximum pressure on SIS’s headquarters while minimizing SIS intrusions into his own. As an exercise in nationalism, that was fair enough. By cultivating me to the full, he could better keep me under wraps. For my part, I was more than content to string him along. The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he would suspect covert action. Who gained most from this complex game I cannot say. But I had one big advantage. I knew what he was doing for CIA and he knew what I was doing for SIS. But the real nature of my interest was something he did not know.

Although our discussions ranged over the whole world, they usually ended, if they did not begin, with France and Germany. The Americans had an obsessive fear of Communism in France, and I was astonished by the way in which Angleton devoured reams of French newspaper material daily. That this was not a private phobia of Angleton’s became clear at a later date when a British proposal for giving Alexandre Parodi, head of the d’Orsay, limited secret information, was firmly squashed by Bedell Smith in person. He told me flatly that he was not prepared to trust a single French official with such information.

Angleton had fewer fears about Germany. That country concerned him chiefly as a base of operations against the Soviet Union
and the Socialist states of Eastern Europe. CIA had lost no time in taking over the anti-Soviet section of the German Abwehr, under von Gehlen,
^*
and many of Harvey’s lobsters went to provoke Angleton into defending, with chapter and verse, the past record and current activities of the von Gehlen organization.

We also had many skirmishes over the various Russian emigré organizations, of which more later in this chapter. There was the People’s Labour Alliance (NTS), which recently achieved notoriety in the case of poor Gerald Brooke.
^†
There were the Ukrainian Fascists of Stepan Bandera, the darlings of the British. Both CIA and SIS were up to their ears in emigré politics, hoping to use the more promising groups for purposes analogous to those for which we had used Jordania. Although the British put up a stubborn rearguard action in favour of the groups with which they had been long associated, the story was one of general American encroachment in the emigré field. The dollar was just too strong. For instance, although the British had an important stake in the NTS, SIS was compelled by financial reasons to transfer responsibility for its operations to CIA. The transfer was effected by formal agreement between the two organizations, though the case of Brooke, an Englishman, suggests that SIS is not above playing around with the Alliance under the counter. Such an action would be quite in keeping with the ethics of secret service.