Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Because of the laborious nature of the task, years would elapse between the actual transmission of a Soviet message and its decoding by the Armed Forces Security Agency. The first big break did not come until 1949, when the cryptanalysts found a duplicate additive in the New York–to–Moscow channel and were able to decipher enough of a Soviet message to identify it as the text of a 1945 telegram from Churchill to Truman. Checking the message against a complete copy of the telegram provided by the British Embassy, the cryptanalysts confirmed beyond doubt that a Soviet spy had somehow been able to obtain the verbatim text—cable number and all—of a private communication between two heads of state.

  The implications were appalling, but the security officer’s nightmare was the cryptanalyst’s dream. The Armed Forces Security Agency requested copies of all transmissions handled by the British Embassy and began matching them against the encoded messages in the New York–to–Moscow channel, working backward through the code book and arriving at the additive. Besides determining which messages had fallen into Soviet hands, the cryptanalysts were coming up with solutions to new additives that could be checked against messages intercepted in other parts of the world. The results remained fragmentary, but by the fall of 1949 enough shards had been pieced together to demonstrate with disconcerting clarity that during the war years there had been a massive hemorrhaging of secrets from both the British Embassy in Washington and the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  One of the first Soviet spies to be undone by the code break was the German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs. A reference in one of the deciphered messages indicated that a Soviet agent had a sister at an American university. When matched against the backgrounds of the scientists working on the atomic bomb, that otherwise unremarkable detail aroused the first vague suspicions against Fuchs, whose sister, Kristel, had briefly attended Swarthmore College. According to an FBI memo, Fuchs became the “prime suspect … when we were able to obtain a document at the Atomic Energy Commission which had been written by him.” That same document had shown up in the New York–to–Moscow link. On February 1, 1950, Hoover informed the White House that “we [have] just gotten word from England that we have gotten a full confession from one of the top scientists, who worked over here, that he gave the complete know-how of the atom bomb to the Russians.” In a subsequent letter, Hoover reported that “Fuchs said he would estimate that the information furnished by him speeded up by several years the production of an atom bomb by Russia.”

  Once the code break had identified Fuchs as the prime suspect, a number of other incriminating traces leaped from the files. Among those arrested as a result of the Gouzenko defection in Ottawa in 1945 had been a suspected Communist agent named Israel Halperin, who, according to an FBI memo, “had in his possession an address book in which appeared, among others, the name Klaus Fuchs.” Another memo stated that the Bureau had received a translation of a captured German document written in 1941 that listed Fuchs as “apparently a Communist worthy of consideration for apprehension by the German army.” Why had that captured document taken so long to surface? Hoover demanded to know. An inquiry revealed that the document had been in the possession of “Supervisor W. K. Harvey up to the time of his resignation in the late summer of 1947. This material became delinquent in that it was not being handled on a current basis due to the shortage of personnel. After the resignation of Mr. Harvey, this material was reassigned, the delinquent handling of the material was corrected, and in early 1948, it was handled on a current basis.”

  Harvey was fortunate to be beyond Hoover’s reach in 1950, for he had been the unwitting custodian of one other piece of the Fuchs puzzle. In his confession Fuchs said his American contact had been a chemist named “Raymond.” Asked to pick out “Raymond” from a series of mug shots, Fuchs pointed to a picture of Harry Gold, a naturalized American citizen of Russian parentage. As an FBI memo noted, “Gold first came to the attention of this Bureau in connection with the activities of Abraham Brothman, concerning whom Elizabeth T. Bentley furnished information.”

