Wilderness of Mirrors

by David C. Martin

  Special sources aside, the fact remained that Harvey, not Angleton, had made the case against Philby, a fact that only increased the rivalry between the two men. When Harvey saw Angleton’s four-page memo describing the relationship between Philby and Burgess, he wrote at the bottom: “What is the rest of this story?” According to one senior officer, the feud between them became so intense that Harvey at one point accused Angleton himself of being a Soviet agent. A lie-detector test supported Angleton’s innocence, but his ego remained in shock. “He could not take credit for suggesting Philby was a penetration no matter how much he wanted to believe it,” one officer said. “Harvey could take credit, and I think Angleton held a grudge against Harvey because of it.”

  Whatever his personal feelings, Angleton would spend the rest of his professional life in counterintelligence as if he were trying to atone for his failure to detect Philby. In many respects, that would be the single most lasting effect of the Philby affair on American intelligence.

  Fair Play Reconsidered

  4

  Like all counterintelligence cases, the Philby affair was a maze of contradictions that invited alternative solutions. An FBI memo raised some of the more troubling questions about the case: “If Philby did use Burgess as a courier, it was the most unprofessional way to alert Maclean that he was under investigation. In a normal Soviet espionage operation, Soviet agents have both means of regular access to their Soviet handlers as well as emergency methods of contact. In normal operations, it would have been sufficient for Philby to alert his Soviet handler who could have taken over and relayed the information to appropriate officials. By using Burgess, Philby unnecessarily compromised all three of these valuable agents. In addition, he knew that Burgess was a drunkard and a homosexual and would not be considered a reliable courier since he could well have revealed his operation while in a drunken stupor on his way back to England.”

  This otherwise inexplicable lapse in Soviet spycraft suggested that the Russians had deliberately blown Philby in order to protect an even more valuable penetration agent. The Soviets had once protected Philby by doing nothing to prevent the FBI from rolling up the Fuchs and Rosenberg networks. It was not inconceivable that they could have given Philby up in favor of some other source, particularly since they knew that the Armed Forces Security Agency had succeeded in breaking his cryptonym out of the cable traffic. It was even possible that Philby, despite his later claims and despite Harvey’s analysis, had not sent Burgess to warn Maclean. There were other British intelligence officers—some senior members of MI5 in particular—who were close to Burgess and knew that Maclean was under suspicion. Perhaps one of them was the third man. No one could say with any certainty what the real situation was— except that it was probably worse than anyone realized.

  In 1951 Soviet spies were so thick in Washington that in the case of Philby and Burgess they actually lived in the same house. Even though that network had been neutralized, there remained the possibility of other, as yet unknown, penetrations. For its part, the CIA had failed utterly in its own attempts to penetrate the Soviet Union. Peer de Silva, the former security officer for the Manhattan Engineering Project, who in 1951 became the chief of operations for the CIA’s Soviet Bloc Division, said that “a close review of our operational files led me to [conclude] that practically every one of our parachuted agents was under Soviet control and was reporting back to us under duress. The KGB was writing their messages and feeding back information they wanted us to have, which was either false, misleading or confusing. We therefore had almost no assets, in terms of agents, within the borders of the USSR or the Baltic states.”

  There was nothing for it but to press ahead, to hope that the worst was over and that time would heal the wounds left by Soviet penetration agents. But events soon reopened those wounds and spread the infection of panic throughout the government. Publicly, Senator Joseph McCarthy was in full cry. Secretly, new developments in the Burgess and Maclean affair demanded attention.

  In 1951 only a handful of men appreciated the full significance of the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Harvey’s allegation against Philby remained a tightly held secret, and although the disappearance of the two diplomats was a public sensation, only those officers privy to the code break and the search for source HOMER realized how long and how well Maclean had served the Soviet cause. The facts available to everyone else, both in and out of government, suggested only that Burgess and Maclean were a pair of dissolutes who had destroyed their careers by their indiscretions and hoped to make a new start in life on the other side. The few who knew the full story did nothing to discourage that naive perception, but in 1954 the facade was finally stripped away by the defection in Sydney, Australia, of a Russian intelligence officer named Vladimir Petrov. During his debriefing, Petrov said that his assistant, Filipp Kislitsyn, had formerly been in charge of a special section in Moscow that served as the depository for all of the material turned over by Burgess and Maclean. They were “long-term agents who had each been independently recruited to work for Soviet intelligence in their student days at Cambridge University,” Petrov quoted Kislitsyn as saying. “Their flight was planned and directed from Moscow, and Kislitsyn was present during the planning of the escape operation,” Petrov continued. “The reason for their flight was that they had discovered that they were under investigation by the British Security Service.”

