When Harvey arrived in this Wild West of espionage, he ordered all CIA officers to carry sidearms when conducting operations. Harvey himself “kept three or four in his desk and never less than two on him.” At a square-dancing party one warm summer evening in Berlin, Harvey was perspiring profusely under a heavy tweed sports jacket but rejected all suggestions that he take it off. “Can’t,” he growled, flipping open the jacket to reveal a pearl-handled revolver strapped under each sweaty armpit. Why not check the guns at the door? one of the gaping onlookers asked. “Can’t,” Harvey growled again. “When you need ’em, you need ’em in a hurry.”
He was the only CIA officer in Berlin or anywhere else who carried a gun at all times. “If you ever know as many secrets as I do,” he liked to say, “then you’ll know why I carry a gun.” He would thoroughly unnerve a visitor by taking a loaded revolver from his desk and toying with it as they spoke, spinning the chamber and sighting down the barrel. If he was a houseguest, he would warn his host to make sure that no small children wandered into his room in the middle of the night, because he slept with a gun under his pillow and was likely to wake up shooting.
Harvey’s fixation on guns was not wholly irrational. By unwritten code, the CIA and the KGB did not kill each other’s officers, but if ever the KGB were to make an exception, the man who had ended the career of Kim Philby would be a good place to begin. To most of his colleagues, however, Harvey’s guns seemed like so much “braggadocio” or “window dressing,” a melodramatic exaggeration of the dangers he faced. “It was a very boring thing,” one officer said, “especially to people who had jumped out of airplanes and who had been involved in combat.” Others saw it as a hangover from his FBI days, like the key chain he wore on his left hip, which did not belong in the subtler and more sophisticated world of espionage—as opposed to drinking, which somehow came with the territory. “He had FBI written all over him,” said Mike Burke, chief of covert action in Frankfurt. “That fellow Harvey is a conspiratorial cop,” Allen Dulles remarked. “The only trouble is I can’t tell if he’s more conspiratorial or cop.”
Shortly after he arrived in Berlin, Harvey was visited by Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s Operations Directorate, who asked to be taken to meet the mayor of Berlin. Wisner, Burke, and Tracy Barnes of the Frankfurt station squeezed into the back seat of Harvey’s car. Harvey got behind the wheel with a gun jammed in his belt, turned to an aide sitting next to him in the front seat, and barked, “Finger the turns”—FBI lingo meaning point the way. “It was like a Grade C movie,” Burke related. Later, when Wisner was preparing to return to Washington aboard an ocean liner, he received a bon voyage telegram from Barnes saying: “Don’t forget to finger the terns”—meaning gulls.
The same men who enjoyed their bons mots at Harvey’s expense had also put him where he was, and Berlin during the 1950s was the front line of the secret war between the CIA and the KGB. It was an assignment for which he was as perfectly suited as General George S. Patton was for combat. Bill Harvey was the secret war made flesh.
If Harvey was the point man for the secret war, Angleton was the paper man, building his counterintelligence staff and its filekeeping capabilities into a more menacing force than Harvey’s entire armory of guns. Although the Doolittle report had recommended a 10 percent cut in CIA personnel in order to eliminate the “large number of people some of whom were of doubtful competence” who had joined the Agency during the Korean War, Angleton’s counterintelligence cadre was vastly expanded in size. What had begun as a tiny staff of two or three researchers under Harvey in 1947 had grown to 125 under Angleton. “Prior to Angleton the counterintelligence staff was nothing,” a CIA officer who had worked for both Angleton and Harvey said. Flexing his added muscle, Angleton set out to fulfill the mandate of the Doolittle report by developing a new source of intelligence known as HT/LINGUAL, a project that violated not only “long-standing American concepts of ‘fair play’ ” but the law as well.
