Their styles contrasted. Harvey had grown up in the same small midwestern town as his father and grandfather. Angleton had grown up all over America and Europe. Harvey collected firearms. Angleton constructed fishing lures. Angleton shambled along like a professor late to a lecture. Harvey walked with the stiff gait of a military man on patrol. They were prototypes of two strains of spies—OSS veterans and FBI exiles—who came together to share the higher calling of the CIA. One journalist who knew them both wrote that Harvey was a man of action, heeding a call to glory. Angleton, he said, was a man of ideas, following a path to power.141
* * *
NO SOONER HAD ANGLETON started to settle in Washington than his bosses sent him back to Italy. He was simply too knowledgeable and capable to be kept in Washington. The Italian Communist Party was already running strong in the campaign leading up to the April elections, which would determine the structure of the country’s first postwar government.
The sense that Italy was on the brink of civil war was pervasive in the American press. “Italy Faces Her Worst Crisis,” proclaimed Look magazine. “The Communist Party is extending its gains every day as poverty and hunger grip the nation. The opposition to communism is also stiffening, with the promise of American aid. But the resistance may not be strong enough.”142
In his quest to make sure the Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI, did not come to power, Angleton knit together friends, allies, and agents into a formidable action network. He could call on the Italian security forces, the Vatican, his father’s associates in the business world, fraternal allies in the Knights of Malta, as well as contacts in the British and French secret services.
To stem the Communist tide, Angleton proposed raising $300,000 in private funds for radio and newspaper advertising and for the “personal expenses” of anti-Communist candidates. It wasn’t enough. His bosses in Washington authorized tapping of the captured assets of the defeated Axis powers to pay for political action in Italy.143 Ten million dollars was put into an account for CIA use.144 A meeting was arranged at the Hotel Hassler. A satchel stuffed with millions of lira was passed from the Americans to their local allies.145 With U.S. money pouring into Italy for the purposes of defeating communism, Monsignor Montini had his reward. He was given control of a campaign slush fund through the Vatican Bank.146
* * *
ANGLETON’S IMAGINATION HAD AN artistic dimension. As the story later circulated, he interrupted one embassy meeting in Rome in early 1948 to ask Ambassador James Dunn if he might offer an idea.
“I thought,” he began mischievously, “we might take advantage of one of America’s great natural resources: Greta Garbo.”
The name of the Swedish actress invoked images of her sultry style. “I realize she once belonged to another country,” Angleton said, “but I believe by now we’re justified in claiming her as our own. So I suggest we import one of her best pictures.” He paused. “I’d like to expose the Italians to Ninotchka.”
Ninotchka, released in 1939, was a comedy in which Garbo spoofed Stalinist Russia. The ambassador ratified Angleton’s proposal on the spot. Actually, Angleton wasn’t the only wise guy with this idea. The Hollywood studios had printed extra copies of Ninotchka and made special arrangements to show the film in Italy as a way of contrasting golden America with ravaged Russia. At the end of the meeting, Angleton supposedly quipped, “Miss Garbo will prove a most lethal secret weapon.”147
And so she did. The Christian Democrats emerged from the election of April 1948 with 48 percent of the vote and an absolute majority in parliament. In this rather open and extensive intervention by the United States, Angleton had played a decisive role. His enemies, the Communists, would never gain control of the government in Rome, and his allies would mostly prosper. Within twenty years, Monsignor Montini would become Pope Paul VI.
REUNION
IN SEPTEMBER 1949, ANGLETON traveled across the Atlantic Ocean by boat, arriving at Southampton, England, the same port that had welcomed him five years earlier.148 Then a novice, he was now an experienced spy. Upon landfall, he went straightaway to London, where he had lunch with his friend Win Scott, now chief of the CIA’s London station. They then plunged into a week of meetings with senior British and American colleagues at SIS headquarters.149
The good news for Angleton was that Kim Philby would soon take command of the SIS station in Washington. He thought Philby was the best of the British service. The bad news for Angleton was the creation of a new enterprise within the CIA, the Office of Policy Coordination. The OPC was especially galling to Angleton because it was born of his personal success in Italy.
On May 4, 1948, barely three weeks after the Italian election, George Kennan, then a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, had drafted a memo stating, “It would seem that the time is now fully ripe for the creation of a political warfare operations directorate within the Government.”150
“We were alarmed at the inroads of the Russian influence in Western Europe beyond the point where the Russian troops had reached,” Kennan later explained, “and we were alarmed particularly over the situation in France and Italy.… That is … why we thought we ought to have some facility for covert operations.”151
Angleton’s mission at OSO was narrow: “the conduct … of all organized Federal espionage and counterespionage operations outside of the United States.”152 Espionage was the theft of secrets, and counterespionage the prevention of the theft of secrets. OPC was entrusted with the more aggressive assignment: to wage political warfare, to manipulate the enemy’s reality without disclosing the CIA’s hand.