  Petrov’s information added nothing to Harvey’s understanding of the Burgess and Maclean affair, but it came as a revelation to those intelligence officers and government officials who had not been told about the communications intercepts or the suspicions about Philby. The senior intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff sounded thunderstruck. “It would appear that very nearly all U.S./U.K. high-level planning information prior to 25 May 1951 [the date Burgess and Maclean fled] must be considered compromised,” he wrote. “Rather than attempt an estimate of how much damage has been done, it might be more profitable to quietly inquire into just who may be taking the place of these two men in the apparatus at this time. It is inconceivable that the pipeline dried up and operations stopped on 25 May 1951.”

  In July of 1954, just three months after Petrov’s defection, President Eisenhower directed Lieutenant General James Doolittle to “undertake a comprehensive study of the covert activities of the Central Intelligence Agency” and to “make any recommendations calculated to improve the conduct of these operations.” Two months later, Doolittle handed Eisenhower a sixty-nine-page top-secret report that confirmed what everybody now realized: the CIA was losing the secret war against the KGB. “Because the United States is relatively new at this game, and because we are opposed by a police-state enemy whose social discipline and whose security measures have been built up and maintained at a high level for many years, the usable information we are obtaining is still far short of our needs.” Doolittle recommended a number of specific remedies, including the exploration of “every possible scientific and technical avenue of approach to the intelligence problem,” and the “intensification of CIA’s counterintelligence efforts to prevent or detect and eliminate penetrations of CIA.” More fundamentally, he urged the CIA to become “more ruthless” than the KGB. “If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered,” Doolittle said. “We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.”

  The Doolittle report foreshadowed much of what the CIA, and Angleton and Harvey in particular, would undertake in the ensuing years. Within weeks of the report’s submission, the new CIA Director, Allen Dulles, placed Angleton in charge of an expanded Counterintelligence Division that would intensify to the point of fanaticism “efforts to prevent or detect and eliminate penetrations of CIA.” Harvey had already been named chief of the CIA’s base in Berlin and was hard at work on a “te
chnical avenue of approach to the intelligence problem” that would mark the CIA’s most daring foray in the secret war.

  For Harvey to go abroad while Angleton remained behind in counterintelligence seemed a curious reversal of roles. Harvey had spent virtually his entire career in Washington, both at the FBI and the CIA, working exclusively, and in the case of Philby, brilliantly, on counterintelligence. Angleton had performed with equal brilliance overseas in postwar Italy, but he had fallen down on the Philby case. The assignment of Harvey to Berlin and Angleton to counterintelligence, however, was neither reward nor punishment for the Philby affair. A bottom line had not yet been drawn on that case. There was enough suspicion to warrant Philby’s severance from the British service but not enough evidence to bring charges against him. CIA officers were instructed to avoid him, but in 1955, when he was publicly accused for the first time of being the “third man” in the Burgess and Maclean affair, the British Foreign Minister had no choice but to assure the House of Commons that there was “no reason to conclude that Mr. Philby has at any time betrayed the interests of his country.”

  Harvey went tc Berlin and Angleton stayed in Washington out of personal preference. Harvey was heeding the call to glory. Angleton was following the path to power. Harvey was heading for the front, leaving the tedious and thankless tasks of headquarters behind. Germany was where the line between East and West had been drawn, and Berlin, located a hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, was the symbol of Allied determination to stand fast in the face of Soviet encroachment. “Germany was the biggest show we had, and Berlin was probably the most important base the Agency had,” one CIA officer said. After the Director of Central Intelligence, the base chief in Berlin was probably the most visible CIA officer in the world. In the secret corridors of espionage, however, visibility did not bring power. That ineffable commodity was the reward of those who labored from within. It was no accident that of the young men present at the CIA’s creation, the two who would in the long run exert the most influence over the Agency’s operations were Angleton and Richard Helms, both of whom held headquarters assignments throughout their careers. Helms would rise to the Director’s office, while Angleton remained in counterintelligence, never climbing a step higher than where he stood in 1954 but ever broadening his base until his was the most powerful and impregnable fiefdom in the secret realm.

  Harvey’s first overseas assignment marked a merciful end to his increasingly unhappy life with Libby. Their marriage was breaking under the strain of his infidelity and her drinking, and on more than one occasion had degenerated into physical violence. He would fly into a rage, “throw glasses, card table, anything he could pick up,” Libby testified during the divorce proceedings. “He hit me several times … on the nose and kicked me a couple of times…. I had to go to the doctor and have an X-ray and had to have applications of heat put on it.” Libby went home to Kentucky, and Harvey escaped with their five-year-old adopted son to Berlin.

  Soon after the divorce became final, Harvey married a WAC major named Clara Grace Follich, whom he had met at the CIA station in Frankfurt. C.G., as everyone called her, left her job as administrative assistant to General Lucien Truscott, the CIA commander for all of Germany, and after a honeymoon in Majorca, the couple moved into a fortresslike white-stucco villa in Berlin. C.G. continued to work for the CIA in Berlin, managing the Agency’s safe houses. (To guard against the possibility the houses might be used as secret trysting places, C.G. decreed that the cleaning ladies hired to look after them must be past the age of desire.) The newlyweds adopted a daughter, an infant who had been left on the doorstep of another CIA officer’s home by an East German woman who wanted her child to grow up free. Harvey’s friends kidded him that his daughter was the ultimate Soviet penetration agent. “Is this kid wired?” they cracked. “Knock it off,” he grumbled.