On November 21, 1955, Angleton recommended to Richard Helms, the number two man in the Operations Directorate, that “we gain access to all mail traffic to and from the USSR which enters, departs or transits the United States through the Port of New York.” The CIA, with the approval of the Post Office, had been photographing the outsides of envelopes for three years, but the number of letters actually opened was very small. “Presently letters are opened without the knowledge of the Post Office Department on a completely surreptitious basis, namely, swiping a letter, processing it at night and returning it the next day,” Angleton explained to Helms, adding the complaint that the “material is not being exploited nearly to the extent it could be.” With HT/LINGUAL, “more letters will be opened,” he promised. “It is estimated that it will be possible to make discreet interior examination and photograph the contents of approximately two per cent of all incoming communications from the USSR, or approximately 400 per month.”
Opening the mail on such a scale would provide “an entirely new avenue of information in the field of counter-espionage,” Angleton argued. Precisely because opening letters was patently illegal, he reasoned, the Soviets would regard mail as a secure means of communication. “It must be assumed that foreign espionage agents have relied on this policy of the United States Government and this has resulted in the extensive use of the mails for intelligence purposes to our detriment,” he counseled. Philby had boasted that he knew the limitations imposed on his adversary’s procedures “by law and convention.” But if he had assured the Soviets that the CIA would never tamper with the United States mail, he had badly misled them.
Each morning three CIA officers reported to a special room at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, where a postal clerk delivered from two to six sacks of mail. For his trouble—and his continued silence—the postal clerk received an annual bonus of $500 from the CIA. Working with a Diebold camera, the three officers photographed the exteriors of about 1,800 letters each day. Each evening they stashed about 60 of the letters in an attaché case or simply stuffed them in their pockets and took them to the CIA’s Manhattan Field Office for opening. Some of the letters were selected on the basis of a “watch list” of names compiled by Angleton’s staff, but most were picked at random. In Manhattan, the CIA officers, all graduates of a one-week “flaps-and-seals” course, used a steam kettle to soften the glue on an envelope and a narrow stick to pry open the flap. A proficient flaps-and-seals man could do the job in five seconds. In an effort to increase the take, the CIA developed a steam oven that could handle a hundred letters at a time, but the flaps-and-seals men found it unreliable and went back to the steam kettle. Once photographed, the letter was put back in its envelope and returned to the mail stream the next day. The film was sent by registered mail or courier to CIA headquarters in Washington. There, a small “Projects Branch” within the Counterintelligence Division processed the film, analyzed the content of the letters, and indexed the names.
HT/LINGUAL began slowly but rapidly picked up speed. Only 832 letters were opened during the first year of operation, but two years later 8,000 letters were being opened annually. Angleton recommended the establishment of a laboratory in the Manhattan Field Office that could “increase our production about 20 per cent” and at the same time inspect the letters for “secret writing and/or microdots.” With the laboratory in operation, more than 14,000 letters were being opened each year. Gradually the watch list grew from a small core of 10 to 20 names to some 600, including such organizations as the American Friends Service Committee and the Federation of American Scientists, as well as authors like Edward Albee and John Steinbeck, and even a member of the Rockefeller family. Correspondents whose letters were opened at random included congressmen, senators, and a presidential candidate, Richard M. Nixon. A total of 215,820 letters would actually be opened, producing a computerized index of 2 million names. “From the counterintelligence point of view, we believed that it was extremely important to know everything possible regarding contacts of American c
itizens with Communist countries,” Angleton explained.
From the beginning, he recognized that the operation was illegal and that exposure would cause “serious public reaction in the United States,” perhaps leading to a congressional inquiry. But an aide to Angleton was confident that if the operation were blown, “it should be relatively easy to ‘hush up’ the entire affair.” At worst, “it might become necessary … to find a scapegoat to blame for unauthorized tampering with the mail.” In any case, “the effort was worth the risk.”
