My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy (24 page)

We had much else to discuss about Germany, since both SIS and CIA could afford to spread themselves on occupied territory. Secret activity of all kinds, including operations directed against the German authorities themselves, were financed by the Germans, as part of the payment for the expenses of occupation.

Apart from Angleton, I had one other principal contact with the counter-espionage section: he was a former FBI man whom Hoover had sacked for drunkenness on duty. The first time he dined at my
house, he showed that his habits had remained unchanged. 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.” I may be accused here of introducing a cheap note. Admitted. But, as will be seen later, the same man was to play a very cheap trick on me, and I do not like letting provocation go unpunished. Having admitted the charge of strong prejudice against him, it is only fair that I should add that he co-operated well with SIS in the construction of the famous Berlin Tunnel.

As I have already said, the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) was concerned with subversion on a world-wide basis. Its head was Frank Wisner, a youngish man for so responsible a job, balding and running self-importantly to fat. He favoured an orotund style of conversation which was disconcerting. I accompanied a mission which he led to London to discuss with SIS matters of common interest. When the discussions touched on issues of international concern, the Foreign Office sent representatives to watch the proceedings. At one such meeting, attended on behalf of the Foreign Office by Tony Rumbold, Wisner expatiated on one of his favourite themes: the need for camouflaging the source of secret funds supplied to apparently respectable bodies in which we were interested. “It is essential,” said Wisner in his usual informal style, “to secure the overt co-operation of people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right.” Rumbold started scribbling. I looked over his shoulder and saw what he had written: “people with conspicuous access to wealth in their own right = rich people.”

My relations with OPC were more active than those with OSO, which were confined mostly to finding out what they were up to. Shortly before my arrival in Washington, the American and British governments had sanctioned in principle a clandestine operation to detach an East European country from the Socialist bloc. The choice fell on Albania for several reasons. It was the smallest and weakest of the Socialist states. It was bounded on the south by Greece, with which Britain and the United States were allied and which was still technically at war with Albania. Its northern and eastern frontiers
matched with Yugoslavia. Our experts considered—quite wrongly, in my opinion—that Marshal Tito, after his break with the Socialist bloc, would adopt a hands-off policy towards any changes in Tiranë. Albania, therefore, looked conveniently isolated and, moreover, it was within easy reach by sea and air from Malta. Owing to the many political implications of such a project, the State Department and Foreign Office insisted on maintaining close supervision of the operation. Subject to that supervision, the execution was the responsibility of SIS and OPC.

Both the British and the Americans were in touch with Albanian emigré groups; both sides undertook to rally their contacts in support of the counter-revolution. The British were to provide Malta as a forward base of operations, and the small boats required for the infiltration of seaborne agents. The Americans supplied most of the finance and logistical support and the use of Wheelus Field, in Libya, as a rear base and supply depot. King Idris was not let into the secret; he was then only the Amir. In the prolonged Anglo-American wrangling that followed, Malta was our trump card. “Whenever we want to subvert any place,” Wisner confided in me, “we find that the British own an island within easy reach.”

The wrangling concerned the political leadership of the counter-revolution. We were in the pre-Dulles era. The United States had not yet come out in open support of extreme reaction everywhere. The State Department was anxious to give the counter-revolution a democratic aspect. To this end, they stole a march on us by rail-roading a handful of Albanian refugees in New York into forming a National Committee and electing as its head a certain Hassan Dosti. Dosti was a young lawyer who, according to OPC, had an impeccable record as a democrat, though I failed to see what evidence there could possibly be for such an assertion. Despite repeated requests, I never came face to face with Dosti. OPC, I was told, had to handle him very carefully because he scared easily. Fine leadership material!

