Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Copyright © 2018 by David C. Martin

  Originally published in 1980 by Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Rain Saukas

  Cover photo credit iStock

  ISBN: 978-1-5107-2218-7

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2219-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  For E. D., Cate, and Zach

  Contents

  Preface

  Foreword

  1 Loss of Innocence

  2 The Poet and the Cop

  3 Philby Undone

  4 Fair Play Reconsidered

  5 A Surfeit of Spies

  6 Murder Corrupts

  7 No Innocent Explanation

  8 Ides of March

  9 The Great Mole Hunt

  10 Burnt-out Case

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Index

  In tragic life, God wot,

  No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:

  We are betrayed by what is false within.

  —GEORGE MEREDITH

  Preface to the 2018 Edition

  More than thirty-five years have passed since I wrote Wilderness of Mirrors. The two main protagonists, James Angleton and William Harvey, are dead, and so is my most important source, Clare Edward Petty.

  By the time I met Ed, I had been working on Wilderness for about a year, collecting pieces of the puzzle without being able to see the big picture. I went to his home in Annapolis more out of thoroughness than with any expectation of a revelation. If he had lived farther away from Washington, I probably would have decided that my budget couldn’t handle the expense. About halfway through our second session, Ed’s hints finally registered. “Wait a minute, are you saying …?” Indeed he was, but to understand it we had to go back to the beginning. Over the succeeding months, we would meet about once a week as he recounted, with almost total recall, the saga of the hunt for a KGB mole inside the CIA. I never saw him refer to any documents or notes, but I don’t know of a single fact he told me that turned out to be wrong.

  The last time I spoke to Ed, he was weeping. His grandson, Army Captain Christopher Paul Petty, had just been killed in Iraq. Ed, who had landed in one of the follow-on waves at Normandy and fought across France into Germany, passed away not long after. They are both buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  In the foreword to the original edition, I wrote that the secret war between the CIA and KGB was devious and the outcome ambiguous. Since then, of course, the outcome of the Cold War has been decided, and it is only fair to point out that Angleton, Harvey, and all the other CIA officers who come in for criticism in this book were on the winning side. Whether that justifies what they did is for the reader to decide.

  —David C. Martin

  Foreword

  This book begins and ends in mystery, with precious few solutions in between. Such is the history of the secret war between the American and Soviet espionage services—the only arena in which the two superpowers actively and continuously confront each other regardless of chills and thaws in the Cold War. The battle is devious and the outcome ambiguous. Complexity and perplexity abound. The record is abstruse and, above all, obscure. Although the exposés and investigations of the 1970s have made it possible to examine the CIA’s files with a fair degree of thoroughness and precision, the vaults of the KGB remain as tightly sealed as ever. Until they are opened we shall never know with certainty how the war is going. We can, however, study the dispatches sent from behind the American lines, and from there the message is that the war has been going badly. The CIA’s defeats have been resounding and its victories Pyrrhic. What the KGB has not done, the CIA has managed to do to itself.

  That distressing report is personified in James Jesus Angleton and William King Harvey, the two men whose careers are chronicled here. To many they were heroes, two of the fiercest warriors in the CIA’s war against the KGB. To others they were villains guilty of illegal and immoral actions. For the moment it is safe to say only that their secret deeds do not always become them when spread upon the public record. They fought in the trenches of concealment and deception, across the lines of falsehood and betrayal, and what passed for virtue there sometimes appears grotesque in the clear light of day. It is the same in any war. What is heroic in combat is criminal in peace. Just as combat sanctions physical violence, so espionage grants license to moral violence.

  For decades Angleton and Harvey maneuvered about this darkling plain without any expectation that they would ever be held publicly accountable for their actions. If they did not fear public censure, neither did they receive public counsel. Now, like monsters of the deep, they are suddenly hauled to the surface and thrown flopping on the deck for inspection. Before we decide whether they are aberrations or prototypes, we must first know the pressures of the depths where they swam.

  I first encountered the remarkable person of James Angleton on the night of December 22, 1974. The New York Times had just published a major exposé identifying Angleton—somewhat unfairly, it turned out—as the mastermind of a massive and illegal spy campaign against antiwar and civil rights activists. I was working the night desk at The Associated Press in Washington, and in true wire-service fashion I called Angleton for what I was sure would be the obligatory “No comment.” We talked for more than an hour, and since that night I have had scores of conversations with him, perhaps more than a hundred, both on the phone and in person. I was not the only reporter who talked regularly with Angleton, but I think I stuck with it longer than most, even though he rarely “leaked” any information that could serve as the peg upon which to hang a news story. Despite the paucity of news, talking to Angleton was a marvelous education in the ways of the CIA. Over time, he explained to me its organization, its personnel, its modus operandi, and its internal rivalries. It was from Angleton, for instance, that I first heard some of the more colorful stories about Bill Harvey.

