The Ghost Read online

  Angleton was learning how deception operations could shape the battlefield of powerful nations at war.

  * * *

  PERDITA MACPHERSON HAD ALREADY started working at the OSS offices on Ryder Street when Angleton turned up late one winter afternoon. He looked lean and taut, with a long-distance runner’s build, she thought. He had cavernous cheekbones and black hair. After a cursory hello, he flung open files and drawers and started pulling out, leafing, and thumbing through papers. He had marvelous hands, she noticed: long, nervous, and expressive.

  Perdita found him to be sensitive and knowledgeable and demanding.

  “He proceeded to dictate a report of immense length, depth, and complexity,” she remembered. “Leaning back in his chair, leaping up suddenly to pace like a panther. He quoted poetry … to strengthen an argument, to dramatize a point.”

  Macpherson liked Angleton, and she loved her job. The Yanks and Brits, the servicemen and civilians, SIS and OSS, all brisk banter and good cheer, working together in cramped quarters, going about their business of defeating the bloody Nazis. One of them was Angleton’s friend, the affable Kim Philby, clad casually in a leather bomber jacket and exuding bonhomie with an endearing stammer.

  “A real charmer,” she recalled decades later. “So calm. So reliable.”70

  * * *

  AS THE HEAD OF the X-2 Italy desk, Angleton was cleared for ULTRA material. He sent coded messages to the OSS station in Rome. With Macpherson’s help, he prepared targeting material to be used as Allied forces entered the city of Florence in September 1944. The result, one memo noted, was “the speedy liquidation of a pre-arranged set of CE [counterespionage] targets,” sixteen in all.71 Angleton had become a lethal man.

  In the face of danger, he was unmoved. After the Allied invasion at Normandy, the Germans stepped up their blitz of London with buzz bombs, also known as “doodlebugs,” which announced their imminent arrival with a sizzling sound that suddenly ceased as the bomb fell toward its target.

  “Whatever the name, the worst thing yet,” Perdita Macpherson recalled. “Whenever one of them sputtered to a halt, my heart stopped. My typewriter stopped too.”72

  After the ensuing explosion, Angleton would look up at her quizzically and ask, “Is anything the matter?”

  Angleton took a dim view of the females of the species, she noticed. “He censured my feminine traits, as he saw them,” she recalled. “Lack of dedication, subjective thinking, faulty logic. And my problems, my endless problems; why did I have so many problems?”

  One day, Angleton opined that Perdita wasn’t working hard enough. Exasperated by the endless hours at the office, followed by standing on line to get a stale loaf of bread, she exploded.

  “I told him I’d been fighting this war longer than he had,” she recalled. “That I was tired of counter-espionage, and just plain tired.”

  Perdita took a holiday with friends in Cornwall, wondering what kind of reception might be awaiting her when she returned to Ryder Street. She was surprised.

  “Jim was a person transformed,” she said. “Luminous, effulgent. He hugged me and spun me all around. Cicely had borne him a son.… The rest of our days hummed along in sunny warmth. His commission came through. I had a spruce new lieutenant on my hands, as well as a new father. He was posted to Rome.”

  BLACK PRINCE

  ANGLETON HURRIED UP TO the villa in Milan. Accompanying him toward the safe house was an Italian friend, Capt. Carlo Resio, a trusted naval officer, and a new acquaintance, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese. A commanding man, not yet forty years old, with a bold nose and a knowing squint in his eye, Borghese was perhaps the most famous fascist military commander in Italy. All three men knew that Borghese’s life was in danger.

  It was May 11, 1945, and the world was changing fast. Franklin Roosevelt had been dead for a month, Benito Mussolini for two weeks, Adolf Hitler for less than two. Germany had just surrendered three days before to the Allied forces of the United States and Great Britain. In northern Italy, the leftist partisans of the Committee for the Liberation of Italy were calling on the people to vanquish the fascists. Retribution was coming swiftly. Bodies were appearing on the streets of Milan.