If the National Committee in New York filled me with misgiving, I was just as depressed by the British nominee for the
leadership. He was a petty tribal chieftain named Abbas Kupi,
^*
an old friend of Julian Amery.
^†
From his photographs, I knew him to be whiskered and habitually armed to the teeth—made to measure for the exercise of British paternalism. I had no doubt that he could equal the feats of his ancestors in raiding unarmed caravans or sniping at heat-stricken Turkish infantrymen plodding hopelessly through the gorges. But I never shared the bemusement of the British gentleman at the sight of a tribesman. I am sure that tribal courage is legendary only in the sense that it is legend, and that the wild mountaineer is as brave as a lion only in the sense that the lion (very sensibly) avoids combat unless assured of weak opposition and a fat meal at the end of it. In short, if Dosti was a young weakling, Abbas Kupi was an old rascal. The interminable Anglo-American argument on their rival merits was intelligible only if one ignored the merits of the case and regarded it as a contest to decide whether the British or the Americans would dominate the counter-revolutionary government—if it was ever formed. When the British and Americans finally tired of the argument and looked around for a compromise, it was found that Dosti and Abbas Kupi had been so hardened in their attitudes by their respective sponsors that neither could be induced to serve under anyone else.

The day-to-day control of the operation was in the hands of a Special Policy Committee (SPC) which met in Washington. It consisted of four members, representing the State Department, the Foreign Office, OPC and SIS. The State Department appointed Bob Joyce, a convivial soul with experience of Balkan affairs; Earl Jellicoe, of the British Embassy, another convivial soul, represented the Foreign Office; Frank Lindsay, of OPC, was yet a third convivial soul; finally, there was myself. It is clear, from such a
membership, that our meetings were less than formal. Lindsay set the tone by remarking, at our first meeting, that the first Albanian he ever saw was hanging upside down from parallel bars. Even in our more serious moments, we Anglo-Saxons never forgot that out agents were just down from the trees. Although I have said that the SPC was in control of the operation, we could never act as free agents. Headquarters never allowed me to forget SIS’s commitment to Abbas Kupi, and, behind headquarters, there loomed the Bevin formula for veto: “I won’t ’ave it.” Doubtless, Frank Lindsay was similarly inhibited.

In such circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that the operation ever got off the ground. We did finally succeed in landing a small party on the Albanian coast with instructions to work their way inland, spy out the land, and then move southwards into Greece. It was hoped that the information they gathered on the way would help us in launching more ambitious schemes at a later date. The operation, of course, was futile from the beginning. Our infiltrators could achieve something only by penetrating the towns, which were firmly under Communist control. For bare survival, they had to hide in the mountains, where their presence would have been useful only if the country was seething with revolt. That, perhaps, was the unspoken assumption behind the whole venture, just as it was assumed more recently (when people should have known better) that a landing in the Bay of Pigs would set Cuba on fire. In the end, a few members of the party did succeed in straggling through to Greece, where they were extricated, with immense difficulty, from the clutches of the Greek security authorities who would have shot them for tuppence. The information they brought was almost wholly negative. It was clear, at least, that they had nowhere found arms open to welcome them.

In due course, the operation was quietly dropped without having made any noticeable dent on the regime in Tiranë. It was just as well for the British and American governments that their squib proved so damp. In the event of success, they would have had endless trouble with their new protégé, not to mention serious
difficulties with Greece and Yugoslavia and possibly Italy as well. Within a few years, Enver Hoxha
^*
had done the job much more effectively, and the headache is felt in Peking. The moral seems to be that it is better to cut one’s losses than give hostages to fortune. The same moral could be applied today to South-East Asia.

Political cross-purposes also bedevilled Anglo-American plans of greater potential importance than the Albanian venture; for instance, projects for the penetration and subversion of the Soviet Union itself. Both SIS and CIA had their Baltic puppets, whose rival ambitions were usually quite irreconcilable. It was with some relish that I watched the struggling factions repeatedly fight themselves to a standstill. On one occasion, the position got so dangerous that Harry Carr, the North European expert in Broadway, was sent to Washington in a desperate bid to stop the rot. His visit ended disastrously, with both Carr and his opposite numbers in CIA accusing each other, quite justifiably, of wholesale lying at the conference table. Disagreements over the Ukraine were even longer drawn out and just as stultifying.

