Shadow Warrior (16 page)

Colby's first priority in Stockholm was to establish his cover. In this Barbara, with her outgoing personality and social skills, proved an able ally. She immediately became active in the cultural and charitable work of the American community and established friendships with Swedish women at all social levels, from the Royal Court on down. Consistent with his cover job as a political officer, Bill wrote reports on Swedish political development. Meanwhile, at the endless rounds of receptions, cocktail parties, and lunches that typified the existence of a junior diplomat, Colby began spotting and recruiting Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians to be leaders and organizers of stay-behind nets. Some were government officials, some military officers, and some ordinary businesspeople. Having been recruited and then checked out, these partisans of the future generally had no more contact with Colby. Either the Agency sent over additional officers under separate cover, or Colby recruited members of the American community in Scandinavia to interact with the stay-behind nets, leaving instructions, maps, and cash in dead drops or meeting clandestinely in safe houses. Frequently Colby, undetected, would observe the contacts to make sure matters were proceeding smoothly. “The perfect operator in such operations is the traditional gray man, so inconspicuous that he can never catch the waiter's eye in a restaurant,” Colby later observed. And he prided himself that he was just such a man.
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It was in Scandinavia that Colby began a practice that endured through most of his career—using his family as cover. In Denmark, he identified a group of anticommunists who agreed to form the nucleus of a stay-behind net. The Agency subsequently dispatched a trainer to work with the cell. Meanwhile, Colby had received a shipment of the special crystal-powered miniature radios then favored by spies and saboteurs. He announced to Barbara and John that they were going to take a tour of Denmark's glorious historical castles. Colby recalled that the trunk of their car was so heavily
laden with radios that it barely cleared the ground. He held his breath as Swedish customs inspectors aboard the ferry connecting Sweden and Denmark eyed the car, but his diplomatic passport got the vehicle through without inspection. Driving between sights, Colby abruptly turned off on a dirt road leading into the woods. There he rendezvoused with the CIA trainer. Barbara and John took a stroll while the resistance novices unloaded the radios. John remembered that on Sundays in Stockholm, the family would go to church at the French embassy, one of the few places where Catholic services were held. “The Russian Orthodox priests there, monks, would serve us hot chocolate after Mass,” he recalled, “and the old man would go upstairs.” The wait seemed endless. “He was running nets out of there.”
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As he had been warned, Colby found Sweden an incomparably more difficult place in which to work than Norway and Denmark. The country's institutionalized neutrality was the most formidable obstacle, but there were others. Anticommunists inside and outside of the Swedish government, some of them in the national intelligence service, had formed their own underground, and Colby had to be careful not to step on toes. And then there was the pro-fascist organization Sveaborg, which had collaborated with the Nazis during the war. Its members were more than happy to join a stay-behind net, but Colby avoided them because of their disdain for constitutional government, not to mention the bad publicity that would ensue should it become known that the CIA was hobnobbing with fascists. The decision was prescient: Shortly after Colby left for his next post, the Swedish government arrested and tried the head of the Sveaborg operation, Otto Halburg, for plotting a right-wing revolution. These difficulties notwithstanding, Sweden's stay-behind network grew to anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 operatives during the time Colby worked in Stockholm.
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In the early 1950s, Sweden teemed with emigrants from countries overrun by the Soviets, especially the Baltic states, Poland, Hungary, and Romania. Colby cultivated this community assiduously, hoping to gain useful bits of information on life behind the Iron Curtain. “I found it an exhilarating experience to develop friendships with exiled East European cabinet ministers, dissident intellectuals, and would-be political leaders,” he later recalled.
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But there was more to the contacts than mutual admiration. In each of the countries and regions in question, there were various resistance
and dissident groups. The CIA used the exiles to communicate with and encourage these anti-Soviet elements, sometimes with tragic results.

