by Tim Weiner
Long after the Korean War was over, the CIA concluded that Hart was correct: almost all the secret information the agency gathered during the war had been manufactured by the North Korean and Chinese security services. The fictional intelligence was passed on to the Pentagon and the White House. The agency’s paramilitary operations in Korea had been infiltrated and betrayed before they began.
Hart told headquarters that the station should cease operations until the ledger was cleared and the damage undone. An intelligence service penetrated by the enemy was worse than no service at all. Instead, Bedell Smith sent an emissary to Seoul to tell Hart that “the CIA, being a new organization whose reputation had not yet been established, simply could not admit to other branches of Government—least of all to the highly competitive U.S. military intelligence services—its inability to collect intelligence on North Korea.” The messenger was the deputy director of intelligence, Loftus Becker. After Bedell Smith sent him on an inspection tour of all the CIA’s Asian stations in November 1952, Becker came home and turned in his resignation. He had concluded that the situation was hopeless: the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence in the Far East was “almost negligible.” Before resigning, he confronted Frank Wisner: “Blown operations indicate a lack of success,” he told him, “and there have been a number of these lately.”
Hart’s reports and Haney’s frauds were buried. The agency had walked into an ambush and represented it as a strategic maneuver. Dulles told members of Congress that “CIA was controlling considerable resistance elements in North Korea,” said air force colonel James G. L. Kellis, who had served as Wisner’s paramilitary operations director. At the time, Dulles had been warned that “‘CIA’s guerrillas’ in North Korea were under the control of the enemy” in truth “CIA had no such assets” and “CIA was being duped,” Kellis reported in a whistle-blowing letter he sent to the White House after the war was over.
The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition. The agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes became a permanent part of its culture. The CIA’s covert operators never wrote “lessons-learned” studies. Even today there are few if any rules or procedures for producing them.
“We are all aware that our operations in the Far East are far from what we would like,” Wisner admitted in a headquarters meeting. “We simply have not had the time to develop the quantity and kind of people we must have if we are to successfully carry out the heavy burdens which have been placed on us.” The inability to penetrate North Korea remains the longest-running intelligence failure in the CIA’s history.
“SOME PEOPLE HAVE TO GET KILLED”
The agency opened a second front in the Korean War in 1951. The officers on the agency’s China operations desk, frantic at Mao’s entry into the war, convinced themselves that as many as one million Kuomintang Nationalist guerrillas were waiting inside Red China for the CIA’s help.
Were these reports fabricated by paper mills in Hong Kong, produced by political conniving in Taiwan, or conjured up by wishful thinking in Washington? Was it wise for the CIA to make war against Mao? There was no time to think that through. “You do not have in government a basic approved strategy for this kind of war,” Bedell Smith told Dulles and Wisner. “We haven’t even a policy on Chiang Kai-shek.”
Dulles and Wisner made their own. First they tried to enlist Americans to parachute into communist China. One potential recruit, Paul Kreisberg, was eager to join the CIA until “they tested me on my loyalty and my commitment by asking whether I would be willing to be dropped by parachute into Szechuan. My target would be to organize a group of anti-communist Kuomintang soldiers who remained up in the hills in Szechuan and work with them in a number of operations and then exfiltrate myself, if necessary, out through Burma. They looked at me, and they said, ‘Would you be willing to do that?’” Kreisberg thought it over and joined the State Department. Lacking American volunteers, the CIA dropped hundreds of recruited Chinese agents into the mainland, often dropping them blindly, with orders to find their way to a village. When they went missing, they were written off as a cost of covert warfare.
The CIA also thought it could undermine Mao with Muslim horsemen, the Hui clans of China’s far northwest, commanded by Ma Pu-fang, a tribal leader who had political connections with the Chinese Nationalists. The CIA dropped tons of weapons and ammunition and radios and scores of Chinese agents into western China, then tried to find Americans to follow them. Among the men they tried to recruit was Michael D. Coe, later one of the twentieth century’s greatest archaeologists, the man who broke the code of Mayan hieroglyphics. Coe was a twenty-two-year-old Harvard graduate student in the fall of 1950 when a professor took him out to lunch and asked the question thousands of Ivy Leaguers would hear over the next decade: “How would you like to work for the government in a really interesting capacity?” He went to Washington and received a pseudonym selected at random out of a London telephone directory. He was told he would become a case officer in one of two clandestine operations. Either he would be dropped by parachute deep into far western China to support the Muslim fighters, or he would be sent to an island off the China coast to run raids.
“Luckily for me,” Coe said, “it was the latter option.” He became part of Western Enterprises, a CIA front in Taiwan created to subvert Mao’s China. He spent eight months on a tiny island called White Dog. The only intelligence operation of consequence on the island was the discovery that the Nationalist commander’s chief of staff was a communist spy. Back in Taipei, in the closing months of the Korean War, he saw that Western Enterprises was no more clandestine than the Chinese whorehouses his colleagues frequented. “They built a whole gated community with its own PX and officers’ club,” he said. “The esprit that had been there had changed. It was an incredible waste of money.” Coe concluded that the CIA “had been sold a bill of goods by the Nationalists—that there was a huge force of resistance inside of China. We were barking up the wrong tree. The whole operation was a waste of time.”
