- the Department of State and the U.S.
Foreign Service
- the U.S. Information Agency (USIA, my
dad’s outfit)
- the Agency for International Development
(USAID, the U.S. foreign-aid agency)
- the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency
- the Peace Corps
- the U.S. Education Exchange
- the U.S. Mission to the UNO (United
Nations Organizations, AKA: the
U.N.)
In the words of Who’s
Who, all these agencies and several others “are used by the CIA for
intelligence purposes or . . . have, with official sanction, been infiltrated.” (There’s actually no such organization as “the
U.S. Education Exchange”; I presume Mader was referring to the U.S. Department
of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs which oversees both the
National Student Exchange Program and the Fulbright Program, though most of
their clients are high school and college students.)
The book’s publisher explains that the intent of the book is
“to demask . . . leading officials and officers, collaborators and agents of
the US intelligence services who are operating on five continents.” It ended up naming almost everyone who ever
served overseas, however, even privately, or served in any high-ranking post in
the government.
In testimony before the U.S. Congress in
1980, Ladislav Bittman, a former intelligence officer for the Czech
Intelligence Service specializing in disinformation (1964-66), who defected
to the United States in 1968 and claimed to have been one of the coauthors of the
book, asserted:
About half of the names listed
in that book are real CIA operatives. The
other half are people who were just American diplomats or various officials;
and it was prepared with the expectation that naturally many, many Americans
operating abroad, diplomats and so on, would be hurt because their names were
exposed as CIA officials.
In fact, Who’s Who
left out actual CIA and other intelligence people. Richard Helms (1913-2002), the Director of
Central Intelligence in those days (1966-73), is in there, as are his
predecessors Roscoe Henry Hillenkoetter, (1897-1982; DCI, 1947–50), Allen Welsh
Dulles (1893-1969; DCI, 1953–61), John A. McCone (1902-91; DCI, 1961–65),
William Francis Raborn, Jr. (1905-90; DCI, 1965–66), as well as William Joseph [“Wild Bill”] Donovan
(1883-1959, the founding director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
the World War II forerunner of the CIA.
(Oddly, Donovan is listed, even though he was long dead by the time the
book was compiled, but Walter Bedell Smith, DCI from 1950 to 1953, who’d died
in 1961, is not.)
(As I will throughout this article, I have used
the names as presented in Who’s
Who’s biographical entries.
I’ve marked insertions with brackets and I’ve corrected errors, such as
incorrect birth years, and added current data, like years of death, as
pertinent.)
In addition, included in Who’s
Who in CIA are Lyndon Baines Johnson (1909-73; President of the United
States, 1963-69), Professor Hubert Horatio Humphrey (1911-78; Vice President of
the United States, 1965-69), Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009; U.S. Secretary
of Defense, 1961-68), Professor Dean Rusk (1909-94; U.S. Secretary of State, 1961-69),
Clark M. Clifford (1906-98; adviser to Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, and Carter; White House Counsel, 1946-50; Chairman of the President’s
Intelligence Advisory Board, 1963-68; Secretary of Defense, 1968-69), and
several National Security Advisors and heads of the National Security Agency,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of Naval Intelligence.
There’s even an entry for journalist and
commentator Bill D. Moyers (b. 1934) who served as Deputy Director of the Peace
Corps (1962-63), a special assistant to President Johnson (1963-67), and White
House Press Secretary (1965-67).
(Who’s
Who also
lists as intelligence officials other prominent
previous and current members of the federal government such as: Frank Church, 1924-84,
U.S. Senator from Idaho, 1957-81; Lawrence S. Eagleburger, 1930-2011, career
Foreign Service Officer from 1957, later Secretary of State, 1992-93; [R. W.] Scott
McLeod, 1914-61, Department of State’s Bureau for Security and Consular Affairs,
1953-57, Ambassador to Ireland, 1957-61; Professor Dr. Dr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger [Jr.], 1917–2007, National
Chairman of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 1953-54, Special Assistant
to the President, 1961-64; and Cyrus Roberts Vance, 1917-2002, Secretary of the
Army, 1962-64, Deputy Secretary of Defense, 1964-67, later Secretary of State,
1977-80.)
