Spies and Traitors by Michael Holzman

Author:Michael Holzman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2021-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

In other words, about the time he became Director of Central Intelligence, Dulles created a unique position of power within the Agency for James Angleton. Angleton’s responsibilities, and his actions, were those “as assigned” by Allen Dulles, as they would be by his successors, especially Richard Helms, until William Colby became Director of Central Intelligence nearly twenty years later.

* * *

Matthew M. Aid, a somewhat controversial national security historian, wrote that the CIA’s Soviet Russia (SR) division and MI-6 attempted to infiltrate agents into the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s in an operation called Redsox, or Red Sox. The parallel effort to recruit Soviet officials who were outside the Soviet Union was called Red Cap (or Redcap). A joint CIA/MI-6 anti-Soviet operation in the late 1940s would likely have involved Frank Wisner of OPC and Kim Philby of MI-6’s Section IX. According to Aid there were operations in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belorussia, the Ukraine, and Russia itself. As with the Albanian operation, the “Redsox” operations were failures. Again, according to Aid, beginning in September 1949: “more than 85 agents, all of them Russian nationals… were infiltrated into the Soviet Union by the CIA…The number of agents infiltrated into the USSR by Britain’s MI-6 is not known… but it is believed to be roughly comparable to the CIA’s numbers, if not slightly higher.” All, or nearly all, of these agents “disappeared.” “It was not until 1952… that CIA and MI-6 counterintelligence officers began to suspect that their agents reporting from behind the Iron Curtain had been ‘doubled.’ ”13 The effort of Soviet intelligence in this endeavor was no doubt facilitated in the early days of the operations, and perhaps later, by Kim Philby.

The counter-attack in this war of spy vs. spy came in Germany. Paul Maddrell found that early in 1955 the German Democratic Republic’s secret intelligence organization, the Stasi, arrested people connected with Radio in the American Sector (of Berlin). With the assistance of Philby and Blake, five of MI-6’s networks were rolled up. “On 31 March 1955 the Security Commission of the SED Politburo approved the programme of arrests of British agents, which was thereupon carried out very swiftly… In a public statement on 12 April the Council of Ministers announced the arrest of ‘521 agents of secret services…’ ”14 It was said by Robin Winks that by this point, at the latest, clandestine services chief Frank Wisner and James Angleton had dual responsibility for Red Sox/Red Cap.15 Again according to William Corson: “In the several months between Poznan [28–30 June 1956] and Gomulka’s election [20 October], the CIA pushed ahead with plans for uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania, in that order.

Red Sox/Red Cap groups, like latter-day Trojan Horse forces, were inserted into those nations’ capitals and plans were made final for the ‘freedom fighters’ to throw off the evil yoke of communism… On October 23, just two days after Khrushchev’s order to the Red Army to stand down [in Poland], the Hungarian revolt against the Soviet-dominated regime began.

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