  Harvey always hung up on me when I called, although I did manage a brief conversation with his wife some months after he died. Angleton encouraged my first thoughts of writing a book about Harvey and advised me that the best hope for persuading Mrs. Harvey to cooperate was to point out that it was because her late husband had been such a forceful figure that he was now the subject of controversy. Had he been a file clerk all his life, his actions would not be of interest to me, I argued at Angleton’s suggestion. Mrs. Harvey still refused her cooperation. The argument is worth mentioning here only to recite to Angleton as an equally good reason for writing a book about him. He, too, has refused to cooperate in any way.

  Angleton and I have not spoken since the spring of 1978, when he first learned that I had come across information that was intensely critical of his professional performance. Since then he has refused to respond t
o my inquiries. The result is that although Angleton has served as a source of information about Harvey in particular and the CIA in general, he has not provided any information about the events in this book that most directly concern him. That was his choice, not mine.

  A word about my other sources. In order of importance they were: retired intelligence officers; documents released under the Freedom of Information Act; and the public record. In almost every instance the information provided by these sources was fragmentary and had to be pieced together. Intelligence officers usually know only a portion of the story, since operations are so tightly held within the CIA. The problem is further complicated by the fact that men bound by a secrecy oath tend to display a very selective memory when talking to a reporter. Classified documents released by the government invariably have key words or entire passages deleted for security reasons. Nevertheless, the Freedom of Information Act remains a useful discovery tool if for no other reason than the effect that even the partial release of official documents has on otherwise recalcitrant witnesses. The public record is, naturally, the most fragmentary of all, and in many cases is just plain wrong. The amount of misinformation that has appeared in print and then been elevated to history through constant repetition is appalling.

  Since most of the people I interviewed insisted upon anonymity, it is hard to say much about them without giving their identities away. One thing can be said in general, and that is that these men (and one woman) were not critics of the CIA. They were staunch supporters. Almost without exception they spent their entire adult lives working for the CIA. They had some very specific complaints about the way certain operations were run, but they remained loyal to the institution and were saddened by the hard times upon which it has fallen. They raged against former officers who revealed secrets in violation of their oath, yet in the next breath they disclosed facts that until that moment were known only to a handful of men. Not wishing to discourage them, I never bothered to point out the inconsistency in that, although they must have realized it. Sometimes, I think, they did not appreciate that what they were saying would merge with what others had told me into an account that was much more revealing than any single person had intended. Other times, they simply fell victim to the need to justify their actions. It is trite but true to say that they did what they did for the good of their country. Unfortunately, it is also true that it frequently didn’t work out that way.

  WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

  Loss of Innocence

  1

  A maid found his body at approximately nine-thirty Monday morning, February 10, 1941. He was lying on the bed, face up, dressed in dark-blue trousers, a green sweater, and socks but no shoes. Next to him was a .38-caliber automatic revolver caked with the gore from a massive head wound inflicted by a single soft-nosed bullet that had entered at the right temple and blown a hole the size of a man’s fist behind the left ear.

  He had checked into the Hotel Bellevue near Washington’s Union Station the night before, registering under the name of Walter Poref and paying $2.50 for the room in advance. His wallet, which contained $50.09, carried papers identifying him as Samuel Ginsberg, a forty-one-year-old native of Russia.

  There were no signs of a struggle. The door had been locked from the inside. After knocking several times, the maid had used her passkey to open it. There was no fire escape, not even a ledge, by which anyone could have entered or left the room through the fifth-floor window. Police found three notes. To his wife, Tonia, he wrote in Russian: “This is very difficult, and I want very badly to live, but it is impossible. I love you, my only one. It is difficult for me to write, but think about me and then you will understand that I must go.” To a friend, Suzanne LaFollette, he wrote in German: “I am dying with the hope that you will help Tonia and my poor boy.” And to his attorney, Louis Waldman, he wrote in English: “My wife and boy will need your help. Please do for them what you can.”

  By noon the coroner had drawn up the suicide certificate, but when police notified Louis Waldman of his client’s death, the attorney screamed murder. Samuel Ginsberg, Waldman said, was in reality General Walter Krivitsky, the former chief of Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe, who had defected to the United States in 1938. More than once, Waldman insisted, Krivitsky had told him, “If ever I am found dead and it looks like an accident or a suicide, don’t believe it. They are after me. They have tried before.”