Angleton felt sidelined. He favored ambitious covert operations against the Soviet Union and its allies, but he insisted they required careful preparation and tight security, neither of which the OPC practiced. As OPC began to expand rapidly, Angleton believed the Agency was being taken over by amateurs. To fortify his position against office rivals, he went to London determined to consolidate his working relationship with Kim Philby, the rising star of SIS.
* * *
THE LEADERS OF CIA and SIS felt an urgent need to forge a more effective working relationship. More than a few people in Washington and London feared World War III might start in the near future. The dream of a cooperative postwar world was dead.153 The strains between the Americans and the British services were dissipating under the growing Russian threat.154
The British wanted to preserve their “sphere of influence,” the politest way of describing their shrinking empire. The country’s self-appointed imperial mission had been battered during the war and besieged after it. In the course of a few months in 1947–1948, the British had had to accept the independence of India, once the crown jewel of their colonies, and then abandon Palestine to the Zionists, who established the state of Israel.
The Americans had a grander agenda. The newly created North Atlantic Treaty Organization would mobilize the armed forces necessary to deter any Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Marshall Plan, funded by Congress, would provide an infusion of capital to rebuild Germany, France, and Italy as democratic countries allied with the United States. And the CIA would escalate secret operations against the Soviet Union and its allies to “roll back” the Communists from the countries where they had taken power.
The meeting of the minds in London in September 1949 settled on the requisite Anglo-American division of labor. The CIA needed expertise in running covert operations, an improved central file registry, and a more robust communications system—all of which the British had in place. SIS needed money and manpower—of which the Americans had a surplus. Kim Philby, all agreed, was just the man to make the new arrangements work in Washington.
After the meetings were over, Philby sailed to the United States, while Angleton flew on to Paris, then Rome and Athens, visiting CIA stations in each city. He visited his parents and wrote occasionally to Cicely, who remained in Tucson with five-year-old Jamie, one-year-old Helen, and the newborn Lucy. His wife wa
s bored and envious of his travels.
Angleton was cavorting around Europe and Greece, and Cicely was complaining to a friend. “Really! The hush hush men deserve little pity and this isn’t even considered a vacation.”
By contrast, Cicely said, she was spending her time talking about babies. “They are wonderful,” she wrote, “but as a topic of conversation can make a woman duller than canned orange juice.”155
* * *
ANGLETON AND PHILBY RESUMED their friendship in December 1949, when they were reunited in Washington. Their bond, born in the classroom at Bletchley Park, nurtured in wartime London, and enhanced by professional collaboration, still had room to grow. Philby was working out of an office in the British embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Angleton became his chief point of contact at the CIA.156 They were the closest of friends, soul mates in espionage.
Angleton introduced Philby to the power rituals of Harvey’s Seafood Grill on Connecticut Avenue. Located three blocks north of the White House, Harvey’s was one of the places to be seen in the capital city. Harvey’s claimed to have served every president since Ulysses S. Grant, a modest culinary distinction perhaps, but one that was irresistible to men with an appetite for power. Angleton didn’t need to point out to his British friend the presence of J. Edgar Hoover, the sturdy and ominous director of the FBI, who often lunched with his cronies across the room.157
Philby embraced Angleton’s tastes. He was a mentor to his American friend and a newcomer to his country. He sought Angleton’s confidence.
“We formed the habit of lunching once a week at Harvey’s where he demonstrated regularly that overwork was not his only vice,” Philby would recall in a memoir. “He was one of the thinnest men I have ever met, and one of the biggest eaters. Lucky Jim! After years of keeping up with Angleton, I took the advice of an elderly lady, went on a diet and dropped from thirteen stone to about eleven in three months.”158
For all their mutual affection, the two men vied for advantage as they talked espionage over lobsters.
“No matter how closely two intelligence services may cooperate, there are always things which are withheld,” observed Jim McCargar, an OPC desk officer who worked with Angleton and Philby. “And there is, in the simple nature of things, a constant jockeying for advantage … it arouses no ill will, but it is, to the contrary, an accepted terrain for judging a man’s professional abilities.”159
Philby, the older man, was adept at these spy games. “The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he [Angleton] would suspect covert action,” he explained. “Who gained the most from this complex game I cannot say. 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.”160
* * *
THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN ANGLETON and Philby was enhanced by mutual appreciation of the previously distant pleasures of marriage and family. Now settling in Washington, Philby and Angleton joined in conventional domesticity with their wives, the path of least resistance, and pleasing in its own ways.
Cicely had come from Tucson with the children. The Angletons bought a four-bedroom house on 33rd Road in north Arlington, on the Virginia side of the Potomac.161 The Philbys settled into a modest rambler on Nebraska Avenue in Northwest Washington. Both wives began entertaining their husbands’ friends and colleagues.