  Gold at first proclaimed his innocence, insisting that he had never been west of the Mississippi, much less to Los Alamos, where Fuchs had worked on the atomic bomb. But when FBI agents searched his home in Philadelphia and found a Chamber of Commerce brochure for Santa Fe, Gold cracked and gave a complete confession that led ultimately to the arrest, conviction, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

  The trial of the Rosenbergs would become one of the most disputed court cases of the century, in part because the government, hoping to protect its most secret source, never introduced one of the most damaging pieces of evidence against them: the decoded traffic from the New York–to–Moscow channel. The Rosenbergs were identified in the traffic only by cryptonyms, but the picture that emerged of a husband-and-wife team of agents matched them precisely, even down to the fact that the woman’s brother was a part of the plot. At the trial Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, who had worked on the bomb at Los Alamos, was the chief prosecution witness, having admitted his role in return for leniency.

  If made public, the evidence contained in the intercepts would have stilled much of the controversy surrounding not only the Rosenberg trial but several other espionage cases as well. Sometimes the evidence fell short of convincing. In the case of Hiss, a message intercepted in the Washington-to-Moscow channel revealed that a Soviet agent had actually been aboard Ambassador Averell Harriman’s plane as it returned to Moscow following the 1945 conference at Yalta. Hiss had been aboard that plane, but so had others, including, of course, Harriman. Other times, however, the evidence was convincing beyond doubt, as when Moscow changed its agents’ cryptonyms by transmitting a message listing both their true identities and their new cryptonyms.

  “Crypt ops,” as they were called, were the most reliable sensory organs in the espionage body. A code break eliminated the problem of relying on agents of questionable reliability and uncertain loyalty. An agent might deliberately be passing on false and misleading information, but a message transmitted in a supposedly unbreakable cipher was unquestionably the real thing. A code break shattered all the mirrors and permitted a straight line of sight across the wilderness. The breaking of the Soviet cipher could have tipped the scales of the secret war in favor of the West as surely as had the cracking of the German Enigma code in World War II. In 1948, however, the Soviets suddenly modified their cipher system in a way that made it once again unbreakable. Two years later, investigators discovered that the Soviets had been alerted to the code break by William Weisband, a disloyal employee of the Armed Forces Security Agency. The man who betrayed America’s ultrasecret was never prosecuted for his crime, since a public trial would have required revelation of the code break. Instead, Weisband spent one year in jail for failing to answer a summons to appear before a grand jury. Despite Weisband’s leak to the Soviets, the code break would remain a closely guarded secret for more than thirty years while cryptanalysts continued to cross-check the backlog of intercepted messages, eventually reconstructing most of the old Russian code book. Whatever marginal value the continued secrecy of the project might have had seemed more than outweighed by the public suspicion and distrust of the government’s actions in the Hiss and Rosenberg cases.

  Astoundingly, the British officer assigned to work with the FBI in tracking down the Soviet spies whose cryptonyms appeared in the traffic was Kim Philby. In 1949 Philby was sent to Washington as the MI6 representative “for the specific purpose of liaising with the Bureau on the cases arising from these intercepts,” a CIA officer said. Philby’s assignment was a logical one, since he had once been in charge of British counterintelligence operations against the Soviet Union. In retrospect it seemed possible that Philby’s Soviet handlers had instructed him to engineer his assignment to Washington after they learned about the code break from Weisband. Whether by accident or by design, Russian intelligence was able to monitor the FBI’s efforts to unravel the Soviet spy nets.

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nbsp; Philby was in “as perfect a spot for the Soviets as they could possibly get a man,” said Robert Lamphere of the Bureau’s Security Division. The damage Philby could do was limited only by the risks he and his Soviet controllers were willing to run. With Philby in Washington at the plexus of free-world intelligence, the Soviets frequently suffered the exquisite agony of knowing too much, of not being able to act on his information for fear they would compromise their best source. An FBI memo pointed out that “Philby … was aware of the results of the Anglo–United States investigation leading to the identification of Klaus Fuchs,” yet the Soviets had not warned Fuchs of his peril. Philby “also knew of the interrogation of Fuchs as well as the full cooperation given by him … yet no action was taken by the Soviets to save any American members of the espionage ring which ultimately was uncovered as a result of the Fuchs revelations.” According to another memo, “Philby and his Russian spy chiefs in Moscow even knew that the FBI planned to arrest the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell, yet they chose to sacrifice them, most probably to keep Philby’s identity a secret.” The Soviet source inside the British Embassy who had obtained the text of the Churchill-to-Truman telegram was a different case. For reasons known only to Moscow, he was worth saving, even at the risk of exposing Philby.

