USSR, therefore, will probably use every means short of armed force to compel these powers to leave the city.
These devices may include additional obstruction to transport and travel to and within the city, ‘failure’ of services such as electric supply, reduction of that part of the food supply which comes from the Soviet Zone… [T] he day-to-day developments in the immediate future will test the firmness, patience, and discipline of all US personnel in Berlin.
As a prediction of the nearly year-long crisis, it couldn’t really be bettered. It certainly seemed as if Stalin wasn’t being served with nearly as good intelligence from his people in Berlin, since he fatally underestimated the resolve of the coalition, and had little option but to back down and eventually reopen the borders.
The Cold War wasn’t the only consideration for the CIA in 1948. Events in the Middle East were the focus of attention, as Jewish forces fought tooth and nail to create an independent state of Israel. On numerous occasions during that year, it seemed as if the Arab forces would deal a decisive blow to the nascent state, which had been declared on 14 May 1948, and recognized by the US and the USSR. However, the tenacity of the Jewish people — together with aid from foreign countries, sometimes in direct breach of United Nations declarations — ensured their survival. Hillenkoetter answered criticisms that the CIA hadn’t predicted the outcome by pointing out that no one could have anticipated the amount of overseas aid that Israel would receive.
What proved to be one of the biggest mistakes the early CIA would make came with regard to the Soviet atomic programme. Neither the CIA nor the FBI was fully aware of the extent of the spy rings that had been set up during the Second World War to elicit the information — although Alan Nunn May had been arrested following the Gouzenko revelations, he was proud in later life that he never betrayed any of his colleagues to the security forces. The Venona transcripts showed that there were others involved, but there wasn’t clear evidence as to whom — and without that information it was impossible to judge what could have been passed across.
Although the Western allies had tried to prevent German atomic scientists from being inducted to the Soviet programme at the end of the war, they knew that some key German personnel, including Dr Nicolaus Riehl of the Auer Company, Professor Gustav Hertz, and Professor Adolf Thiessen, were in Russian hands. Intelligence reports concluded that Germany’s foremost cyclotron constructor, as well as an expert in the biophysics of radiation, were also working for them. Four East German scientists who defected to the West in 1947 helped to fill in some of the gaps, and evidence obtained by covert CIA operatives suggested that plutonium production was taking place at Elektrostal, a small town about sixty miles east of Moscow, using material produced at the IG Farben plant near Berlin.
Unfortunately, the CIA’s own analysts didn’t pay much heed to that information, and instead relied on pre- war geological analyses which stated that the Soviet Union wouldn’t be able to threaten America’s near-monopoly on suitable ore. In October 1946, the CIA’s Office of Reports and Estimates suggested that ‘It is probable that the capability of the USSR to develop weapons based on atomic energy will be limited to the possible development of an atomic bomb to the stage of production at some time between 1950 and 1953. On this assumption, a quantity of such bombs could be produced and stockpiled by 1956.’ The ORE admitted its projections were ‘educated guesswork’ but based it on ‘the current estimate of existing Soviet scientific and industrial capabilities, taking into account the past performance of Soviet and of Soviet-controlled German scientists and technicians, our own past experience, and estimates of our own capabilities for future development and production.’ Although the information received regarding the Soviets progress brought the projected date forward to a certain extent, the earliest possible date was still being given as ‘mid-1950’ with mid-1953 being the most probable. That report was dated a mere five days before the Soviets exploded their first atomic device, nicknamed Joe-1 at Semipalatinsk, a site in north-eastern Kazakhstan, on 29 August.
Internally at the CIA, the failure to predict the timing of the test firing was described as an ‘almost total failure of conventional intelligence’ by assistant director Willard Machie. Summoned before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on 17 October, Hillenkoetter maintained that ‘I don’t think we were taken by surprise’ — an assertion that didn’t go down too well with the members of the committee.
‘Our estimates were not too far off,’ Hillenkoetter said, explaining that the CIA assumed that the Russians didn’t begin work on an atomic programme until after the explosion at Hiroshima in August 1945, but it was now clear that they had started in 1943 — so the ORE’s estimate of five years from start to finish was still accurate. He also noted that now the Russians had exploded a bomb, it meant that they could better correlate the various pieces of information that they had. (One Senator pointed out that even ‘the Russians themselves didn’t know that they had the bomb until it went off’, unconsciously echoing the concerns of Soviet ministers at the time, who sought reassurance that there had been the distinctive mushroom cloud before reporting to Stalin.)
At least one of the Senators present caught the mood: ‘We have not had an organisation adequate to know what is going on in the past and [the DCI] gives me no assurance that we are going to have one in the future.’
Failing to predict the rise of the Communist party and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China was another charge levelled against Hillenkoetter by the
In the words of a later deputy DDI at the CIA, John Gannon:
[There was] a widely held but incorrect perception that the job of intelligence officers is to predict the future. That is not the case. Only God is omniscient, and only the Pope is infallible; intelligence officers are too savvy to compete in that league. Rather, the function of intelligence is to help US decision makers better understand the forces at work in any situation, the other fellow’s perspective, and the opportunities and consequences of any course of action so that US policymakers can make informed decisions.
Hillenkoetter’s job at the CIA was made much harder by the lack of cooperation that he received from other intelligence agencies. As he told President Truman, ‘The [military] services withhold planning and operational information from the CIA and this hampers the CIA in fulfilling its mission.’ The FBI could be obstructive, and the military sections overestimated Soviet capabilities in their own fields to ensure their own departments received the necessary support.
It wasn’t all bad news: the CIA were able to prevent a Communist party victory in the 1948 Italian elections. This wasn’t the spy work of the Second World War, sneaking behind enemy lines. However, for an American government seriously worried about the spread of Communism, it was equally important, and for the agents actively involved in passing money to contacts and other clandestine activities, it wasn’t that different in reality.
Former CIA operative F. Mark Wyatt was one of those involved in this new form of spying. As he told CNN in 1995:
The run-of-the-mill operative in the [CIA] was hopeful that we could get into a [covert] operation… My colleagues in the CIA, in 1946–47, when I was involved, were gung-ho. We had been in the war; we didn’t question authority — ‘Should we do it this way, should we not?’ We definitely knew that the Soviet empire was, as Reagan said, the Evil Empire, and that was it. And when we were stationed abroad… whether we were in Sri Lanka or we were in Iceland, we knew what our target was: it was the Soviet target. We were interested in what was going on in that country, and the connections of that country with the pervasive expansionist Soviet power.
DCI Hillenkoetter wasn’t convinced that the CIA had the authority to take an active role in the Italian election and was advised by the agency’s general counsel, Lawrence Houston, that he needed a specific mandate. This he received from the National Security Council in NSC directive 4a, which ordered the CIA ‘[to] initiate steps looking toward the conduct of covert psychological operations designed to counteract Soviet and Soviet-inspired activities’. The Special Procedures Group (SPG) was tasked with finding a way to do this.
In reality, this meant working with the Christian Democrats to defeat the Popular Democratic Front, a coalition formed by the Italian Communist and Socialist Parties. In addition to letter-writing campaigns by Italian- Americans, propaganda broadcasts by the Voice of America warning of the dangers of a rerun of the