From the years before the war, SIS had maintained contact with Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian Nationalist of marked Fascist views, and the collaboration had developed since the war. The trouble was that, although Bandera was quite a noise in the emigré community, his claims to a substantial following inside the Soviet Union were never seriously tested, except in the negative sense that nothing much ever came of them. A first party, equipped by the British with W/T
^†
and other clandestine means of communication, was sent into the Ukraine in 1949, and disappeared. Two more parties were
sent the following year, and remained equally silent. Meanwhile, the Americans were beginning to nurse serious doubts about Bandera’s usefulness to the West, which the failure of the British-sponsored parties to surface did nothing to allay.

The American attack on the alliance between Bandera and SIS gathered strength in 1950, and much of my time in the United States was spent in transmitting acrimonious exchanges between Washington and London on the rival merits of obscure emigré factions. CIA proffered three serious objections to Bandera as an ally. His extreme nationalism, with its Fascist overtones, was a handicap which would prejudice Western dealings with other groups inside the Soviet Union, for example, the Great Russians. He was alleged to have his roots in the old emigration and to lack all contact with the new, “more realistic” emigration which the Americans were busy cultivating. Finally, he was accused flatly of being anti-American. The British plea that Bandera was being used solely for the purpose of gathering intelligence, and that such a use could have no political significance, was brushed aside by the Americans, who argued that, whatever the nature of the connection, its very existence must inflate Bandera’s prestige in the Ukraine. They professed fears that any reinforcement of Bandera’s following must risk splitting the “resistance movement” in the Ukraine, with which they were themselves working.

The weakness of the American case was that it rested on bald statement, and very little else. The results produced by the “more realistic” emigration, and by the “resistance movement” in the Ukraine, were scarcely less meagre than the results of the British-Bandera connection. It is true that CIA claimed to have received some couriers from the Ukraine in the winter of 1949–50, but the wretched quality of their information suggested rather that they were tramps who had wandered into the wrong country. In 1951, after several years of hard work, CIA were still hoping to send in a political representative, with three assistants, to establish contact with the “resistance movement.” They had also scratched together
a reserve team of four men, to be sent in if the first party vanished without trace.

In order to resolve Anglo-American differences on the Ukrainian issue, CIA pressed for a full-scale conference with SIS, which was duly held in London in April 1951. Rather to my surprise, the British stood firm and flatly refused to jettison Bandera. The best that could be agreed, with unconcealed ill-temper on the American side, was that the situation would be re-examined at the end of the 1951 parachute-dropping season, by which time, it was hoped, more facts would be available. Within a month, the British had dropped three six-man parties, the aircraft taking off from Cyprus. One party was dropped midway between Lwów and Tarnopol; another near the headwaters of the Prut, not far from Kolomyya; and a third just inside the borders of Poland, near the source of the San. In order to avoid the dangers of overlapping and duplication, the British and Americans exchanged precise information about the timing and geographical co-ordinates of their operations. I do not know what happened to the parties concerned. But I can make an informed guess.

Some eight years later, I read of the mysterious murder of Bandera in Munich, in the American zone of Germany. It may be that, despite the brave stand of the British in his defence, CIA had the last word.

XI. T
HE
C
LOUDBURST

The FBI was in sorry shape when I reached Washington. It had caught a Tartar in the small person of Judith Coplon, a brilliant young woman employed in the Department of Justice, against whom they were trying to bring home espionage charges. When the evidence against her, obtained largely by illegal telephone-tapping, had hardened sufficiently to justify her arrest, Hoover sanctioned the necessary action and Coplon was pulled in. She was caught in the act of passing documents to a contact, and the case against her seemed open and shut. But in their haste the FBI had neglected to take out a warrant for her arrest, which was therefore in itself illegal. The FBI could only effect arrests without warrant if there was a reasonable presumption that the suspect was contemplating imminent flight. As Coplon was picked up in a New York street, walking away from a station from which she had just emerged, the purpose of imminent flight could not have been imputed to her by any conceivable stretch of imagination.