  Harvey had first seen Germany in 1950 when the CIA base at Pullach on the outskirts of Munich picked up an aging and down-at-the-heels Austrian count claiming to be in contact with a Soviet cipher officer in Vienna who was prepared to tell all in return for $25,000 in cash and resettlement in the West. The Pullach base was skeptical, even though the CIA station in Vienna observed the count entering Soviet headquarters at the Imperial Hotel and was able to confirm that the Russian officer he claimed to be in contact with actually existed. Pullach cabled headquarters recommending that they break contact with the count, but Harvey wanted to see for himself. The Soviets had changed their entire cipher system in 1948 after learning of the code break, and any chance, however slim, to crack the new system could not be overlooked. Harvey arrived at Pullach along with a “Pelican Team” of interrogators equipped with sodium pentothal. The “truth serum” only succeeded in making the count violently ill, but a simple polygraph convinced Harvey that he was a fraud who had worked for the Russians as a low-level informant but had no knowledge of Soviet ciphers or contact with anyone who did. Pullach sent out a “burn notice,” notifying all CIA stations and Allied intelligence services that the count should be ignored if he ever tried to peddle his shoddy goods again. Harvey’s mission to Pullach had proved fruitless, but it was a memorable one nonetheless. On his way to a dinner party one evening, he stopped off for cocktails at the base chief’s house, where he lingered on and on, downing one martini after another and ignoring repeated hints about the late hour until his expectant host finally tracked him down by phone with news that the food was growing cold. When at last Harvey sat down to dinner, he promptly fell asleep—in his salad, according to Peer de Silva’s account.

  If Harvey’s reputation preceded him to Berlin, he did not disappoint. At a cocktail party given to introduce him to the State Department types, he again fell asleep, this time in an easy chair with a drink in his hand, cocked at a precarious angle. The assembled diplomats hovered nearby, absorbed in the fate of the tipping drink.

  Harvey’s drinking would become legend during his years in Berlin. His capacity, like his growing bulk, was enormous. On a trip to Copenhagen, Harvey checked in at the Hotel d’Angleterre in midafternoon and waited at the bar to meet the local station chief for dinner. The station chief arrived to find the bartender staring in wonder as Harvey downed his seventh double martini. They adjourned to the dining room, where Harvey ordered another round and wine with dinner. At home, Harvey served his guests martinis in water goblets. Relations with his MI6 counterpart were never better than the night he put an olive in his colleague’s glass and filled it with water while two senior officers from London grew glassy-eyed over the real thing.

  Harvey did not speak a word of German on the day he arrived in Berlin and scarcely more on the day he left, a fact that he was loath to admit. “I can remember sitting next to Harvey on a plane, and he was pretending to read a German newspaper,” said an officer in the CIA station at Frankfurt. “He didn’t read a word of German. I knew it, and he knew I knew it.” Harvey’s lack of German may have been a source of embarrassment to him, but it did not hamper his effectiveness. Berlin was an occupied city, and the Germans quickly learned to speak the language of the occupying powers.

  In theory, Harvey was subordinate to the American military commanders in Berlin. In practice, he answered to no one—as Brigadier General Kermit Davis, chief of staff for the American Military Command, found out. During the winter, Davis walked home for lunch each day along a path plowed through the snow just wide enough for two men to pass. For two days in a row, Davis had encountered a pair of men dressed in trench coats and berets, conversing together in German. Each time, they bore down on him two abreast, forcing him off the plowed path into the snow. On the third day, Davis stepped aside with resignation as the two men strode toward him, but as they passed, he threw a body block, knocking them both into the snow. Calling them “Kraut sons of bitches,” Davis was surprised to hear their muttered oaths coming back at him in English. He realized they were Americans and followed them far enough to see them enter the CIA compound. Storming into Harvey’s office, Davis
demanded that some action be taken against the two men, who had been so disrespectful to the second-highest-ranking American officer in Berlin. Harvey laughed and said the two men should be commended for the effectiveness of their cover as “Kraut sons of bitches.”

  The action in Berlin was wide open and rough. The walls of Harvey’s office were lined with racks of firearms, and a thermite bomb perched atop each safe, ready for the emergency destruction of files in the event of a Russian invasion. Shortly before Harvey arrived in the city, Dr. Walter Linse, director of a CIA-financed organization that collected intelligence from an underground network of laborers in East Germany, was wrestled into a taxicab one morning as he emerged from his apartment. Police gave chase as the taxi sped toward the Soviet sector, guns blazing. Linse was never seen again—the victim of one of the two-score kidnappings that occurred in Berlin over a two-year period.