  Two years before his death, Krivitsky had informed the State Department that he had been accosted near Times Square in New York by an alleged Soviet operative named Sergei Bassoff. “The General then asked Mr. Bassoff if he intended to shoot him, and Bassoff replied in the negative,” a department memo recounted. Bassoff contented himself with the ambiguous statement that “we have read all that you have written and we suppose you are writing more.” Krivitsky did write more, including a series of articles in The Saturday Evening Post, that among other things, accurately predicted the 1939 alliance between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. He also wrote his memoirs, and shortly after their publication, Krivitsky again contacted the State Department, saying “he was afraid an attempt would be made on his life inasmuch as he … thought he had observed a couple of Soviet agents watching his residence.”

  It was hard to tell how many of these threats were real and how many were Krivitsky’s imagination. As a former friend, Paul Wohl, said, “Krivitsky was afraid and accused most everyone of being an [Soviet] agent or spy.” Yet Krivitsky had good reason to be afraid. A friend and fellow defector named Ignatz Reiss had been found by the side of a road near Lausanne, Switzerland, with twelve bullets in his body. Even the skeptical Wohl, who had had a falling out with Krivitsky over money, did not discount the peril. One month before Krivitsky’s death, Wohl had written to their mutual acquaintance, Suzanne LaFollette: “Will you please inform your honorable friend K. that an ominous person is in New York: Hans…. His [Krivitsky’s] devious practices hardly justify this warning. I hesitated to send it. It may be better to let the rats devour each other.” Wohl later told the FBI that he had seen the ominous Hans standing at a bus stop on Fifth Avenue. He had first encountered Hans about five years before at The Hague, where Krivitsky ran his intelligence operations in the guise of an Austrian rare-book dealer. According to Wohl, Hans seemed to serve as chauffeur and handyman for Krivitsky. He also told the FBI that “Hans was the most expert locksmith he had ever come across.”

  In his memoirs Krivitsky described Hans as “my most trusted aide in many unusual assignments.” He had even told Hans of his intention to defect and had urged him to come along. But Hans had remained loyal to Stalin, and after failing to dissuade Krivitsky, had set out to kill him. The last time Krivitsky had seen Hans was on a railroad station platform in Marseilles shortly after he had asked the French authorities for asylum. “I judge that the plan was to abduct me from the train and take me to a safe place in Marseilles … where I could either be kept until the arrival of a Soviet boat or disposed of more simply,” Krivitsky wrote. But Hans had fled when Krivitsky’s French bodyguard pulled a gun. Krivitsky was certain that Hans had been sent to the United States to try again.

  Washington’s chief of detectives insisted that all of the physical evidence found at the death scene and all subsequent developments “clearly and conclusively show the man took his own life.” Krivitsky had spent the weekend before his death on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia, owned by a former German Army officer named Eitel Wolf Dobert. Dobert led police to a local store where both the manager and the clerk positively identified a photograph of Krivitsky as the same “Walter Poref” who had purchased the .38 automatic and the soft-nosed ammunition found at the Hotel Bellevue. “I am more positive than ever that this was a case of suicide,” said another police official. “There is no doubt in my mind that Krivitsky planned to end his life while he was in the Dobert home.” The most that police were willing to acknowledge was the possibility that Krivitsky had been hounded to his death by threa
ts from Soviet intelligence.

  But Krivitsky had not bought a silencer for his .38, and it was difficult to understand how, in a hotel where guests regularly complained about the paper-thin walls, a shot could be fired in the still of the night and not be heard, especially when the rooms on either side were occupied. The police had not bothered to dust the gun for fingerprints or to check the door latch for signs of tampering by an “expert locksmith” such as Hans.

  The FBI refused, officially at least, to investigate the case. “We are not in this case and are not going to be baited into it by newspaper promotion tactics,” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover scribbled at the bottom of a memo. Nevertheless, the chief of the Washington Field Office was informed that “the Bureau wants a very discreet check into the matter of Krivitsky’s death…. This matter must be handled very discreetly so as to preclude the possibility of the Bureau’s getting publicity in connection therewith…. The Bureau is denying to the press that an investigation is being conducted.” The FBI turned up nothing, discreetly or otherwise.

  Not until six years later would an alert State Department researcher poring over the captured files of the German Foreign Ministry come across a coded telegram dated September 21, 1939, from Berlin to the German ambassador in Washington. It referred to a man called Stein, who “is to be appointed and paid 500 dollars on the Washington account.” The telegram went on to explain that “the Editor-in-Chief of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung has taken over Stein for his stay in the United States and is paying him a salary…. Stein is to be rendered assistance if necessary.” That seemingly innocuous message was given sinister import by a note attached to a second telegram, sent on the following day. “According to a communication from the Abwehr Division of the Wehrmacht High Command, Stein has only been commissioned to follow Krivitsky’s traces.”