Hedging its bets on the Nationalist Chinese, the CIA decided that there had to be a “Third Force” in China. From April 1951 until the end of 1952, the agency spent roughly $100 million, buying enough arms and ammunition for 200,000 guerrillas, without finding the elusive Third Force. About half the money and guns went to a group of Chinese refugees based on Okinawa, who sold the CIA on the idea that a huge cadre of anticommunist troops on the mainland supported them. It was a scam. Ray Peers, the OSS veteran who ran Western Enterprises, said that if he ever found a real live soldier of the Third Force, he would kill him, stuff him, and ship him to the Smithsonian Institution.
The CIA was still searching for the elusive resistance forces when it dropped a four-man Chinese guerrilla team into Manchuria in July 1952. Four months later, the team radioed for help. It was a trap: they had been captured and turned against the CIA by the Chinese. The agency authorized a rescue mission using a newly devised sling designed to scoop up the stranded men. Two young CIA officers on their first operation, Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey, were sent into a shooting gallery. Their plane went down in a storm of Chinese machine-gun fire. The pilots died. Fecteau did nineteen years in a Chinese prison and Downey, fresh out of Yale, did more than twenty. Beijing later broadcast a scorecard for Manchuria: the CIA had dropped 212 foreign agents in; 101 were killed and 111 captured.
The final theater for the CIA in the Korean War lay in Burma. In early 1951, as the Chinese communists chased General MacArthur’s troops south, the Pentagon thought the Chinese Nationalists could take some pressure off MacArthur by opening a second front. About 1,500 followers of Li Mi, a Nationalist general, were stranded in northern Burma, near the Chinese border. Li Mi asked for American guns and American gold. The CIA began flying Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Thailand, training them, equipping them, and dropping them along with pallets of guns and ammunition into northern Burma. Desmond FitzGerald, newly arrived at the agency with glittering lega
l and social credentials, had fought in Burma during World War II. He took over the Li Mi operation. It quickly became a farce, then a tragedy.
When Li Mi’s soldiers crossed over into China, Mao’s forces shot them to pieces. The CIA’s espionage officers discovered that Li Mi’s radioman in Bangkok was a Chinese communist agent. But Wisner’s men pressed on. Li Mi’s soldiers retreated and regrouped. When FitzGerald dropped more guns and ammunition into Burma, Li Mi’s men would not fight. They settled into the mountains known as the Golden Triangle, harvested opium poppies, and married the local women. Twenty years later, the CIA would have to start another small war in Burma to wipe out the heroin labs that were the basis of Li Mi’s global drug empire.
“There is no point in bemoaning opportunities lost…nor attempting to alibi past failures,” Bedell Smith wrote in a letter to General Matthew B. Ridgway, MacArthur’s successor as chief of the Far East Command. “I have found, through painful experience, that secret operations are a job for the professional and not for the amateur.”
A postscript to the CIA’s Korean calamities came soon after the armistice of July 1953. The agency saw President Syngman Rhee of South Korea as a hopeless case, and for years it sought ways to replace him. It almost killed him by mistake.
One cloudless afternoon in late summer, a yacht sailed slowly past the shoreline of Yong-do, the island encampment where the CIA trained its Korean commandos. President Rhee was on board having a party with his friends. The officers and guards in charge of the training site had not been informed that President Rhee would be passing by. They opened fire. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but the president was displeased. He called in the American ambassador and informed him that the CIA’s paramilitary group had seventy-two hours to leave the country. Soon thereafter the luckless station chief, John Hart, had to start all over again, recruiting, training, and parachuting agents into North Korea from 1953 until 1955. All of them, to the best of his knowledge, were captured and executed.
The agency failed on all fronts in Korea. It failed in providing warning, in providing analysis, and in its headlong deployment of recruited agents. Thousands of deaths of Americans and their Asian allies were the consequence.
A generation later, American military veterans called Korea “the forgotten war.” At the agency, it was deliberate amnesia. The waste of $152 million on weapons for phantom guerrillas was adjusted on the balance sheets. The fact that a great deal of Korean War intelligence was false or fabricated was kept secret. The question of what it had cost in lost lives was unasked and unanswered.
But the assistant secretary of state for the Far East, Dean Rusk, sniffed out a whiff of decay. He called on John Melby, a skilled State Department China hand, to investigate. Melby had worked side by side with the first American spies in Asia from the mid-1940s onward and knew the cast of characters. He went out to the region and took a long, hard look. “Our intelligence is so bad that it approaches malfeasance in office,” he told Rusk in an eyes-only report that somehow wound up on the desk of the director of central intelligence. Melby was summoned to CIA headquarters for a classic chewing-out by Bedell Smith, as Deputy Director Allen Dulles sat by in silence.
For Dulles, Asia was always a sideshow. He believed that the real war for Western civilization was in Europe. That fight called for “people who are ready and willing to stand up and take the consequences,” he told a few of his closest friends and colleagues at a secret conference held at the Princeton Inn in May 1952. “After all, we have had a hundred thousand casualties in Korea,” he said, according to a transcript declassified in 2003. “If we have been willing to accept those casualties, I wouldn’t worry if there were a few casualties or a few martyrs behind the iron curtain…. I don’t think you can wait until you have all your troops and are sure you are going to win. You have got to start and go ahead.
