Shadow Warrior (19 page)

Charlie was, of course, working for Angleton, the two having become acquainted in postwar Italy. Through Charlie, Angleton kept in touch with Italians in the police force and government whom he had recruited in the late forties. Colby soon discovered that Charlie's independent communiqués to Washington were arguing against an opening to the left, taking the Luce-Angleton position that Nenni was just a stalking horse for Togliatti and, by association, Moscow. “The professional intelligence operators who managed him,” Colby wrote in his memoir, “to ensure that this direct truth reached policy levels, had arranged that his reports be forwarded in their raw form in sealed envelopes to Washington and laid on the desks of senior policy-level officials as the real story direct from the source.” According to one account, on one of Charlie's visits to Washington, John Foster Dulles's limousine rather melodramatically picked him up on a street corner so he could brief the secretary of state in private.
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In typical Colby fashion, Bill cultivated Charlie, flattered him, and deferred to him. They became friends. For Charlie, however, the station's political action chief seemed increasingly omnipresent. Could he see Charlie's latest dispatch? Who was he going to talk to next? Colby began to insist that Charlie's product was so important that it had to be disseminated more widely, beginning with the ambassador and the embassy's other political officer, then with the CIA station chief, and subsequently with the analytical staffs of the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence in Washington. “Charlie's material then reached all its proper readers,” Colby said, “but arrived without a special aura of mystery, and was put in proper proportion in the jigsaw puzzle collection of information needed to understand the variegated Italian political scene.”
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Angleton was annoyed, but there was little he could do. Colby could hardly be accused of suppressing Charlie's reports. The former Jedburgh understood that nothing was more dangerous in intelligence than allowing one person's views and information to be left unjuxtaposed against others. This would not be the last time Colby turned “need-to-know” against itself.

The conflict between Luce and Colby, civilized though it was, was fundamental. Colby spoke for liberal cold warriors who wanted to undercut
the PCI's appeal by growing center-left political coalitions that pursued social and economic reforms, which would in turn improve the lot of the working classes. Luce represented those Americans who equated socialism with communism, who insisted that the only viable economic model was free enterprise rooted in the private ownership of property. “She was extremely reactionary,” Senator J. William Fulbright, who had served in the House with Luce, later remarked. “Sort of like what you would associate with Louis XVI.” In 1955 and 1956, two successive Christian Democrat prime ministers, Giovanni Gronchi and Amintore Fanfani, threw their support behind the so-called Vanoni Plan, named for budget minister Ezio Vanoni. The scheme, based on the assumption that private industry and finance in Italy was too weak to generate sufficient economic growth, called for a vast expansion of public investments in housing and public works and the nationalization of some sectors of the economy. In his reports to Washington, Colby lauded the Vanoni Plan as a vehicle for the promotion of social and economic justice in Italy, absolutely vital to creating a lasting noncommunist majority. Luce could not have disagreed more. The Vanoni Plan, she declared, was actually a scheme to build a bridge between the Christian Democrats and the “pro-Communist socialists.”
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Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's February 1956 speech to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) attacked the “crimes of the Stalin era.” It seemed to herald the beginning of a reformist movement behind the Iron Curtain, possibly involving growing tolerance for dissent, respect for law, and even national self-determination. The speech was supposedly “secret,” intended only for the Kremlin's inner circle. By April, however, the CIA had managed to obtain not one but two copies of the potentially explosive address. Angleton acquired one through his network of Soviet émigré Jews, while Ray Cline, head of the Agency's research and analysis division, obtained one separately through a paid informant in Eastern Europe.
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Cline and Frank Wisner, Angleton's immediate superior, differed drastically on what to do with the purloined documents. During the 1952 presidential campaign, Secretary of State Dulles and leading Republicans had promised to “roll back” communism rather than just contain it, as Truman and the Democrats had advocated. Wisner and Angleton were enthusiastic supporters of roll-back; Cline and others in the foreign policy establishment
were more cautious, arguing that overt US support for uprisings in Soviet-bloc countries could easily lead to World War III. Angleton would later argue that he and Wisner wanted to delay publication of Khrushchev's speech until “secret armies” of anticommunist émigrés could be trained in West Germany to be unleashed at the appropriate moment. If it was not delayed, they said, the speech should be edited to create maximum consternation among the communist parties of Europe. Bill Colby was certainly not against rolling back the Iron Curtain, but his first priority was to save Western Europe from a communist takeover. He had become a convert to political action. He and like-minded figures within the CIA and the State Department wanted the speech published in full as a means to promote democracy in Italy, to commit Nenni and the Socialists—and perhaps even Togliatti and the PCI—to the democratic process and the rule of law. The liberals won this particular battle; CIA director Allen Dulles delivered a copy of the full text to the State Department, which in turn released it to the
New York Times
.
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The ultimate test of roll-back versus containment came in the fall of 1956. Nationalist and democratic elements in Poland and Hungary, in part inspired by the Khrushchev speech, began pressuring Soviet authorities for more autonomy and multiparty elections. The Kremlin managed to placate the Poles, but events in Hungary soon got out of hand. Roving bands of militant students and workers attacked government buildings, defaced symbols of Soviet power, and retaliated against members of the communist secret police. In the midst of this turmoil, the CIA-controlled Radio Free Europe broadcast calls to arms to the people of Hungary and implied that help was on the way. Emboldened by these promises of support, Hungarian nationalist leader Imre Nagy announced not only the formation of a coalition government, but also Hungary's intention to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet–East European alliance system. Faced with the collapse of their Eastern European empire—Americans were not the only ones who believed in the domino theory—Khrushchev and his generals acted. On November 4, Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest; during the fighting that ensued, some thirty thousand Hungarians and seven thousand Russians died. Newsreels showed freedom fighters in Budapest launching futile attacks against Soviet tanks with Molotov cocktails and small arms and then being cut down in the streets. To the end, the revolutionaries sent out urgent pleas for help.