Virtually every other CIA officer who reviewed HT/LINGUAL came to exactly the opposite conclusion. The Agency’s Inspector General found very little counterintelligence potential in the operation, since it must “be assumed that Russian tradecraft is as good as our own and that Russian agents communicating with their headquarters would have more secure channels than open mail.” Passing references in the letters to crop conditions, prices, or the weather might be of some incidental intelligence value but hardly enough to justify either the risk or the cost of opening the mail. After a preliminary sampling of letters, the most that Angleton could claim for HT/LINGUAL was the “interesting” fact that eight letters from the heartland of Godless Communism had contained “some religious reference.” Beyond that, the first batch of mail was no help at all. “An examination of the contents of 35 communications from the Georgian Republic prior to the 9 March 1956 uprising showed no indication of discontent in any manner,” he acknowledged. The mail was later to prove useful in helping the FBI and Angleton’s counterintelligence staff keep track of members of the Rosenberg network who had fled to Russia yet still corresponded with friends and relatives in the United States, but almost by definition the operation was not likely to yield anything more valuable than that. Since Soviet citizens assumed that their letters were routinely opened and read by the local authorities, the Inspector General pointed out, “it is improbable that anyone inside Russia would wittingly send or receive mail containing anything of obvious intelligence or political significance.” Summing up his evaluation of HT/LINGUAL, the Inspector General said that “most of the offices we spoke to find it occasionally helpful, but there is no recent evidence of it having provided significant leads or information which have had positive operational results. The Office of Security has found the material to be of little value. The positive intelligence derived from this source is meager.”
HT/LINGUAL played to the enemy’s strength. The CIA could not hope to match the KGB in police-state tactics. The law forbade it. Of course, the law could be broken, as with HT/LINGUAL, but it had to be done in such restrictive secrecy, hidden not only from the public but from the rest of the government, that the operation was a pale shadow of what the Soviets could mount. To succeed somehow in duplicating Soviet tactics despite the law would be a de facto admission of defeat, since the CIA would be corrupting the very political system it was fighting to preserve from Russian subversion. Angleton was not the only CIA officer whose attempts at becoming “more ruthless” than the KGB would lead him into a self-defeating imitation of Soviet tactics, although the danger was naturally greatest in the field of counterintelligence, which concentrated exclusively on thwarting those tactics. In later years, Harvey would resort to practices far more ruthless than opening mail.
It was easy enough to say of such excesses, as Angleton did of HT/LINGUAL, that “I reconciled it in terms of the knowledge I had, and my colleagues had, regarding the nature of the threat.” But the simple fact was that they didn’t work. Almost without exception, the CIA’s real achievements relied not on police-state tactics but on the weapon of which the KGB had a critically short supply—technology. The Doolittle report, despite its call to “subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies,” recognized the potential of the “technical avenue of approach.” It was a potential that would be realized in striking fashion during Harvey’s stay in Berlin.
Carl Nelson of the CIA’s Office of Communications stood at his hotel-room window and looked out on Vienna’s Ringstrasse, a circumferential boulevard laid down where ramparts once guarded the seat of the Hapsburg empire. Across the street stood the Imperial Hotel, headquarters for the Soviet occupation forces, which shared uneasy dominion over the city with British, French, and American troops. The object of Nelson’s interest—a pair of cables connecting the Imperial Hotel with the Soviet command in Moscow—was so close he felt he could reach out his hand and touch it. Later, he strolled through the streets, following the path of the cables overhead to the outskirts of the city, where they snaked underground to connect with the long-distance lines leading to Moscow. Nelson traced their subterranean route on a blueprint as they ran parallel to the main highway that connected the airport with the city center.
It was the fall of 1951 and Nelson was searching for the best location to install a wiretap. But before he could find it he was taken aside by British officials and informed that MI6 was already monitoring the Soviet lines. A full two years before, MI6 had purchased a private house set back a short distance from the highway in the suburb of Schwechat. Engineers had resurfaced the driveway with a sturdy expanse of reinforced concrete and beneath it had dug a seventy-foot tunnel from the basement out to the cables. Nelson’s scratching about was only one of several, slightly comical complications that had bedeviled the British operation since its inception.
