Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  “Blown operations indicate a lack of success”: Becker to Wisner, undated but December 1952 or January 1953, CIA/CREST. Before resigning as deputy director of intelligence, Loftus Becker told his colleagues that he was “distressed to learn how uninformed our people in the field were” and expressed his doubts about the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence anywhere in Asia. Deputy director’s meeting, December 29, 1952, CIA/CREST. Then he confronted Frank Wisner directly.

  “CIA was being duped”: Kellis made his accusations of false testimony by senior CIA officials in a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, May 24, 1954, DDEL.

  “We are all aware that our operations in the Far East are far from what we would like”: Wisner, “[Deleted] Report on CIA Installations in the Far East,” March 14, 1952, CIA/CREST.

  The officers on the agency’s China operations desk: The history of American intelligence operations in and around China in the years between the end of World War II and the beginning of Mao’s dictatorship has never been completely recounted. A score of OSS veterans had hung on in China under military cover after Truman’s abolition order, taking the name External Security Detachment 44. Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Delaney first ran ESD-44; he later became chief of the CIA’s tiny Tokyo station in 1947, and then the number-two man at OPC’s Western Enterprises operation on Taiwan. In 1945, when the war was over, Delaney wrote of the tasks ahead in a dispatch sent from Shanghai. He noted that American intelligence officers faced a vast terrain as unfamiliar as the mountains of the moon, great swaths of land running from the South China Sea west to Afghanistan, from Saigon north to Siberia. They had to know the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet, communist Chinese, and Nationalist Chinese military and intelligence services, and they had to puzzle out the particulars of all the politics and pressure groups in the Far East. These tasks would take the better part of fifty years. They were complicated by CIA’s conventional wisdom: Mao’s Chinese, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese, and Kim Il-sung’s Koreans all were creatures of the Kremlin, an immutable monolith, of one mind, made in Moscow. The OSS and early CIA men of the Far East sent bales of intelligence back to Washington. Much of it went unread, “locked up in archives in the company of silence and rats.” Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 258–259.

  The CIA’s first officers in China were commanded by Amos D. Moscrip, who worked out of a French outpost in Shanghai, where he played the socialite, drank hard, and slept with a White Russian girlfriend. Some State Department diplomats thought they could do business with Mao, who after all had worked with the OSS against the Japanese. But the communists clearly suspected that Americans in China, diplomats or not, would try to subvert them. By October 1948, the State Department wanted all American diplomatic outposts in China evacuated, because anyone who could remotely be connected by the communists to espionage on behalf of the United States faced prison or perhaps worse. In Mukden, a city of two million in Manchuria, those evacuation orders arrived as the American consul general, Angus Ward, and his twenty-one-member staff were placed under a yearlong house arrest after refusing to surrender the consulate to Mao’s troops. “He was accused of espionage, which, frankly, he was guilty of!” remembered John F. Melby, then a State Department political officer reporting out of Chungking. “He’d been working with what was known as ESD-number something or other, which was a CIA outpost. He was up to his eyeballs, working with the crew that he had up there with him in Manchuria.” Melby oral histories, HSTL, FAOH.

  The chief of “the crew” was Jack Singlaub, one of the more audacious cold warriors of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1948, Singlaub had been conspiring with the Chinese Nationalists, attempting to insert a network of White Russians into the Soviet Union, and seeking ways to plant spies in Soviet-occupied North Korea. Singlaub did in fact manage to run some Korean agents through Manchuria into North Korea in 1948. He dispatched dozens of men who had been prisoners of war held by the Japanese with orders to try to join the communist military in the North and report back on their intentions and capabilities. A handful seemed at first to have succeeded. But when he tried to find safe houses for those spies in Seoul, he was thwarted by MacArthur’s resistance. Singlaub sent an extraordinary request through CIA channels to the White House—it was addressed “Eyes Only Moscrip, For the President”—pleading for Truman to arm the Chinese Nationalists with American war stockpiles on Okinawa. The president was unmoved. With the fall of Mukden imminent, Singlaub cabled the nearest American naval commander: “IMPERATIVE I NOT BE CAPTURED.” He flew out under artillery attack, passing a reconnaissance plane with a red star insignia, knowing this battle of the cold war was lost. John K. Singlaub, Hazardous Duty: An American Soldier in the Twentieth Century (New York: Summit, 1992), pp. 132–149.

