Shadow Warrior (15 page)

In November 1950, when he became a full-fledged employee of the CIA, Colby was aware of these schisms, but he was part of the A-team, part of the “Mighty Wurlitzer,” as Wisner (one of the few non–Ivy Leaguers at the top rungs of the Agency) referred to the OPC. To Colby's and Wisner's generation, the term “Wurlitzer” (from the Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, maker of musical instruments) conjured up images not only of jukeboxes but also of giant theater organs, such as the one at Radio City Music Hall. It was, as its designers intended, a “one-man orchestra.” It seemed as if there were as many keys in Wisner's instrument as there were in a Wurlitzer organ. The OPC's mandate was to duplicate what the Soviets were doing and beat them at their own game. This meant boosting anti-communist propaganda in countries at risk, with the CIA subsidizing pro-Western newspapers and exploiting sympathetic American correspondents.
It meant Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, CIA-funded broadcast networks whose messages were designed to sow the seeds of unrest behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains. It meant paramilitary actions intended to block communist ascents to power in Third World countries and, occasionally, to subvert communist governments already established there. It meant, especially in the 1950s, the creation of “front” organizations that would fight communist activists for control of women's and veterans' organizations, labor unions, youth groups, lawyers' associations, and cultural organizations. In 1949, the OPC employed some three hundred officers with a budget of $4.7 million. By 1952, those numbers had grown to 2,812 and $82 million, respectively. This was Wisner's “Mighty Wurlitzer.”
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Colby had assumed that he would be assigned to the “Far East,” as East Asia was then called, because of his Chinese-language skills, but Gerry Miller had hired him, and Miller headed the Western European Division of the OPC. Soon after Colby began reporting to the Reflecting Pool huts, Miller told his newest recruit that he was being assigned to the Scandinavian Division. The NORSO experience had trumped Tientsin.

Among its myriad tasks, the CIA in 1950 was planning for a possible Soviet invasion and occupation of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Those who had run Jedburgh and NORSO during World War II concluded that it would be far easier and more efficient to recruit, fund, equip, and train an underground resistance force before a particular country was overrun than afterward. Parachuting in men, money, and equipment after the fact was not the ideal way to raise a partisan resistance. The Agency wanted trained, equipped, and well-led anticommunist guerrilla forces at the ready even before the Red Army arrived. Colby's assignment was to use his knowledge of the area and its people to set up these “stay-behind nets,” as they were called. To prepare for his new post, he was given a desk in the middle of one of the busiest corridors in the OPC building.

While he mulled over the current intelligence from Scandinavia, Colby had to learn to become a spy. His duties with the OPC would only slightly resemble those he had performed for the OSS. The first order of business was to sign a secrecy agreement, a lifetime pledge not to reveal any classified information relating to the activities of the CIA. Because of his background, Colby was spared “fluttering,” the Agency term for a lie-detector
test. Neither did he have to undergo parachute training—which the new DCI, General Walter Bedell Smith, had ordered for all new recruits so there would be no macho pecking order. Colby was also spared paramilitary training at “The Farm,” the special CIA training facility that had been set up at Camp Peary, about 100 miles south of Washington. But he did have to learn “tradecraft,” as the skills of intelligence were referred to in the West. The Russians called these skills the “rules of conspiracy,” but the basic concepts were the same.
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Colby received instruction on how to pass messages by way of dead-letter drops (where the message is left by one spy in a secret location, and picked up later by another) and cut-out agents (intermediaries), how to set up clandestine meetings, and how to handle safe houses, manipulate the chemicals used in invisible writing, shake tails, and use miniature cameras and other James Bond–type equipment. Then there was tutelage on the complicated and extremely important process of recruiting agents in an assigned country. The CIA officer, operating undercover as a diplomatic or military official attached to the American embassy, would scour the population for potential agents, usually beginning with government officials of the host country encountered at cocktail parties and receptions. Anticommunist sympathies were the best indicators of a prospective informant, but personal peccadilloes or a simple lust for money would do in a pinch. The CIA recruiter would then have the Agency run an extensive background check on the mark. If he or she passed, a third party would be brought in to make the pitch; if something went wrong, the CIA officer stationed in-country would be protected. Once an agent had been recruited, his case officer would test him by assigning him to collect information on something the Agency had already investigated. If the information checked out, the recruit was in. He was then asked to sign a document connecting him to the CIA so he could be blackmailed if he got cold feet. If the information did not check out, however, the recruit was assumed to be either a con man or an agent of the Soviet or East European security services. According to Victor Marchetti, a former CIA operative who wrote the classic exposé
The Cult of Intelligence
, a good case officer had to “combine the qualities of a master spy, a psychiatrist, and a father confessor.”
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Of the relationship between handler and recruit, there were two prevailing philosophies within the Agency. In the “buddy” system, the handler developed a close personal relationship with his mark, convincing him that
they were working together on a common goal and invoking personal loyalty as the risks and doubts mounted. Critics of this approach argued that it made the handler emotionally vulnerable. In their view, the best relationship was a purely detached one in which the handler treated the recruit as a commodity to be used, getting the most out of him as possible, and then discarding him. Colby claimed to have preferred the former and to have been “distressed” by the latter: “[T]rust and friendship . . . were the keys to successful secret collaboration,” he wrote. Yet trust and friendship were not always in the offing, and success was relative. He would recruit and use men and women throughout his career, relying on friendship and appeals to altruism, and then send some to their deaths in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe and communist North Vietnam. If the enemy was to be defeated, the heroes would have to adopt some of the methods of the antiheroes. In his novel
Harlot's Ghost
, in which he explored the world of espionage, Norman Mailer has one character remark, “If a good man is not ready to imperil his conscience, then the battlefield will belong to those who manipulate history for base ends.” There were certainly limits on how far the CIA would go in using the methods of its adversary, however; if an agent backed out on the NKVD [the Soviet intelligence apparatus], it might very well kill his family.
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What Colby would find most challenging was leading a double life in the field. There was his existence as a spy, an agent provocateur, a clandestine operative. He was engaged in work vital to America and the entire free world, battling an enemy without scruple and in command of vast human, industrial, and natural resources. The world of officer and agent was a shadowy one where things were often not what they seemed. And yet, he was also a family man, a churchgoing Catholic trying to lead a normal life with normal relationships. He was a man of integrity, and yet his job was rife with deception and manipulation. In the tumult, it was sometimes easy to become disoriented. As reality is to dream, so one life was to the other, but which was which? Bill Colby did not despair; he was confident of his own internal moral compass, and he trusted his self-discipline and sense of duty. He was a man who could distinguish between illusion and reality. Or so he convinced himself.