Among the well-known and government-connected, however, are
also some just-plain citizens, some with recognizable names, caught up in Who’s Who’s net because many (but not all)
had an association with an intelligence agency during their World War II
service:
·
Stewart Johonnot Oliver Alsop (1914-74),
newspaper columnist and political analyst; worked with the OSS during World War
II (aiding the French Resistance, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre).
·
Leroy Anderson (1908-75), composer (“The
Syncopated Clock,” “Sleigh Ride,” “The Typewriter”); served in CIC during World
War II.
·
August Hecksher [II] (1913-97), public
intellectual and author; editorial staff of the New York Herald Tribune
(1948-56), Parks
Commissioner of New York City (1967-72); worked for OSS in North Africa during
World War II.
·
Garson Kanin (1912-99), playwright and film and
stage director (Born Yesterday;
husband of actress-playwright Ruth Gordon).
·
[Andrew C.] McLellan (1911-86), labor leader
and Inter-American Representative of the AFL-CIO.
·
George Meany (1894-1980), labor leader and
president of the AFL-CIO (1955-79).
·
Professor Dr. Eugene Willard Miller
(1915-2002), geographer, university professor, and academic writer; professor
of geography at Pennsylvania State University (where he created the Department
of Geography), 1945-80; worked as a geographer for OSS during World War II.
Less (in)famous are the agents who later would participate
in the CIA-backed Chilean coup of 1973 that overthrew Salvador Allende Gossens,
the elected Marxist president, who are also named in the book, including David
A. Phillips (1922-88), a CIA officer in South and Central America who was
involved in the Allende coup and a similar operation in Guatemala in 1954.
Who’s Who in CIA also
names Richard Skeffington Welch (1929-75), the CIA station chief in Athens who,
seven years after the book appeared, was gunned down outside his residence by
Marxist guerrillas after his name and address were published in a local
newspaper.
(Also listed is former CIA
agent Philip Agee, 1935-2008, who in 1975 published Inside the Company:
CIA Diary [Penguin Books] which identified
429 names and descriptions of “employees, agents, liaison contacts or were
otherwise used by or involved with the CIA or its operations; and of
organizations financed, influenced or controlled by the CIA.”)
Missing are any Deputy Director for Operations (or Director
of Plans, as the position was called at the time Who’s Who was compiled and published; Desmond Fitzgerald, 1965-67,
and Thomas Karamessines, 1967-73 were the incumbents during that period), the head
of the CIA Directorate of Operations (DO), the clandestine arm of the agency
(except those, like Dulles and Helms who rose to become DCI), and J. Edgar
Hoover (1895-1972), the long-serving Director of the FBI (1924-72). (Karamessines, 1917-78, was actively involved
in the 1970s in plans to destabilize the government of Chilean President
Allende.)
Another CIA name omitted from Who’s Who is that of Aldrich Ames, (1941-2026), who went to work for the agency in 1962 and by 1985 had become a KGB
mole in the CIA providing intelligence to the Soviet Union and Russia until he
was arrested in 1994. Ames was tried and
convicted of espionage and sentenced to life without the possibility
of parole. He died in federal prison at age 84.
Some other people well known to have been connected with the
CIA who aren’t mentioned in the book are G. Gordon Liddy (b. 1930) and E.
Howard Hunt (1918-2007), two of the Watergate burglars who, in 1972, helped break
into the Democratic campaign headquarters in Washington on behalf of Richard M.
Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President; either of the other Watergate
burglars who were CIA operatives (Bernard Barker, 1917-2009, and James W.
McCord, Jr., b. 1924); William “Rip” Robertson (1920-70), another operative
engaged in the Guatemala coup; Gerry Patrick Hemming (1937-2008), a mercenary
soldier and CIA operative who worked in Cuba (where he met Lee Harvey Oswald,
assassin of President John F. Kennedy) to aid Fidel Castro overthrow dictator
Fulgencio Batista in 1959; and James Jesus Angleton (1917-87), the famous
mole-hunter in the CIA who became almost obsessed with uncovering a KGB
undercover operative inside the agency, predicting the discovery and arrest of
Aldrich Ames—which Angleton didn’t live to see.
Also not named are any of my father’s USIA, consular, and
embassy coworkers (except one, Dad’s immediate predecessor in Koblenz and Bonn:
Gunther Karl Rosinus, b. 1928, who’d served in the State Department’s Office of
Intelligence Research from 1951 to 1953)—most notably the woman who was the
embassy spook, Herma Plummer (1908-91), although everyone (including this
teenaged foreign service brat) knew what her job was.