  Angleton, at twenty-seven years of age, was canny and well trained, already a student of power. He would later insist that he did not care for Borghese’s fascist ideas, only for the tangible assistance he gave the U.S. government, a distinction that would prove not to make much of a difference.

  The three men entered the villa and closed the door behind them.

  * * *

  JUNIO VALERIO BORGHESE, ANGLETON’S companion that day, was one of the few standouts in Italy’s feckless military performance in World War II. He came from a family with a storied name and a dissipated fortune. As a young man, Borghese was inspired by Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, which brought the Fascist Party to power. He joined the navy, married a countess, and became a submarine commander. He fought with Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, where his prowess in clandestine naval warfare won him the command of the prestigious Tenth Light Flotilla, also known as the Decima Mas. When Italy entered World War II, Borghese pioneered the use of speedboats, midget submarines, and frogmen. He had even planned an attack on U.S. ships in New York Harbor.73

  When Rome capitulated to the incoming Allied forces in September 1943, Mussolini retreated north under the protection of the German army. Borghese joined him. He converted the maritime Decima Mas into a land-based fighting force. Thousands rallied under his banner, responding to his creed of God, home, and family. By the end of 1944, the Decima Mas had more than ten thousand men under arms.74

  The motto of the Decima Mas was MAS: Memento Audere Semper, “Remember Always to Dare.”75 Borghese dared to defend the Nazis. When Gen. Karl Wolff, the German commandant for the region, directed Borghese to launch a war of reprisals against the partisans, Borghese obliged without hesitation or pity.

  In the village of Borgo Ticino on August 18, 1944, a lieutenant under Borghese’s command announced the Decima Mas response to a partisan attack on a convoy that killed three German soldiers. He wanted four Italians killed for every dead German, and he selected his victims at random from the town’s residents. To underscore his point, the lieutenant decided to add a thirteenth man on a whim. All were executed on the spot.76

  For the Decima Mas’s promiscuous reliance on torture, rape, looting, summary executions, and collective punishment, Borghese gained a title he did nothing to discourage: the Black Prince.

  * * *

  IT WAS IN WARTIME Rome that the legend of James Angleton was born. Assuming command responsibilities for OSS counterintelligence, he made an immediate impression. His mission was daunting. Occupied Italy had to be cleansed of German informants left behind by the Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party and sister organization of the more notorious Gestapo. It was Angleton’s job to identify, catch, and interrogate so-called line crossers, German spies who sought to collect order-of-battle information on the advancing Allied forces.77 From London, the reliable Kim Philby kept him supplied with the all-important Bletchley Park decrypts of what the German high command was planning.78

  His father’s contacts helped. Hugh Angleton had taken his family back to the United States in December 1941 to escape the coming war. He enlisted in the U.S. Army’s School of Military Government in Virginia, which was planning for the occupation of Italy and Germany. Hugh Angleton was assigned to the staff of Gen. Mark Clark, the commander of the U.S. invasion of Italy. He returned to Italy with the U.S. invasion forces in August 1943. After the royalist government surrendered in September 1943 and Mussolini fled north, the Americans took control of the southern part of the country.

  Hugh Angleton, calling on friends in business and government, served as an OSS representative in discussions with leaders of the Italian military, intelligence services, and police. The American collaboration with elements connected to the Fascist Party an
d regime—court prefects, police chiefs, and local leaders—was part of a deliberate choice made by the Allies to create conservative coalitions to oppose Italy’s left-wing political factions, especially the Communists and the labor movement.79

  In his new job, Angleton followed his father’s political path.

  * * *

  IN ROME, ANGLETON WORKED out of a three-story office building on the via Sicilia that also housed the offices of the British SIS and U.S. Army Counterintelligence. In OSS communications his code name was ARTIFICE.

