Shadow Warrior (18 page)

In 1954, La Signora brokered a deal between Italy and Yugoslavia that brought the long-disputed city of Trieste into the Italian polity, much to the delight of the country's nationalists. She began to dream of a new ruling coalition composed of the conservative wing of the Christian Democrats, the business-oriented Liberal Party, neo-fascists who supported the constitution, and monarchists. Colby argued long and hard against this strategy. Instead, he maintained, the United States should support an opening to the left, to try to split the Socialists off from the Communists. If this could be accomplished, the PCI would be reduced to a mere 20 percent of the electorate. Colby did not say so in front of the ambassador, but he observed to McCoy and others that only a left-center coalition would pursue social and economic policies capable of attracting and holding the masses.
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In her tilt to the right, Clare Luce enjoyed the support of a powerful ally within the CIA: James Jesus Angleton, head of the Agency's counterintelligence division and, for much of his career in the CIA, Colby's bête noir. Jim was the son of James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno—the elder Angleton had met his Mexican bride in Nogales while serving as a cavalry officer in 1917—and had spent his youth in Rome, where his father had run the National Cash Register franchise. In 1933, Jim had been shipped off to England to attend Malvern College in Worcestershire. In 1940, his father moved the family to New York, and the following year Jim enrolled at Yale. It was there that he began acquiring his reputation as an eccentric. “He was quite British in his ways,” recalled poet Reed Whittemore, his close friend. “He was a mixture of pixiness and earnestness, very much at home in Italian literature, especially Dante, as well as the fine points of handicapping horses.”
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Jim's intellect was wide-ranging, inquisitive, and eclectic. Many of his classmates found him less than attractive, however. Angleton never slept,
and he was never wrong. “Collapsing into bed late at night,” remembered his roommate, William Wick, “I would often arise next morning to find Jim still reading or furiously writing, ashtrays stuffed with cigarette butts, and the room littered with library books.” With Whittemore, Angleton edited the literary magazine
Furioso
, whose contributors would eventually include T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. Angleton had met Pound in 1938, while summer vacationing with his family in Rapallo, and the two subsequently became fast friends.
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In 1943, Jim was inducted into the US Army and assigned to the Italian division of the OSS. His first stop was London, where he went to work for the Italian desk of X-2, OSS's counterintelligence branch (the component tasked with preventing or ferreting out enemy penetration of Allied intelligence operations). Angleton fell in love with the world of counterintelligence; it would be his home during the remainder of his CIA career. It was also in London that Angleton became part of an exclusive club that had access to the high-level enemy radio and teletype communications collected in the “Ultra” decryption project. Both Churchill and Eisenhower later remarked that Ultra, which deciphered the “Enigma” codes of the Germans, was key to the Allied victory. Because its work was so important, X-2 operated in an atmosphere of absolute secrecy and security. It had its own overseas stations separate from regular OSS offices, a dedicated communications channel, and independent liaison with British intelligence. X-2 could veto OSS espionage and paramilitary operations without explanation. Angleton was also privy to the Allied Double Cross operation launched in support of the Normandy invasion, in which captured Nazi intelligence operatives were fed false information to transmit back to Berlin. It was at this point that Angleton became convinced of the primacy of counterintelligence in national security operations and the absolute efficacy of “need-to-know.”
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In 1944, Angleton and his lifelong deputy, Ray Rocca, moved their operation to Italy; following V-E Day, they stayed on, working for the OSS's successor agencies. Angleton was an anticommunist true believer. In his view, Moscow was at the head of a monolithic communist threat bent on world domination by any means and at whatever cost. Angleton helped the Carabinieri, the Italian military police, develop a counterintelligence unit and recruited spies that penetrated the PCI, the PSI, and the Vatican. He reputedly paid a Vatican code clerk $100 a week for copies of the Holy
See's worldwide intelligence reports. Angleton's office was at 22 Via Sicilia, in the fashionable hotel district just off the Via Veneto and only three blocks from the US embassy. One of Angleton's missions was to gather evidence for the Nuremburg Trials of alleged Nazi war criminals. In the process, he made contact with members of the Zionist underground in Italy and in refugee camps elsewhere. He cultivated those contacts and helped key individuals make their way from Europe to Palestine. Angleton became an ardent supporter of Israel, personally running the Israeli desk within the CIA from 1952 through 1974 while simultaneously heading counter-intelligence. Among other things, he anticipated that the Soviet Jews who would flood into the new state would provide an excellent and ongoing source of intelligence on Russian affairs.