Colby later wrote that Frank Wisner was ready to intervene in Hungary with arms, communications equipment, air resupply, and even exile fighters—“this was exactly the end for which the Agency's paramilitary capability was designed”—but the White House was unequivocal in its opposition. “Starkly,” Colby observed, “we demonstrated that ‘liberation' was not our policy when the chips were down in Eastern Europe as the price might have been World War III.”
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In truth, the CIA's so-called “secret armies” would have made no difference whatsoever: only full-scale military intervention by NATO could have forced the Soviets to withdraw. With French and British troops tied down by the Suez crisis, there was little support in the alliance for such a move; as Eisenhower was to observe afterward, there was about as much chance of assembling and inserting a major multinational force into Hungary as there was of sending in the military to aid Tibet.

Frank Wisner was one of the casualties of the uprising. He happened to be on an inspection tour of European CIA stations at the time. As the fighting in Budapest intensified, he rushed first to West Germany and then to Austria, where he stood at the border watching helplessly as Hungarian refugees flooded across. Some had been wounded. Indeed, “people [were] killed by the Russians as he stood there, in his sight,” recalled a colleague. “It was a profound shock.” Wisner rushed back to the embassy and frantically phoned Washington, pleading with the White House to commit troops. It was all to no avail. Later, in Rome, as the fighting continued to rage in Budapest, Wisner, a close friend of Clare Luce, made a point of attending Mass with Hungarian refugees. The ambassador recalled that he regularly returned from these outings dead drunk. By the time the maestro of the Mighty Wurlitzer returned to the United States, he was a nervous wreck and sick with hepatitis from eating tainted clams. He was, recalled a friend, “rambling and raving . . . totally out of control.” Three years later, Wisner was eased out as deputy director of plans, and in 1965 he took his own life, a victim of the delusion of roll-back.
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Appalled though he was by the Hungarian debacle, Colby moved immediately to make propaganda hay out of it. By 1956, the United States Information Service (USIS) employed a staff of 50 Americans and 250 Italians who labored in offices throughout the country writing newspaper articles, designing posters, and co-opting Italian journalists. Colby's operation worked hand-in-glove with the USIS. The cruel suppression of the
Hungarian uprising exposed the Soviets for what they were, ruthless imperialists rather than selfless sponsors of workers' paradises, proclaimed the anticommunist media in Italy. The Agency also arranged care for the refugees who poured across the border, as well as memorial services for fallen freedom fighters.
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The Hungarian uprising created turmoil within the communist and socialist parties in Western Europe, and in Italy it facilitated the efforts of those urging an opening to the left. Within the PSI, pressure mounted on Nenni and his followers to throw in their lot with the Christian Democrats and abandon the PCI now tainted even more than before by its association with Moscow, and through it, suppression of the Hungarian uprising. Clare Luce remained as adamant as ever, but a bizarre series of events sidelined her. In 1955, she had fallen ill, and she remained so. Her weekly meetings with Miller and Colby were transferred from her office to her equally ornate bedroom in the Villa Taverna, her residence. When she still did not improve, the ambassador's doctors ordered her home for tests and treatment. Suspecting foul play by the KGB or operatives of the PCI, Miller ordered a thorough investigation. The culprit turned out to be not a communist assassin but lead from paint chips that had fallen into her food during meals at the residence. She returned to Rome, but departed for good in December 1957.