Early in 1951, Gerry Miller called Colby in and told him that he was being sent to Stockholm, Sweden, to build an OPC presence. The first order of
business was to establish a cover, a particularly difficult part of the job for American intelligence officers. In totalitarian societies, where the state controlled all bureaucracies, public and private, the left hand was used to not knowing what the right was up to. The NKVD, for example, could order any Soviet government agency or corporation to provide cover and support for its operatives. In a sense, the entire governmental apparatus and society were extensions of Soviet intelligence. In Western democracies, establishing cover was a bit more difficult. The United States, in particular, was a remarkably open society with no history of institutionalized peacetime intelligence. CIA personnel attached to embassies as cultural attachés or assigned to work for corporations overseas were bound to stick out if they underperformed or performed in an unusual manner. Their peers were bound to talk. It was decided that Colby's public job would be the Foreign Service; he was to be attached to the American embassy in Stockholm as a junior political officer in the Foreign Service reserve, a category established for bureaucrats from agencies other than State who were temporarily working abroad. In April, Bill, Barbara, John, Catherine, and baby Carl deplaned for Sweden.
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As a Cold War battlefield, Scandinavia was particularly complex. Denmark and Norway were part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), firmly in the Western camp. Sweden clung to its official and traditional neutrality, a stance that had sheltered it during two world wars. Because of its proximity to the Soviet Union, Finland had to defer in its foreign policy to its huge neighbor. Denmark and Norway could, with CIA help and advice, build their own stay-behind nets, but in Sweden the process would have to go on without official government cooperation. Finland was generally considered too risky an environment for covert networks. Colby had expected to be sent to Norway, but Sweden was more centrally located and a more difficult assignment. In his instructions, Miller had stressed the need for absolute secrecy. If the OPC's activities in Denmark and Norway were revealed, questions would arise concerning state sovereignty. Moreover, one possible interpretation of the construction of the stay-behind nets was that NATO had given up on Scandinavia as a lost cause in the event of a Soviet invasion. The problems in Sweden were more obvious. Colby's efforts to develop stay-behind nets throughout Scandinavia, if made public, would be seen as a threat to Swedish neutrality. In all three—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—the governments in question would have to disavow the Agency's efforts to build an anti-Soviet
resistance if they became known. The region was fertile ground for Soviet espionage: Finland and Sweden hosted large Soviet embassies, and all of Scandinavia was rife with communist front organizations.
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Colby later recalled that he got on well with his Office of Special Operations (OSO) counterpart in Stockholm, mainly because he generally deferred to him. But the relationship between the spies (OSO) and the covert operatives (OPC) was strained nonetheless. Scandinavia, and especially Sweden, teemed with exiles from the three Baltic states that the Soviet Union had annexed following World War II. Harry Rositzke, chief of the OSO's Soviet Bloc Division, mounted a major operation to insert agents into the former states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania and from there into Russia. In each of these new Soviet republics, there were active, well-organized partisan movements clamoring for help from the United States and its allies. Covert operations belonged to the OPC, Wisner and Miller argued, but the OSO resisted, fearing that the knuckle-draggers and cowboys would blow their cover. If matters were not complicated enough, there was also the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI-6). Harry Lambton Carr, controller of the northern area for MI-6, had his own network of spies and operatives. In April, just before moving his family to Stockholm, Colby had accompanied Rositzke on a trip to London to coordinate CIA operations with the British and other relevant members of NATO.
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In October 1950, after the CIA failed to predict the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, Roscoe Hillenkoetter had been replaced as director of the CIA by General Walter Bedell Smith, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and General Eisenhower's chief of staff during World War II. Nicknamed “Beatle,” Smith was an intense, demanding individual, his naturally gruff demeanor exacerbated by acute stomach ulcers. “His temperament is even,” remarked a subordinate. “He is always angry.” Smith was a plain-spoken midwesterner who resented the empire being built by Frank Wisner and his upper-class, Ivy League friends. He had never put much stock in psychological warfare, unconventional warfare, or covert operations of any sort. The Agency's second director was determined that it stick to intelligence collection and analysis. “If you send me one more project with goddamned balloons,” he once yelled at a subordinate, using his synonym for any type of gadgetry, “I'll throw you out of here.” The new DCI much preferred the more modest and reserved officers of the OSO
to the men of the OPC. In August 1952, Smith announced that he was merging the OPC and the OSO to form a new division, the Directorate of Plans. To head the new entity, he brought on board Allen Dulles, a former OSS spymaster in Europe and a member of one of the most powerful clans in America. Wisner would report to Dulles, as would his counterpart, Richard Helms, newly appointed head of what had been the OSO. For Wisner, this amounted to a “severe double demotion.”
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