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In 1948, Angleton returned to the United States as an army major. He resigned his commission and immediately joined the CIA, serving Bedell Smith as chief of foreign intelligence operations. When Allen Dulles came on board as DCI following the 1952 presidential election, Angleton was made head of a powerful new unit named the Counterintelligence (CI) Staff. He had been chosen personally by the new director. For the next eight years, Angleton would enjoy unprecedented access to Dulles—he was the only staff member with permission to enter the director's office unannounced. He and the DCI would drive home together at the end of each workday.
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By tradition, responsibility for internal security had rested with the FBI. With the advent of the CIA, the two agencies proceeded in uneasy partnership. In theory, the FBI had responsibility for subversive activities within the United States, and the CI Staff handled communist espionage abroad. In reality, the CIA retained control of all operations designed to penetrate opposition intelligence services, domestic or foreign. Whereas the FBI historically simply arrested and deported enemy spies, the CIA attempted to “turn” them, that is, to convert them into double agents. Attached to virtually every overseas CIA station were one or more counterintelligence officers whose duty it was to monitor US espionage and covert action operations to ensure that they had not been penetrated by the KGB. Successful “moles” would be in a position to feed false information to CIA officers and disrupt carefully planned operations.

Beyond monitoring the activities of their own intelligence community, counterintelligence personnel were tasked with penetrating the KGB and
other communist intelligence services. Because Marxist-Leninist societies were so tightly controlled, recruitment of double agents behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains proved extremely difficult. Counterintelligence's primary targets were KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agents, the only Russians empowered to move freely about the world. In the United States, counterintelligence concentrated on preventing KGB penetration of the Agency itself and, if penetration occurred, on ferreting it out. “As practiced by the CIA and the KGB,” Victor Marchetti wrote in
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
, “counterespionage is a highly complex and devious activity. It depends on cunning entrapments, agents provocateur, spies and counterspies, double and triple crosses. It is the stuff that spy novels are made of, with limitless possibilities for deceptions and turns of plot.”
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From the perspective of the CI Staff, every Agency employee was a potential Soviet spy or “mole.” According to some reports, the chief of CI maintained a list of the fifty or so key positions in the CIA that were most likely to be targeted for penetration and kept the individuals occupying those positions under constant surveillance. Angleton was convinced that mole hunting was absolutely crucial to any and every successful intelligence operation. “If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service,” he was quoted as saying. Compared to totalitarian societies, the Western democracies, with their characteristic emphasis on openness, individualism, and privacy, as well as their suspicion of authority and secrecy, were particularly vulnerable to penetration by the KGB and the GRU. Moreover, as America's spy handlers cast their net for new agents, they were bound to land a bad fish from time to time. By penetrating the CIA and other Western services, the Soviets could do far more than spy on them, Angleton pointed out: they could also serve as agents of influence, creating deceptions that would enable Moscow to manipulate those services and, by extension, their governments. The goal of the opposition, he wrote, was to create “a wilderness of mirrors”—a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot. The “wilderness” consisted of the “myriad of stratagems, deceptions, artifices, and all the other devices of disinformation which the Soviet Bloc and its coordinated intelligence services use to confuse and spilt the West . . . producing an ever-fluid landscape where fact and illusion merge.”
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As Jim Angleton well knew, the intelligence labyrinths in which Moscow hoped to trap Western intelligence were historical realities. In the early
1920s, Lenin and his first intelligence chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, had devised an elaborate counterespionage apparatus named “the Trust.” Agents of the Trust spread out across Europe to make contact with White Russian refugees, portraying themselves and their organization as an anticommunist network operating within the Soviet Union. They fed the émigrés false information, saying, in effect, that communism was failing and that the Bolshevik regime was about to be overthrown by the Russian people. The émigrés, in turn, sold these mutually reinforcing bits of information to Western security forces, with the result that they halted plans for military landings, economic blockades, and other forms of coercion. Then there was the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra), the highly effective Soviet military intelligence network that spied on Germany during World War II. Its agents successfully penetrated Nazi occupation authorities in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands as well as in Nazi Germany itself. Because of “Venona”—the US-UK operation that broke the Soviet intelligence code during World War II—the CIA, and Angleton in particular, was intimately familiar with the Rote Kapelle. Indeed, he subsequently used it as a teaching tool for training his operatives.