  From the ULTRA intercepts, he knew the Germans were planning to retreat north and leave their Italian allies behind in strategic centers. Other information suggested that Valerio Borghese would be responsible for the organization that the Nazis were leaving behind. Angleton crafted a scheme he called Plan IVY to dismantle the German intelligence and sabotage networks north of Florence. The plan relied on Captain Resio, a frigate commander and top official in the Italian naval intelligence agency.80 Angleton gave him the seaworthy code name SALTY.

  Resio provided Angleton with an understanding of what Borghese and his Decima Mas shock troops wanted. His SALTY reports dealt primarily with two themes: One was the threat of Communist insurgency in northern Italy and the Soviet Union’s support for the same; the other, the existence of a fascist residue that had to be excised from the otherwise-worthy leadership of the Italian security services.

  When Angleton sent these reports to X-2 headquarters in London, the response was dubious. The Soviet Union was an ally against the German-Italian axis. The Italian navy’s intelligence service, his colleagues cautioned, had long been considered royalist and anti-Soviet: “Therefore, it seems possible that this information may well be in the nature of a propaganda plant.”81

  Angleton disagreed.

  * * *

  PLAN IVY WAS JUST one aspect of the OSS effort to disable and dismantle the German and Italian intelligence networks on behalf of the Allied armies. From the OSS station in Bern, Switzerland, Allen Dulles, a former State Department official turned Wall Street attorney, had opened private lines of communication in early 1945 with General Wolff about the possibility of surrender.

  Dulles, an amoral pipe-smoking schemer, had long experience with—and high regard for—a number of German businessmen and financiers. Dulles regarded the rise of the Nazis as an unfortunate aberration that should not taint the reputation of the good Germans who did not support them. While President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were insisting on unconditional Nazi surrender, Dulles had a different idea: a separate peace with responsible Germans to end the war more quickly. If Wolff and others broke with Hitler and ceased fighting, Dulles intimated they would be treated well by the victorious Allies.

  Dulles called it Operation Sunrise. It was designed to blunt the advance of Communist forces in Europe. The Soviet army was advancing from the east toward Austria. Communist-led partisans were vanquishing the fascist regimes in the Balkans and they were surging in Italy. Dulles predicted that Hitler and his most loyal followers would retreat to Bavaria, where they would fight to the end. Angleton followed Dulles’s lead.

  “Around February 1945,” Angleton later recalled, “the OSS learned from very reliable sources that the Nazi regime was setting up a plan for the creation of a last zone of resistance in Austria, after the complete destruction of northern Italy by its retreating troops. This ‘scorched earth’ policy, which would have cost Italy all her ports, her factories and her lines of communication, was intended to create a ‘revolutionary situation’ which could have resulted in an encounter between the Soviets and the Western allies from which Hitler hoped to profit.”82

  The goal of Angleton’s Plan IVY was to convince Borghese not to join in any plans for a “scorched earth” retreat. If the Decima Mas commander and his men were spared the ignominy of surrender, northern Italy would not be razed. To make contact with Borghese, Angleton chose Commander Antonio Marceglia, a former member of the Decima Mas.83 Marceglia relayed Angleton’s offer to Borghese.

  “If he agreed to cooperate with the allies and line up his units to prevent the Germans from blowing up the port, he would be saved from the partisans who planned to gun him down in the streets of Milan.”84

  Borghese warily agreed. He provided the Americans with detailed maps of explosive mines laid in the port of Livorno. Then he surrendered, or, as he preferred to put it, demobilized. The men of the Decima Mas laid down their arms and flag at five o’clock on the afternoon of April 26, 1945, in a ceremony in their barracks at Fiume Square in Milan.85

  Suddenly, the fascist collapse came faster and was uglier than anyone had expected. Angleton had received the sickening news at his office in Rome. Benito Mussolini, his mistress, Clara Petacci, and three of his top men were dead, captured by the partisans at Lake Como and executed. To prove the fascists were truly dead, the partisans had brought their bodies back to Milan and strung them up by their feet from the latticed roof of the Esso gas station in Piazzale Loreto, a bustling traffic circle not far from the heart of the city. Soon jeering crowds gathered to desecrate the upside-down bodies of the dead dictator, his mistress, and their friends.