At the same time, both men maintained a life apart, working long hours and pursuing private interests. Angleton built a heated greenhouse to grow orchids. He installed a rock tumbler for polishing stones in his basement, where he made jewelry at night.162 In his basement, Philby stored camera equipment, which he used for his own nocturnal pastimes.163
For all their chummy bonhomie, Angleton and Philby shared a certain ruthlessness, no doubt implanted by the example of their headstrong, successful fathers. The profession of secret intelligence demanded calculation, autonomy, cleverness, and mastery, qualities that they could not have failed to appreciate in each other. Angleton had seen his father trade dull success in Dayton for daring opportunity in Milan. Philby’s father, St. John, had broken with British establishment to become a Muslim and political adviser to King Ibn Saud. He even helped broker the U.S. acquisition of the Saudi oil concession, infuriating his countrymen.
Philby’s affable demeanor masked a hard streak that his more discerning associates glimpsed.
“He wore suede shoes, cravats and crumpled suits when the rest of the senior staff subscribed to a strict dress code,” said McCargar. “… His smile, suggestive of complicity in a private joke, conveyed an unspoken understanding of the underlying ironies of our work.… Behind the modest, slightly crumpled exterior there was no mistaking a quick mind and a tenacious will.”164
Philby was a formidable man. Robert McKenzie, the chief of security at the British embassy, had worked with St. John Philby and saw the influence on his son. “Philby had inherited from his father that same sense of dedicated idealism in which the means did not matter as long as the end was worthwhile,” he said. “… This sense of dedication and purpose to whatever he was doing gleamed through and inspired men to follow. He was the sort of man who won worshippers. You didn’t just like him, admire him, agree with him; you worshipped him.”165
Angleton did not worship Philby—self-abasing emotion was not his style—but he did display a veneration bordering on the romantic for the older man. He, too, thought himself bold and ruthless. As he had told Eugen Dollmann, “We are masters of the world.”
The friendship of these two masters extended into evenings and weekends when Jim and Cicely attended parties at Philby’s sparsely furnished home on Nebraska Avenue. The entertainment usually consisted of a pitcher of martinis, a bottle or two of whiskey, some ice, and some glasses.166 The ever-considerate Philby poured the first round and then the guests were on their own.
The thirsty attendees included many people who passed through Philby’s office during the day. There were CIA men like McCargar and his wife. There were embassy colleagues, including Wilfred Mann, a nuclear scientist, and his wife, Miriam, who were close to the Angletons. There were experienced cops like Robert McKenzie, and sometimes savvy FBI men like Mickey Ladd and Bob Lamphere and their wives. Later that summer, Philby’s new houseguest, an openly homosexual man named Guy Burgess, joined the party.167 The consumption of liquor, observed McCargar, was “gargantuan.”168
“HOMO CIRCLES”
THE SPRING OF 1950 was a sour season in Washington. Fears of war overseas bred fears of infiltration at home. In February, the previously obscure junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, charged in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that that there were two hundred Communists on the State Department payroll, an astonishing number if true. The charge made headlines, so McCarthy took his case to the floor of the U.S. Senate. In the course of a six-hour speech, he presented a case-by-case analysis of eighty-one people whom he described as “loyalty risks,” without naming any of them. Over shouted objections, McCarthy led his Senate colleagues through each case. In most, he accused the unnamed officials of “palling around with Communists,” joining Communist-front organizations, reading Soviet propaganda, or acting as Soviet agents. A few were homosexuals, McCarthy said. One “flagrantly homosexual” translator had been dismissed as a “bad security risk,” he noted, but the man was later reinstated by a “high State Department official.”169
As McCarthy and others on Capitol Hill began to weave together the threats of communism and homosexuality in 1950, Washington was engulfed with two popular passions: a wave of anti-Communist fervor that liberal historians would call “the Red Scare” and a widespread revulsion against homosexuals that gay historians would dub the “Lavender Scare.” Both Communists and gays, it was said, should be purged from the federal government’s workforce.170
The Lavender Scare was felt as an extraordinary political development. Homosexuality was all but unspeakable in American culture. Some newspapers would not even mention the word. Others
, like the Washington Times-Herald, one of the capital’s leading dailies, relied on abusive language. Gays and lesbians were “queers,” “pansies,” and “cookie-pushers.” In any case, to even speak of such people was unheard of and scandalous.
And then there were the facts of the matter. While the florid-faced McCarthy was often reckless, his charges were not entirely imagined.171 There were a lot of gays and lesbians in Washington. The federal government had quadrupled in size between 1930 and 1950.172 More than a few of these governmental jobs were filled by gay people migrating into Washington, looking to escape the strictures of conventional families and small-town life.173
When Senator Millard Tydings, a liberal from Maryland, attacked McCarthy for the lack of specificity in his charges, the Wisconsin Republican responded with a true story, which Tydings could not refute. One known homosexual had been dismissed from the State Department, McCarthy said, only to be immediately rehired by the CIA.
“This man who was a homosexual … spent his time hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park,” he declared.174
Angleton knew the man McCarthy was talking about. His name was Carmel Offie. He worked for the CIA, and Angleton could not stand him.
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