Plummer was not a
covert operative when she was in Bonn, even though her career had included
years in the DO, and before that she was an alumna of “Wild Bill” Donovan’s
OSS. Described by an embassy colleague,
George Jaeger (b. 1926), who’d arrived in Bonn around the time my father left (and
is listed in the book!) as an
“elderly Margaret Rutherford-like graduate of . . . Allen Dulles’ World War II
operation,” she cut a distinctive figure
along the halls of the embassy in her proto-earth shoes and earth-mother attire. (This was the Herma Plummer I remember, but according
to a CIA colleague from the 1950s, she’d been “an attractive, tall woman,
always elegantly dressed.”)
She retired as
a GS-15 (the equivalent of an army colonel or a navy captain) a month after the
English version of Who’s Who was
published, a recipient of the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit, the agency’s
third-highest award. (Dad was an FSO-4,
the Foreign Service equivalent of a GS-10 or -11, the same as an army captain
or a navy lieutenant.)
Who’s Who in CIA was compiled by Mohamed
Abdelnabi (Beirut), Ambalal Bhatt (Bombay—now Mumbai), Fernando Gamarra (Mexico
City), and Shozo Ohashi (Yokohama), under the direction of Julius Mader
(1928-2000; aka Thomas Bergner)
doubtless with the assistance and guidance of the GDR’s Ministerium für
Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security or, more commonly, Stasi, the
East German secret police) and possibly also the Soviet KGB.
Mader, a self-declared journalist who, as an
agent of the MfS Department of Agitation (Abteilung Agitation) with the rank of major and an Offizier im besonderen
Einsatz (OibE, or a special operations officer), was adept at anti-Western
propaganda and disinformation.
(‘Disinformation,’ or Desinformation
in German and dezinformatsia in
Russian, is, according to Wiktionary,
“Intentionally false information disseminated to deliberately confuse or
mislead.”)
He “self-published” Who’s Who so it wouldn’t bear a
government publishing label—although in reality there was no such thing as an
independent publication in the GDR.
The book, like most Soviet Bloc publications in
that era, is cheaply bound at 5¾″ x 4¼″
and, as I noted earlier, 605 pages long.
It has a red fabric hard cover and a dust jacket of cerulean blue on the
top half and crimson-and-white stripes on the bottom half to call to mind the
U.S. flag (without exactly matching the colors).
Aside from the biographical listings, Who’s
Who in CIA contains a “Foreword” by Mader, the facsimile
of a short letter of thanks on Foreign Relations Committee letterhead from
Senator Joseph A. Clark (1901-90; Democratic Senator from Pennsylvania,
1956-68) to Mader (whom a note explains “helped the US Senate in investigations
against the CIA”) for “suggest[ing] additional readings on the CIA,” “Notes for
the user,” and a list of abbreviations used in the entries.
Mader also includes six fold-out line-and-block
diagrams of the organizational structures of the “American Intelligence
Services,” the “Office of Intelligence Research of the State Department,” “Military
Intelligence Headquarters of the USA,” the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the “System of several cover organizations
used by the CIA.”
At the end of the book
are included two detachable cards, one for corrections and additions and the
other for the submission of more names of U.S. intelligence agents.
Mader, whose real name was apparently Thomas
Bergner (there’s some confusion over which name was
his birth name and which a pseudonym), was born in the Sudetenland in what is
now the Czech Republic, the part of Czechoslovakia with a large ethnic German
population which Hitler annexed in 1938.
After the German surrender in 1945, Sudeten Germans, including
16-year-old Mader’s family, were forcibly resettled within the Soviet
occupation zone of Germany, which in 1949 became the German Democratic
Republic, a puppet state of the Soviet Union.
After a brief turn studying business in 1946 and ’47, Mader began
studying law, journalism, political science, and economics at the Universities
of Berlin and Jena, the Institute of Internal Trade in Leipzig, and the German
Academy for Political and Legal Science “Walter Ulbricht” in
Potsdam. He earned a master's degree in
business in 1955.
He joined the Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the communist party of the GDR)
in 1958. In 1960, Mader became a
full-time agent of the MfS (with yet another cover name, Faingold), earning the
designation OibE in 1962 and the rank of major in 1964. (Both the KGB and the MfS were military or
paramilitary organizations with uniforms and military ranks.)