  The location was personal for Angleton. The Piazzale Loreto was located less than ten minutes from the Angleton home in Milan. Angleton might have filled up the family car at the gasoline pumps of that Esso station.

  Angleton summoned Resio and drove north with a contingent of U.S. soldiers as bodyguards. On May 9, he met with Borghese and delivered a friendly message: Admiral de Courten, commander of Allied forces in Italy, wanted him to come to Rome. Angleton felt that Borghese had fulfilled his end of the Operation Sunrise bargain. Besides, the partisans had discovered where he was staying and would soon come to get him. Borghese was wary of a trick but had little choice: trust this earnest American or wind up as a public carcass like his friends Benito and Clara.

  * * *

  ANGLETON WAS A MAN in demand. On the night of May 11, 1945, he had a dinner date that he could not break. He had previously invited a British colleague to have supper at the villa. Angleton did not want to cancel, so he installed Borghese and Resio elsewhere in the villa and returned to prepare the table for his visitor. His guest had just returned from the surrender negotiations between the Allies and the Germans.

  “Among other things,” Angleton recounted later, “my guest told me that he had asked the Germans to bring him the fascist ringleaders: Valerio Borghese and Col. DeLeo.” The British planned to question the men, his guest said, and then hand them over to the partisans for immediate execution.86

  Angleton had to swallow his alarm as he ate. He said nothing of Borghese’s whereabouts to his guest, even though the man the British wanted was sitting nearby. The two men finished their meal, and Angleton bade his friend farewell. The next morning, Angleton dressed the fascist Borghese in an American serviceman’s uniform and they drove south.

  In Rome, Angleton installed Borghese in an OSS safe house on via Archimedes.87 On May 19, 1945, Borghese was formally arrested and taken to the Allied military base in Caserta, south of Rome, where prosecutors for the war-crimes tribunals were gathering evidence. Someone in the OSS, perhaps Angleton himself, arranged for Borghese’s arrest record to be falsified so that the Italian government would not learn that he was in custody.88 As Angleton later explained, he had saved Borghese’s life because he thought the U.S. government had a “long term interest” in retaining his services.89

  Borghese, never charged with the war crimes of the Decima Mas, would be convicted of lesser offenses and released in 1949. He and his wife were the only fascists of the period who were formally rescued by the authority of the U.S. government.90 Thanks to Angleton, Borghese survived to become titular and spiritual leader of postwar Italian fascism.

  * * *

  “ANGLETON’S APPROACH CAN BE best understood as the implementation of what might be called ‘Total Counterespionage,’” wrote historian Timothy Naftali. “…
He believed that a counterespionage service had to have an insatiable appetite for information about foreign activities so as to be in a position to restrict, eliminate, or control the ways by which other states collected their intelligence.”91

  Imbued with fascist sympathies and anti-Communist passion, Angleton channeled his convictions into Anglo-American hegemonic ambition. With the analytic skills forged in Yale literary criticism and secret intelligence training imparted by the British SIS, he had unique aspirations. Angleton was intent on nurturing an intelligence network in service of the new American millennium. Recruiting the Black Prince was just the beginning.

  NAZI

  EUGEN DOLLMANN SAT IN a darkened, empty cinema as the matinee romance Kisses You Dream Of flickered on the screen.92 It was another leisurely, lonely day in the life of a dapper man who had preened for the popping flashbulbs at fashionable events in Rome society throughout the 1930s. With his impeccable Italian and native German and ingratiating personality, Dollmann had flourished as a translator in the decade when Mussolini’s Social Republic and Adolf Hilter’s Third Reich made common cause.93

  These days, Herr Dollmann could not be quite so outgoing. His membership in the SS, the Schutzstaffel (“Protection Squadron”) of the Nazi Party, was sufficient cause for his immediate arrest.94 Just five years before, he had sat between Mussolini and Hitler as they traveled in German-occupied Russia.95 Now he sat in the darkness of the cinema between two empty seats.