“You have got to have a few martyrs,” Dulles said. “Some people have to get killed.”
7. “A VAST FIELD OF
ILLUSION”
Allen Dulles asked his colleagues at the Princeton Inn to consider how best to destroy Stalin’s ability to control his satellite states. He believed that communism could be undone by covert action. The CIA was ready to roll back Russia to its old borders.
“If we are going to move in and take the offensive, Eastern Europe presents the best place to start,” he said. “I don’t want a bloody battle,” he said, “but I would like to see things started.”
Chip Bohlen spoke up. Soon to be named the American ambassador to Moscow, Bohlen had been in on the game from the start. The seeds of the CIA’s political-warfare program were first planted at the Sunday night suppers he had attended five years before. “Are we waging political warfare?” he asked Dulles rhetorically. “We have been waging it since 1946. A lot has been going on. Whether it has been effective, or done in the best way, is another question.
“When you ask, ‘Shall we go on the offensive?’ I see a vast field of illusion,” Bohlen said.
While the war in Korea still raged, the Joint Chiefs commanded Frank Wisner and the CIA to conduct “a major covert offensive against the Soviet Union,” aimed at “the heartland of the communist control system.” Wisner tried. The Marshall Plan was being transformed into pacts providing America’s allies with weapons, and Wisner saw this as a chance to arm secret stay-behind forces to fight the Soviets in the event of war. He was seeding the ground all over Europe. Throughout the mountains and forests of Scandinavia, France, Germany, Italy, and Greece, his men were dropping gold ingots into lakes and burying caches of weapons for the coming battle. In the marshes and foothills of Ukraine and the Baltics, his pilots were dropping agents to their deaths.
In Germany, more than a thousand of his officers were slipping leaflets into East Berlin, forging postal stamps carrying a portrait of the East German leader Walter Ulbricht with a hangman’s noose around his neck, and plotting out paramilitary missions in Poland. None of this provided insight into the nature of the Soviet threat. Operations to sabotage the Soviet empire kept overwhelming plans to spy on it.
“YOU OWN HIM BODY AND SOUL”
Deeply wary, Walter Bedell Smith dispatched a trusted three-star general, Lucian K. Truscott, an officer with impeccable connections and a distinguished war record, to take over the CIA’s operations in Germany and to find out what Wisner’s men were doing. General Truscott’s orders were to suspend every scheme he deemed dubious. Upon his arrival, he chose Tom Polgar of the CIA’s Berlin base as his chief aide.
They found several ticking time bombs. Among them was one very dark secret, described in CIA documents of the day as a program of “overseas interrogations.”
The agency had set up clandestine prisons to wring confessions out of suspected double agents. One was in Germany, another in Japan. The third, and the biggest, was in the Panama Canal Zone. “Like Guantánamo,” Polgar said in 2005. “It was anything goes.”
The zone was its own world, seized by the United States at the turn of the century, bulldozed out of the jungles that surrounded the Panama Canal. On a naval base in the zone, the CIA’s office of security had refitted a complex of cinder-block prison cells inside a navy brig normally used to house drunk and disorderly sailors. In those cells, the agency was conducting secret experiments in harsh interrogation, using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing.
The project dated back to 1948, when Richard Helms and his officers in Germany realized they were being defrauded by double agents. The effort began as a crash program in 1950, when the Korean War erupted and a sense of emergency seized the CIA. Late that summer, as the temperature approached a hundred degrees in Panama, two Russian émigrés who had been delivered to the Canal Zone from Germany were injected with drugs and brutally interrogated. Along with four suspected North Korean double agents subjected to the same treatment at a military base commandeered by the CIA in Japan, they were among the first known human guinea pigs under a program code-nam
ed Project Artichoke, a small but significant part of a fifteen-year search by the CIA for ways to control the human mind.
Many of the Russians and East Germans whom the agency had recruited as agents and informers in Germany had gone sour. After they had given up what little knowledge they had, they resorted to deception or blackmail to extend their short careers. More than a few of them were suspected of working in secret for the Soviets. The issue became urgent when CIA officers came to realize that the communist intelligence and security services were far bigger and significantly more sophisticated than the agency.
Richard Helms once said that American intelligence officers were trained to believe that they could not count on a foreign agent “unless you own him body and soul.” The need for a way to own a man’s soul led to the search for mind-control drugs and secret prisons in which to test them. Dulles, Wisner, and Helms were personally responsible for these endeavors.
On May 15, 1952, Dulles and Wisner received a report on Project Artichoke, spelling out the agency’s four-year effort to test heroin, amphetamines, sleeping pills, the newly discovered LSD, and other “special techniques in CIA interrogations.” Part of the project sought to find an interrogation technique so strong that “the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.” A few months later, Dulles approved an ambitious new program code-named Ultra. Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York hotel. Like the suspected double agents sent to the secret brig in Panama, these men were expendable conscripts in the battle to defeat the Soviets.