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In April 1958, with the next round of national elections looming in Italy, Colby again pressed the issue of an opening to the left. “It is essential that dynamic and effective democratic government be possible in Italy,” he wrote to Washington. “This can hardly be the case if a powerful Communist Party is able to maintain its hold over the PSI. It is more than ever necessary to break this hold, splitting the PSI in such a way as to insure the maximum accession of strength to the forces of Democratic Socialism.” To his delight, Colby found that the tide was shifting. The new ambassador, James David Zellerbach, authorized direct talks with members of the Nenni wing of the PSI. The 1958 elections were indecisive, however, and it was not until 1963, during the Kennedy administration, that the opening to the left occurred. In that year, the PSI was admitted to the ruling coalition, and Pietro Nenni was named deputy prime minister.
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By 1958, Bill Colby was ready to move on. He had, he observed, been in Italy for five years—“long enough to have become knowledgeable about
the country, but not long enough to have become more oriented to it than to United States interests.” He was extremely proud of the political action operation he had headed. He believed fervently that in its struggle with the forces of international communism, Washington must do more than just damage its enemies; it must help its friends. US intervention in Italian political life may have been extralegal, but in his opinion, it was eminently moral. The Italian campaign, he wrote, “showed that the United States can conduct such a struggle on a political level rather than wait until it must be confronted on a military one.”
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Colby's Italian tour came to an end as a Cold War consensus was emerging within the United States. On the right were conservatives like Henry Luce, former isolationists who had decided that if the United States could not hide from the world, it must control it. They argued that the only way America could be safe in a hostile world was through a network of alliances and overseas military bases as well as through possession of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. On the left were liberal internationalists like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Senators J. William Fulbright and Hubert Humphrey, public intellectuals and political reformers who saw America's welfare as being tied to that of the other members of the international community. To a degree, they supported alliances and military aid, but in addition, they wanted to eliminate the social turmoil and economic deprivation that they perceived to be a breeding ground for Marxism-Leninism and an invitation to Sino-Soviet imperialism.

The CIA mirrored that division no less than the American polity as a whole. In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger, a former OSSer, published
The Vital Center
, which subsequently became the bible of anticommunist liberals. Schlesinger, who was as strongly anti-McCarthy as he was anti-Stalin, was in regular contact with senior officers of the CIA. At the other end of the ideological spectrum was James Burnham, a former Trotskyite turned fervent anticommunist. In
The Struggle for the World
, published in 1947, he depicted international communism as a conspiratorial movement bent on worldwide domination. His subsequent
Containment or Liberation?
was the definitive call for roll-back. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Burnham worked for the Office of Policy Coordination as a full-time consultant. Within the CIA, Colby was the personification of liberal internationalism, whereas Jim Angleton embodied the hardline, uncompromising approach of Burnham and the conservatives.
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