  In Shanghai, the station chief, Fred Schultheis, had been building a fair-size network of agents and informers in the city, in part because he spoke impeccable Chinese, which he honed by reading anything he could get his hands on, from newspapers to comic books. He was, among Americans, an old China hand, having been stationed in country with the army throughout the war. With Mao on the march, winning city after city in late 1948, Schultheis couldn’t wait to get out. He went to Hong Kong as chief of station in 1949, and soon became convinced that Hong Kong, too, was about to come under communist attack. He began sending out terrifying reports based on speculation and surmise, warning that the city was the next domino to fall. One State Department officer and OSS veteran stationed with him in Hong Kong, Joseph A. Yager, remembered that fear vividly: “We had various intelligence that seemed to indicate that an attack was coming. It turned out to be wrong.” But “Schultheis was convinced that it was coming. He was very alarmist. He said, ‘This time, it won’t be Stanley. It will be Belsen.’ Stanley was Stanley Peninsula, where the Japanese had interned the foreigners. That was pretty bad. They had nearly starved them to death. Of course, Belsen was one of the death camps of the Germans.” Yager oral history, FAOH.

  At headquarters in 1950, Singlaub, installed as the CIA’s China desk officer after Mao’s triumph, oversaw stations abandoned and operations routed. He worked feverishly to maintain the dwindling network of CIA officers and stay-behind agents in China, and to re-establish broken espionage networks in Manchuria and North Korea.

  In Tihwa, the capital of Xinjiang, in China’s desolate wild west, Douglas Mackiernan was the CIA man at the two-man American consulate. He had been posted there during the war as an army air force officer and knew the terrain, rich with uranium, oil, and gold. He lived about as far from Western civilization as any American on earth. Finally forced to abandon the consulate in the face of communist forces, Mackiernan was stranded. He would have to find his own way out. At the end of a seven-month, 1,200-mile trek out of China, he was shot, pointlessly, by a Tibetan border guard, the first CIA officer to die in the line of duty.

  In Shanghai, Hugh Redmond, who had been Singlaub’s underling in Mukden, tried to operate under a thin cover as the local representative of a British import-export firm. “He was a likeable guy, but not terribly effective,” Singlaub observed. “It was the height of folly to believe that an amiable young amateur like Hugh Redmond, no matter how dedicated, could function well against a ruthless totalitarian foe.” Chinese security forces arrested Redmond as a spy. He killed himself after almost two decades in prison. Robert F. Drexler, a longtime China intelligence hand at the State Department, received Redmond’s mortal remains. “His ashes, I can still see them,” Drexler remembered, “an enormous package, about two feet long and one foot square, with a muslin covering and the large letters of his name on the side. And this was set on my desk. Perfectly horrible. The Chinese told us he committed suicide, after being held for 20 years, with a razor blade in a Red Cross package. The Red Cross told us they never put razor blades in their packages.” On Mackiernan and Redmond: Drexler oral history, FAOH; Ted Gup, The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives (New
York: Anchor, 2002).

  “We haven’t even a policy on Chiang Kai-shek”: Bedell Smith, preliminary staff meeting, National Psychological Strategy Board, May 8, 1951, CIA/CREST.

  “they tested me on my loyalty”: Kreisberg oral history, FAOH.

  “Luckily for me”: Coe interview with author. Mike Coe was sent to White Dog Island, off the China coast, where the futility of the mission was considerably eased by the camaraderie. His companions on the island included Phil Montgomery, born Philippe-Louis de Montgomery, an heir to the Noilly Prat vermouth fortune, who kept the bar well stocked; and the legendary R. Campbell James, Jr., who drained it as best he could. “Zup” James, Yale ’50, with the mannerisms and clipped mustache of a British grenadier, was the last Western Enterprises officer to leave Taiwan in 1955. He went on to Laos, where he recruited the nation’s leaders over cocktails and roulette.

  the CIA decided that there had to be a “Third Force” in China: Lilley and Coe interviews with author. Lilley FAOH. 60 arms and ammunition for 200,000 guerrillas: “OPC History,” Vol. 2, p. 553, CIA.

  Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey: The CIA recently declassified its first formal admission of the deaths of its agents in the Third Force fiasco and the bungling that led to the capture of Fecteau and Downey: Nick Dujmovic, “Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952–1973,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2006:

  The first Third Force team to be airdropped did not deploy until April 1952. This four-man team parachuted into southern China and was never heard from again. The second Third Force team comprised five ethnic Chinese dropped into the Jilin region of Manchuria in mid-July 1952. Downey was well known to the Chinese operatives on this team because he had trained them. The team quickly established radio contact with Downey’s CIA unit outside of China and was resup-plied by air in August and October. A sixth team member, intended as a courier between the team and the controlling CIA unit, was dropped in September.

  In early November, the team reported contact with a local dissident leader and said it had obtained needed operational documents such as official credentials. They requested air ex-filtration of the courier, a method he had trained for but that the CIA had never attempted operationally…. Pilots Norman Schwartz and Robert Snoddy had trained in the aerial pickup technique during the fall of 1952 and were willing to undertake the mission…. Late on 29 November, Downey and Fecteau boarded Schwartz and Snoddy’s olive-drab C-47 on an airfield on the Korean peninsula and took off for the rendezvous point in Chinese Communist Manchuria, some 400 miles away…heading for a trap.

  The agent team, unbeknownst to the men on the flight, had been captured by Communist Chinese security forces and had been turned. The request for exfiltration was a ruse, and the promised documentation and purported contact with a local dissident leader were merely bait. The team members almost certainly had told Chinese authorities everything they knew about the operation and about the CIA men and facilities associated with it. From the way the ambush was conducted, it was clear that the Chinese Communists knew exactly what to expect…. As the C-47 came in low for the pickup, flying nearly at its stall speed of around sixty knots, white sheets that had been camouflaging two antiaircraft guns on the snowy terrain flew off and gunfire erupted at the very moment the pickup was to have been made. The guns, straddling the flight path, began a murderous crossfire…. Fecteau later remembered standing outside the aircraft with Downey, both stunned but conscious, telling each other that they were “in a hell of a mess.” The Chinese security forces descended on them, “whooping and hollering,” and they gave themselves up to the inevitable.

  [T]here is the question of whether the field ignored warnings that the deployed team had been turned by the communists…. A former senior operations officer who, as a young man, had served in Downey and Fecteau’s unit in 1952…asserts that, in the summer before the November flight, an analysis of two messages sent by the team made it “90 percent” certain, in his view, that the team had been doubled.

  Bringing his concerns to the attention of the unit chief, the officer was rebuffed for lack of further evidence. When he persisted, he was transferred to another CIA unit. After Downey and Fecteau’s flight failed to return, the unit chief called the officer back and told him not to talk about the matter, and he followed instructions—much to his later regret….

  No record of an inquiry into the decision to send Downey and Fecteau on the flight appears to exist. It is clear that no one was ever disciplined for it…. Many years later, Downeyt old a debriefer that he felt no bitterness toward the man who sent him on the mission: “I felt for him. It turned out to be such a goddamned disaster from his point of view.”

  the Li Mi operation: The operation would have terrible consequences. The first of these came after the CIA neglected to inform the American ambassador in Burma, David M. Key, about Li Mi. When he found out, he was furious. He cabled Washington, protesting that the operation was becoming an open secret in the Burmese capital and in Bangkok as well, and that the trampling of Burma’s sovereignty was doing deep damage to American interests. The assistant secretary of state for the Far East, Dean Rusk, instructed his ambassador to shut up: he was to categorically deny any American involvement in the operation and blame it all on freelance gunrunners. Li Mi and his forces later turned their guns on the Burmese government, whose leaders, suspecting American connivance, severed relations with the United States and began a half century of isolation from the West that produced one of the world’s more repressive regimes. Aspects of the Li Mi operation are in Major D. H. Berger, USMC, “The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool: An Analysis of Operations Conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 1949–1951,” available online at http://www.global security.org/intell/library/reports/1995/BDH.htm. Further details were supplied by Al Ulmer, who succeeded Desmond FitzGerald as Far East division chief; Sam Halpern, FitzGerald’s executive officer; and James Lilley.