Soon after Colby arrived in Stockholm, he began cultivating a promising source, a Romanian expatriate. One evening in the spring of 1952, he paid a visit to the man in his high-rise apartment. The conversation seemed routine, but later, as Colby was getting into his car to leave, he heard a loud thud behind him. The Romanian had jumped out of his upper-level window, killing himself. Communist agents had learned of his contacts with the CIA and were threatening to liquidate family members he had left behind the Iron Curtain.
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Because of his experience as a Jedburgh, Colby was asked to help the Soviet Bloc Division and MI-6 recruit and train East European exiles who were to be dropped into Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. There they would link up with anti-Soviet resistance networks and engage in acts of espionage and sabotage. The 1950s were the heyday of covert operations, even after Bedell Smith merged the OPC and the OSO. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, paramilitary teams had been dropped behind North Korean and Chinese lines to organize attacks on enemy formations and installations. CIA agents worked closely with Chiang Kai-shek's forces to train and insert guerrilla fighters into mainland China. In the Philippines, the soon-to-be-famous Edward Lansdale was advising President Raymond Magsaysay as he put down the communist-led Hukbalahap rebellion. In Vietnam, the Agency ran two stations, one collaborating with the French, the country's colonial ruler, and the other with a Catholic nationalist named Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1953, the CIA would help overthrow left-leaning governments in Guatemala and Iran.
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Colby's piece of the paramilitary war on communism proved to be a disaster. Virtually every dissident and paramilitary group behind the Iron Curtain had been penetrated by the NKVD or the security apparatus of the communist East European government in question. Colby found himself in charge of a four-man team of Latvians who had escaped into West Germany and then made their way to Sweden. After being given the entire Jedburgh treatment, the team was dropped into Latvia only to be immediately rolled up. In the fall of 1952, Max Klose, a German under contract to the CIA, inserted a four-man team into Lithuania by boat and was subsequently able to extract only a single agent. Unbeknownst to him and
Colby, all four were communist operatives. “I went down to the airfield each time an agent team was about to be inserted into a target country to do a final check of their equipment and to wish them good luck,” recalled an army officer assigned to Colby's operation. “[N]one of those I was responsible for made contact [with their CIA handlers] after being inserted.”
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It was not as if Colby and his colleagues did not know what to expect. During his stint in Sweden, an Estonian exile, a female journalist, pointed out to the former Jedburgh that there were vast differences between the Nazi and Soviet occupations. In their obsession with the notion of a master race, the Germans had not been interested in converting the subjugated. What the Nazi occupying authorities required was that the subject populations not challenge authority and that they perform the jobs assigned to them to support the war economy. By contrast, the Soviets and their satellite governments were profoundly ideological. They were determined to control every aspect of peoples' lives, even their thoughts. Each citizen behind the Iron Curtain was called upon to spy on his or her neighbors, reporting any suspicious activity to the state police. Those CIA-trained agents who parachuted into communist nations could not count on a receptive population ready to welcome them and rise up in revolt. States like Estonia, Poland, and North Vietnam became known as “denied areas.” One US intelligence officer labeled them “counterintelligence states” because of their overriding attention to internal security and population control. Colby found this picture “chilling,” he wrote in his memoirs, and he remembered wondering at the time whether “we had to think in new and revolutionary terms.”
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In his actions in Scandinavia and subsequently in Italy and Vietnam, Colby gave no indication that he had fallen out of love with the Jedburgh model, however. He would have agreed with Paul Hartman, a Riga-born CIA officer, who, when challenged over the sacrifice of so many brave men and women, commented, “It's all part of our mission.”
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D
espite its proximity to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Stockholm was still a sideshow in Cold War Europe. The real action was in Berlin, Rome, and Vienna. Thus, when Gerry Miller, relegated to Rome station chief after the consolidation of the OPC and the OSO, offered Colby a position on the Italian front in the summer of 1953, he promptly accepted.