  The FBI’s search for the source had dragged on for the better part of two years with no break in sight. “We had received some dozen reports referring to the source, who appeared in the documents as HOMER, but little progress had been made in identifying him,” Philby later wrote in his memoirs. “The FBI was still sending us reams about the Embassy charladies and the inquiry into our menial personnel was spinning itself out endlessly.” Philby knew who HOMER was and could gauge exactly how close the investigators were coming. As long as they concentrated on workers who might have filched a copy of the Churchill telegram from the burn bag, HOMER was safe. Sooner or later, however, the focus would shift to the diplomats who had actually handled the telegram, and the real HOMER would inevitably fall under suspicion. All the while, cryptanalysts continued to pore over the intercepts, searching for some clue that might give HOMER’s identity away. Philby received drop copies of the messages as they were decoded by the Armed Forces Security Agency, and it must have been chilling to know that it was only a matter of time before his own Soviet cryptonym would also appear in the decoded material. Once that happened, how long would it be until some reference in the traffic gave his own identity away?

  Philby’s ability to monitor the investigation for the Russians was due to end in the autumn of 1951, when his two-year tour in Washington would be over. Having decided that the situation must be resolved before then, he put the investigation on the right track by reminding London of Krivitsky’s warning about “the young Scotsman who had been imbued with Communism in the early 30s and who subsequently was induced to enter the service of the British diplomacy.” As Philby told it, “I suggested that these data, such as they were, should be matched against the records of diplomats stationed in Washington between the relevant dates in 1944–45 of the known leakages.” That was a very close calculation on Philby’s part, since there was, in his words, “the nasty little sentence in Krivitsky’s evidence that the Soviet secret service had sent a young English journalist to Spain during the Civil War.” Philby figured that the lead was too vague to pose a threat to him. “There were no further identifying particulars, and many young men from Fleet Street had gone to Spain.” Besides, the fact that he had pointed the investigation in the right direction with his reminder about the “young Scotsman” would discourage any suspicions occasioned by the flimsy coincidence between Krivitsky’s “nasty little sentence” and Philby’s past. Philby was right. Krivitsky’s evidence never weighed very heavily against him. As it turned out, he did far greater damage to himself with a dinner party he gave in the spring of 1951.

  Libby Harvey, as was increasingly her habit, had had too much to drink. “This is god-awful,” she proclaimed in a loud voice, jabbing at the roast beef on her plate. Her dinner partner, Robert Lamphere of the FBI, tried without success to shush her. She was right about the roast beef, though. It was cold. Philby had let the cocktail hour go too long, and that had done neither the roast beef nor Libby any good.

  Libby was poised at the top of a long slide into alcoholism. Her sister back in Kentucky blamed it on the “highfalutin’ society in Washington.” One of Harvey’s CIA colleagues said the same thing from a different perspective. “Libby was an awfully nice girl who came from humble origins. He started to move up in the world. He moved too fast for Libby. She couldn’t keep up.” That statement had an unintended double entendre, for Harvey had acquired a considerable reputation as a skirt-chaser. As far as Libby was concerned, it was a deserved reputation. He was “out about three nights a week and sometimes it would be five o’clock in the morning when he’d get in and sometimes it would be seven o’clock,” she said later during the divorce proceedings. “He was always supposed to be at work,” she added with unmistakable sarcasm. Libby probably had her own ideas about where her husband was that night in the summer of 1947 when he did not return home from the FBI stag party. Perhaps her call to the Bureau to report him missing was made more out of anger than concern for his well-being. If she wanted to pay him back for his infidelity, she certainly succeeded.