He was awarded a doctorate in economics and
social sciences from the Academy of Law and Political Science in 1965. At the MfS, where he wrote propaganda tracts
and books and works of disinformation, his specialties were the operations and
structure of the intelligence and security organizations of the FRG (the
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz—the Federal Office for the Protection of the
Constitution—the West German equivalent of the FBI, and the
Bundesnachrichtendienst—the Federal Intelligence Service—the FRG’s CIA
counterpart), the United States, and the United Kingdom.
(Mader also wrote extensively about the Third
Reich, a pervasive bugaboo for the East Germans, Soviets, and the whole Warsaw
Pact. There are frequent references to
“fascists” and “neo-fascists” in Mader’s writings, including Who’s
Who in CIA.)
Some of Mader’s books before the publication of Who’s
Who in CIA were Gangster in Action: Design and
crimes of the U.S. Secret Service (1961) and No Longer a Secret: The
secret of the German Federal Republic and its subversive activity against the
GDR (1966).
He continued to write
such books until 1988 (CIA Operation Hindu Kush: Intelligence activities in
the undeclared war against Afghanistan was his last), the year before the Berlin Wall came down, and
the year Mader received the Patriotic Order of Merit in silver, the award’s
second-highest level, for outstanding service to the GDR in civilian life.
All together, his books, including
translations, sold several million copies, mostly in the Soviet Bloc. He died in (a reunited) Berlin at the age of
71, though the final 12 years of his life, after the dissolution of the German
Democratic Republic, to which he’d devoted his entire adult life, seem to have
gone largely unrecorded.
In his Foreword to Who’s
Who in CIA, Mader explains his rationale for compiling the book. In doing so, he doesn’t hesitate to employ
portentous language to depict the dire importance of the publication:
Never in the history of the
USA has the influence of its intelligence system on home and foreign policy
been as great as it is today. For, as
tools of the monopoly groups that rule in North America, the various
intelligence services of the USA play a special part in the global strategy of
that state. (p. 7)
[The US intelligence
services] send out their spies and subversive agents, conspire with neo and
pro-fascist cohorts, prepare putsches, and armed intervention, and stimulate
ideological subversion. (7)
Oddly, much of what Mader and his cohorts say in Who’s Who is largely factually correct,
but it’s spun in a propagandistic way that, first, makes the facts seem ominous
and threatening:
. . . psychological warfare
and all the dirty methods of subversion were publicly raised to state policy for the USA. (8)
The US intelligence services
. . . plan and organize dangerous actions at every hour. For this reason the people of all nations are
warned of the organizers of the CIA machinations. (14)
This approach served both to alert the populations of Warsaw
Pact nations to Western plotting and subterfuge and to provide legitimacy for
the activities of the Soviet Bloc security forces like the KGB and the Stasi.
Second, the book omits any mention of activity by the Soviet
Bloc forces that might necessitate U.S. and Western response, portraying itself
as the innocent victim of U.S. intrigue.
In fact, Mader accuses the U.S. of actions and practices in which the
USSR and the Eastern Bloc openly engaged:
North American imperialism
takes upon itself the right as the world’s policeman, so to speak, to intervene
against every democratic, progressive and non-capitalist development all over
the world. (7)
[The CIA] has been unmasked
hundreds of times the world over as [the] leading centre of imperialist
espionage activities and as the coordinating centre for coups d’etat against
lawful governments as well as for counter-revolutionary attacks. (10)
Third, perfectly ordinary actions and policies are made to
appear dangerous and excessive.
By far the largest and most
influential of the American intelligence branches is the Central Intelligence
Agency which is directly subordinated to the Executive Office of the President of
the USA, and whose director holds a key position in the mechanism of the North
American power system. (9-10)
The fact that the CIA is the largest U.S.
intelligence agency is irrelevant. Some
agency will obviously be the largest in its category; it’s not pertinent, but
it sounds scary because one of Mader’s main goals is to demonize the U.S.
intelligence complex, with special emphasis on the CIA. Remember that Mader’s intended audience wasn’t
the populace of the the Western allies but the people of the Soviet Bloc
and, more pointedly, the so-called
unaligned nations.