  The CIA’s Thai allies were deeply into Li Mi’s heroin trade. Things almost got out of hand in Bangkok in 1952. The CIA’s Lyman Kirkpatrick, then the assistant director for special operations and thought to be in line to succeed Wisner, flew out to Asia in late September 1952, along with his counterpart, Wisner’s assistant director, Colonel Pat Johnston. At least one American mixed up with the drug dealing was dead, and the matter appears to have been referred to the attorney general of the United States. None of it was sorted out to anyone’s satisfaction. Colonel Johnston resigned his post immediately thereafter. Kirkpatrick contracted polio during the trip and nearly died. He returned to the CIA a year later, was passed over for promotion, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, serving as the CIA’s brooding inspector general, a study in frustrated ambition.

  “I have found, through painful experience”: Smith to Ridgway, April 17, 1952, CIA, DDEL.

  A postscript to the CIA’s Korean calamities: On the effort to supplant Syngman Rhee: “Rhee was becoming senile, and the CIA sought ways to replace him…,” The Ambassador in Korea (John Muccio) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (John Allison), Secret, February 15, 1952, FRUS, Vol. XV, pp. 50–51. An NSC memo to Secretary of State Dulles, dated February 18, 1955, said that President Eisenhower had approved an operation “to select and encourage covertly the development of new South Korean leadership” and to bring it to power if needed. Peer de Silva’s recounting of the CIA’s near-shooting of President Rhee is in his memoir, Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 152.

  “Our intelligence is so bad that it approaches malfeasance in office”: Melby, FAOH.

  “people who are ready and willing to stand up and take the consequences”: Dulles in transcript of “Proceedings at the Opening Session of the National Committee for a Free Europe,” misdated but May 1952, declassified May 28, 2003, DDEL.

  Chapter Seven

  “If we are going to move in and take the offensive”: Dulles transcript, “Proceedings of th
e National Committee for a Free Europe,” misdated but May 1952, declassified May 28, 2003, DDEL.

  “a major covert offensive against the Soviet Union,” aimed at “the heartland of the communist control system”: The orders were to “contribute to the retraction and reduction of Soviet power,” and to “develop underground resistance and facilitate covert and guerrilla operations in strategic areas.” They came from Admiral L. C. Stevens, a senior war planner from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had been Smith’s naval attaché in Moscow. Admiral L. C. Stevens memo to Wisner, “Subject: OPC Strategic Planning,” July 13, 1951, CIA/CREST. The goal was to “place the maximum strain on the Soviet structure of power.” NSC staff memo, “Scope and Pace of Covert Operations,” June 27, 1951, CIA/CREST.

  “Like Guantánamo”: Polgar interview with author. Bedell Smith’s orders to Truscott are dated March 9, 1951, CIA/CREST.

  a program code-named Project Artichoke: Untitled memo for deputy director of central intelligence, May 15, 1952; memo for director of central intelligence, “Subject: Successful Application of Narco-Hypnotic Interrogation (Artichoke),” July 14, 1952, CIA/CREST. This second report noted that Dulles had met with military intelligence service chiefs in April 1951 to seek their help with Project Artichoke; only the navy liaison had come through. The result of the navy’s assistance was the Panama brig. A follow-up memo, sent to Bedell Smith, reported that two Russians had been interrogated for two weeks in June 1952 by a joint Navy-CIA team under Project Artichoke, and a combination of drugs and hypnosis had proved useful. All of this was an outgrowth of the national emergency created by the Korean War and the suspicion that American prisoners were being brainwashed in North Korea. Senate investigations got to the margins of this program thirty years ago, but the paper trail had largely been destroyed. Project Artichoke, the investigators reported in four terse paragraphs, included “overseas interrogations” involving both “a combination of sodium pentothal and hypnosis” and “special interrogation techniques” including “truth serums.” The nature of the “overseas interrogations” was not explored by Congress.