Casting about for a cover, MI6 had first set up a Harris tweed import shop in one of the buildings next to the highway, confident that such quintessentially British goods would not attract enough customers in Vienna to interfere with the real business of installing the tap. To its dismay, MI6 found Harris tweed to be immensely popular with the local population. The first shipment from England was an instant sellout, and British operatives were soon buried beneath an avalanche of import license applications as they struggled to keep pace with the demand. Withdrawing from its unwanted bonanza, MI6 moved into the private home and finally managed to install the tap. According to the plan, a British officer was to pick up the first set of tapes recorded by the monitoring station from a schoolgirl who would be carrying them in her bookbag while strolling in Schoenbrun Park. When the MI6 man approached his pubescent contact, however, a Viennese policeman collared him on suspicion of child molestation. British officials hurriedly explained the situation to the Viennese authorities, and Operation SILVER, as it was called, proceeded without further incident until Nelson stumbled upon it, forcing the British to share their hard-earned communications intelligence with the Americans.
Nelson could not have struck SILVER—the first successful attack on a major Soviet landline—at a more opportune time. The advent of ultra-high-frequency line-of-sight radio communications had sharply reduced the amount of intelligence that could be gleaned from the airwaves. Lower frequencies, with their longer waves, would bend around the curve of the earth and could be monitored at great remove from the source. The higher frequencies, with their shorter waves, did not follow the curve of the earth. Traveling in straight lines, they could be intercepted only at points directly in line with the transmitter and receiver. “You could no longer sit back in your own territory and listen to Russian radio communications,” a CIA officer explained. The result, a CIA document noted, was the creation of “gaps in our intelligence coverage which were particularly unfortunate during the period of Cold War escalation.”
At the same time that technology was working against the interception of Soviet radio signals, however, Carl Nelson had scored a major breakthrough in the interception of messages carried over landlines. Twenty years later, Nelson’s breakthrough would remain such a closely held secret that it would be referred to only in the most guarded terms, even within the CIA. “[T]he Office of Communications, in the course of its continuing efforts to provide secure communications for the Agency, became aware of a principle which, when applied to target communications, offered certain possibilities,” one document noted cryptically.
Nelson had discovered that SIGTOT, a cipher machine manu
factured by the Bell System for use by the United States in its worldwide communications, was vulnerable to intercept. He had invented a way to tap into any cable carrying SIGTOT’s enciphered message and monitor that message, not in its encoded form but in plain text. No code-breaking was required. Once he had hooked up the proper combination of capacitors, amplifiers, and assorted gadgets, Nelson could sit back and watch the clear text clatter forth at sixty words per minute onto an ordinary teletype machine. The only limitation was that the tap had to be installed within twenty miles of the point from which the signal originated. Very simply, Nelson had discovered that as SIGTOT electrically encrypted a message from the clear text to a meaningless jumble of letters, it gave off faint echoes of the clear text, which traveled along the wire with the enciphered message.
Immediately and at great expense, the United States abandoned SIGTOT for a more secure cipher system, while Nelson set out to determine whether the other side’s communications system was equally vulnerable. Operation SILVER proved that it was. Just as with SIGTOT, echoes—Nelson called them “transients” or “artifacts”—of the clear-text messages being enciphered by the Russians at the Imperial Hotel on Vienna’s Ringstrasse could be sorted out from the encoded signals monitored at the listening post in the suburb of Schwechat. American intelligence had scored its biggest coup since the wartime code break that had uncovered source HOMER. This time, however, the British were not let in on the secret, even though MI6 had dug the tunnel and installed the tap. Once Nelson’s technique was proved in operation, five more taps were installed on Soviet landlines in and around Vienna, but the original tap at Schwechat proved the most valuable, for it revealed that the Soviet Union would not commit itself to a military advance through the Balkans, a piece of intelligence holding enormous significance for the disposition of American troops during the fighting in Korea.
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