  One of Libby’s friends in Kentucky claimed that Harvey plied his wife with liquor in order to keep her submissive while he went about his extramarital activities. “He fed it to her,” Libby’s friend said with undisguised venom. Another friend said that Libby drank only to keep pace with her husband, who had his own drinking problem. According to Philby, “The first time [Harvey] dined at my house … he fell asleep over the coffee and sat snoring gently until midnight when his wife took him away, saying, ‘Come now, Daddy, it’s time you were in bed.’ ” The second time the Harveys dined at Philby’s it would have been a merciful blessing had Libby fallen asleep over her roast beef.

  It was the largest party Philby had given since coming to Washington as MI6 liaison officer. All of the CIA and FBI officers he knew and dealt with on a regular basis—Harvey, Angleton, Lamphere, and others—were there with their wives. Philby was a good man to get to know. Any British officer awarded the plum of the Washington liaison job was clearly on the way up. Some people were already beginning to think of him as one day becoming the head of MI6.

  Dinner over, Philby and his guests adjourned to the living room for more drinking. Sensing that the evening was getting out of hand, Lamphere said his good-byes as soon as decency permitted, departing before the arrival of Philby’s houseguest, the outrageous Guy Burgess.

  According to a memo later written by Angleton, Burgess was “a close and old friend of Philby. He was his classmate at Cambridge and they continued to maintain a close relationship up to the present. For example, during the period that Philby was the chief [MI6] representative in Istanbul, he was visited by [Burgess] who stayed at his home.” To hear Philby tell it, Burgess had helped him get his start with MI6. Burgess, a flagrant drunkard and an unabashed homosexual, was the epitome of indiscretion and had not lasted long at MI6. He had drifted off to a job with the BBC before catching on in the Foreign Office as the confidential secretary to the minister of state. In 1950 Burgess had been assigned to the British Embassy in Washington as a second secretary, and Philby had taken him into his house. Now after barely a year in Washington, Burgess was on the verge of being recalled to London for abusing his diplomatic privileges. He had been stopped for speeding three times in one afternoon, each time berating the police for interfering with his diplomatic immunity. He had been so offensive that the governor of Virginia had reported the incident to the Department of State.

  Outrageous though he was, Burgess was too irrepressible and too witty to be ignored. He had a reputation as a caricaturist and was fond of telling how he had drawn a sketch of a wartime meeting of the British Admiralty that had to be classified top secret. The besotted Libby fulfilled L
amphere’s premonition of disaster by begging Burgess to sketch her. He obliged with an obscene cartoon of Libby, legs spread, dress hiked above her waist, and crotch bared. Harvey swung at Burgess and missed. The party was about to degenerate into a drunken brawl. Angleton quickly steered Harvey to the door and walked him around the block to cool off while Libby regained her composure. Burgess continued on as though nothing had happened. The evening ended without further violence, and the guests staggered off into the night. The entire incident might have been blessedly forgotten had it not crossed paths with the search for source HOMER.

  The review of the Krivitsky file that had been prompted by Philby’s reminder turned up a small circle of a half-dozen diplomats who vaguely conformed to the description of a young Scotsman imbued with Communism in the early 1930s. One of them was Donald Maclean, another graduate of Cambridge, who had served in Washington from 1944 to 1948. Maclean was the son of a prominent British family from the island of Tiree off the Scottish coast. At Cambridge he had been an avowed Communist who told his mother that he was going to Russia to join the Revolution and who published articles predicting that the “whole crack-brained criminal mess” of capitalism was “doomed to disappear.” After graduation he had not gone to Russia, although his good friend Guy Burgess had. Maclean had abruptly abandoned his revolutionary fervor and joined the Foreign Office, where he became at once the model bureaucrat. By 1944 he had risen to the post of second secretary in Washington, where, among other things, he was in charge of the embassy code room, and in particular of the ambassador’s private cipher in which Churchill’s cables to Truman had been sent.