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Angleton himself had once been victimized by a Soviet “double game.” While working in London for X-2, he had made the acquaintance of Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby. The son of the famous British Arabist St. John Philby, Kim, who was nicknamed after the boy spy in Rudyard Kipling's novel, was a top-level operative in Britain's SIS. A handsome, charming man, Philby seemed a stereotypical member of the British aristocracy, complete with tweed jacket and pipe. Before Angleton had departed for Italy, Philby had acted as something of a dark arts tutor to the young American. The friendship began anew in Washington in 1949, when Philby was posted there as SIS liaison with the FBI and the CIA. For two years, the men would meet every week at Harvey's restaurant—J. Edgar Hoover's favorite—for lobster, martinis, and wide-ranging discussions of the worldwide Anglo-American intelligence effort. All the while, Angleton was unaware that in 1934 Philby had been recruited into a Soviet spy ring along with fellow Cambridge students Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, and Anthony Blunt. During World War II, MacLean had provided the Kremlin with copies of top-secret British and American documents, including correspondence between Churchill and Truman. In Washington, as an official of the British embassy, Burgess lived in Philby's basement,
where he worked transmitting copies of secret documents to his Russian handlers. In 1951, Burgess and MacLean, fearing that they were about to be exposed, fled to the USSR. Philby was recalled to London, interrogated, and dismissed from the SIS; there was not enough evidence to prosecute him, however. In 1963, Philby himself would flee to Moscow, where he subsequently revealed all. Philby, Burgess, MacLean, and Blunt eventually became known as the Cambridge Four; some allege the involvement of a fifth man, John Cairncross, making them the Cambridge Five. “We shall never know how many agents were killed or tortured as a result of Philby's work as a double agent,” Lord Birkenhead observed at the time, “and how many operations failed.” For the rest of his days, Angleton would be haunted by memories of those candid lunchtime conversations.
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In 1955, Pietro Nenni and the Italian Socialists began the long, slow process of separating from Togliatti and the PCI. Colby saw the development as a breakthrough in the campaign for
apetura alla sisistra
, or “opening to the left.” In 1956, he recommended to his superiors in Washington that the Rome station be authorized to open a dialogue with Nenni; facilitating a Socialist switch from the Communists to the center coalition “would be desirable from the viewpoint of both Italian and US interests.” The United States must be pragmatic, he said: “Under present circumstances, we cannot afford to be guided by likes or dislikes, moral approval or disapproval.”
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Like Clare Luce and the Catholic hierarchy, Jim Angleton viewed the Nenni-led PSI as nothing more than a Trojan horse to help Togliatti and the Communists penetrate the ruling coalition. He was not going to stand idly by and allow liberals like Colby to open the door to a fifth column. One day in 1956, Gerry Miller, chief of the West European Division of the Office of Plans, summoned Colby to his office. There was a very special American agent operating in Rome, a “singleton” who observed and reported independently to CIA headquarters and the State Department. Miller told Colby that he wanted him to “handle” the agent, whose code name was “Charlie.” The simplicity of the code name belied the complexity of the personality, Colby soon learned. Miller, Colby, and Charlie subsequently rendezvoused at a suburban café for a cappuccino and a get-acquainted session. The new man on the block had been part of the OSS team that had come to Italy during the last stages of World War II and the onset of the Cold War to help the Italians put together a new government. Charlie was Catholic, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and incredibly well-connected in
Italy's political and social circles. “Well-educated and widely read,” Colby said of him, “he could discourse with ease on medieval philosophy and the Pope's social encyclicals.” In truth, Miller was having trouble keeping Charlie in his loop, and even more trouble gaining access to Charlie's loop.
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