It would be difficult to exaggerate Italy's importance in the thinking of US strategists and policymakers during the decade following World War II. The architects of the anticommunist alliance perceived Italy—strategically located athwart the Mediterranean Basin and a historic crossroads connecting Europe with the Middle East and Asia—to be the keystone in NATO's southern arch. If the nation succumbed to the forces of international communism, the rest of Western Europe would be in grave peril.

Two years after the end of World War II, the Christian Democrats of Italian prime minister Alcide De Gasperi headed a tenuous coalition government that included representatives of all Italian factions, including the Italian Communist Party (PCI). The key to the political and strategic situation was Italy's near economic collapse. The country's industrial heart in the north had survived the war relatively unscathed, but it was starved of the raw materials it needed to operate. Axis and Allied bombing had devastated Italy's highways and railroads and sunk its merchant marine. De Gasperi's government faced a deficit of some 600 billion lire. An economically distraught Italy would continue to be vulnerable to a communist
takeover and unable to shoulder its responsibilities as a future member of NATO even if it remained in the Western camp.
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In the spring of 1947, under intense pressure from the United States, De Gasperi kicked the Communists out of his coalition. In September, Palmiro Togliatti, a founding member of the PCI who had spent the war in exile in Moscow, announced to his followers in Modena that if the other parties continued to reject the Communists as a partner, they might have to take up arms against the government. American intelligence estimated that the Communist resistance in Italy could call on up to 50,000 well-armed and seasoned fighters who could be supplied and reinforced by Josef Broz Tito's Communist regime in neighboring Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, the Truman administration threatened military intervention in case of a Communist insurrection. Thus did Italy's national elections of 1948 take on enormous significance. The PCI had every reason to feel confident. By the end of 1945, the party could count 1,760,000 members. By the end of the following year, membership stood at 2,166,000. Posters of Stalin, affectionately known as
Baffone
(“Walrus moustache”), could be seen in factories and on city walls all over Italy.
²

On April 18, 1948, the centrist parties handed the left a clear electoral defeat. The Christian Democrats won an absolute majority in parliament and, with the support of the Liberals and the Social Democrats under Giuseppe Saragat, formed a relatively stable government. The Communists, and the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), under Pietro Nenni, were shut out of power. But 1948 would prove to be a mere prologue to the real drama.

Despite his inflammatory rhetoric, Togliatti made the decision to keep the struggle in Italy within constitutional bounds, to establish Communist Party control through the electoral process rather than by force of arms. This approach was not universally popular with his compatriots. In the summer of 1948, Togliatti survived an assassination attempt by militants within the PCI who were disgusted with his pacifism. His near martyrdom, his continuing commitment to electoral politics, and Italians' growing resentment at America's increasingly heavy-handed intervention in Italy proved very advantageous to the PCI. Meanwhile, De Gasperi was proving to be an irresolute and ineffective leader. Despite Marshall Plan aid, Italy continued to wallow in the economic doldrums. Amid poor economic reports and evidence of widespread government corruption, the Social Democrats quit the governing coalition, while on the right monarchists and
neo-fascists stepped up their attacks on De Gasperi, demanding, among other things, that he outlaw the PCI.
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In the meantime, a major shift in US policy toward Italy had taken place. In 1951 the newly established Psychological Strategy Board declared that the communist threats in Italy and France were more than just a matter of political extremism flourishing in climates of social and economic unrest; the communist parties there were part of a Sino-Soviet threat to subvert free governments everywhere. The United States would have to move beyond mere economic and military aid and fight the enemy on its own terms, making full use of the dark arts—espionage, propaganda, misinformation, front organizations, and
agents provocateur
. The creation of the CIA's Mighty Wurlitzer was in no small part a response to the situation in Italy. In this, as in other foreign policy matters, there was more continuity than discontinuity between the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. NSC 5411, a policy document that President Eisenhower approved in 1953, called “for all practicable means” to reduce the strength and effectiveness of the PCI. To implement this policy, Eisenhower selected Clare Boothe Luce—actress, playwright, former congresswoman, and wife of Time/Life publisher Henry Luce—as ambassador to Italy.
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