That the DCI is subordinate to the U.S.
president is also routine. So is the
Secretary of Defense, the civilian head of our military; in fact, as
Commander-in-Chief, the president is de
facto and de jure the direct
superior of the generals and admirals of all branches of the armed forces. The same command structure pertains in nearly
every country on earth, including both the Soviet Union and the present-day
Russian Federation.
I’m not sure what Mader means when he asserts
that the DCI “holds a key position in the mechanism of the North American power
system” since I’m unaware of any collective power structure for Canada, the
U.S., and Mexico (not to mention Greenland, the nations and territories of
Central America, and those of the Caribbean—all part of North America), but if
he really means the United States, then . . . well, duh.
The DCI is an important
member of the president’s national security team—for obvious reasons, I should
think—but only an occasional participant in the National Security Council,
attending only when invited for matters pertaining to his
responsibilities. (The current regular
intelligence advisor to the NSC—though not a permanent member—is the Director of
National Intelligence, a post that didn’t exist until 2004. Before that the DCI held the position, but
even so, the NSC has no executive authority; it’s an advisory body whose
recommendations must be confirmed and issued by the president.)
The DCI isn’t autonomous, however. He (or she, though the office hasn’t yet been
filled by a woman) can’t launch operations on his own or define policy, any
more than the Secretary of State can establish diplomatic relations with a
nation or the Secretary of Defense can go to war at their volition. (Actually, not even the president is supposed
to be able to do that latter, but Vietnam proved that he can.)
Public opinion in the USA
already fears that the CIA has become the “invisible government”. This becomes particularly clear when one analyses
to which alarming measure the CIA and the Department of State, the Foreign
Office of the USA, have become integrated in terms of personnel. Even the “New York Times” of April 27th, 1966 estimated
that 2,200 CIA agents are active in the diplomatic service of the USA “under
official cover abroad”. (10-11)
Certainly there’s cross-over between the State Department,
the military, and the intelligence community.
(Does anyone believe that this didn’t happen in the Soviet Union and the
GDR? Before we elected George H. W.
Bush, a former DCI in 1976-77, president in 1988, Yuri Andropov, Chairman of
the KGB from 1967 to 1982, was premier of the USSR, 1982-84.
Today, the President of the Russian
Federation, Vladimir Putin, was head of the Federal Security Service, successor
of the KGB, from 1998-99.) The
experiences and backgrounds are analogous—which doesn’t mean that the
crossovers in the Department of State are spies any more than the former
military officers in the foreign office are still warriors.
The New York Times estimate of intelligence personnel
abroad cited, 2,200, isn’t out of line as a worldwide figure, especially given
what was going on around the world in the the mid-1960s. (Saigon and Vietnam would probably have accounted
for a majority of these people. Berlin,
where I was stationed five years later, was also agent-dense during the Cold
War.)
Most of those wouldn’t be
espionage or counterespionage agents, but technicians, interpreters and
translators, and various specialists, some on short-term assignment for
specific tasks. Mader makes the number
seem sinister—without acknowledging the size of the clandestine Warsaw Pact
presence beyond the borders of Eastern Europe in response to which the U.S and
Western activity would have expanded.
In addition, “official cover” doesn’t mean the intelligence
personnel attached to embassies or consulates are clandestine or covert (though
some are, of course). Many are known to
the other mission workers and even the public just as Herma Plummer was at the Bonn
embassy in the ’60s.
(When I was an MI
counterintelligence agent in Berlin, we wore civilian clothes and didn’t use
our ranks in public, but everyone knew where we worked—there was a brass plaque
at the entrance to our office that read “66th Military Intelligence
Group.” Many civilian intelligence
personnel operated under similar conditions.)
(The New York Times
material cited in the passage above is from “How C.I.A. Put ‘Instant Air Force’
Into Congo: Intervention or Spying All in a Day’s Work,” published on 26 April
1966—not 27 April, as Mader writes. The
correct quoted line is: “under official cover overseas,” a quotation from historian Arthur Schlesinger’s 1965 book
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the
White House. This Times article was the second of five in
a series about the CIA, 25-29 April.)
Furthermore, Mader often writes in Marxist boilerplate,
probably for the consumption of the already-converted leftists in his audience,
that sounded rote, stilted, and unconvincing even in 1968. Take, for instance, this statement:
. . . the intelligence
service of the USA has always been the domain of the fanatical enemies of
democracy and a stronghold of the anti-communists. (8)
The Stasi writer is here deliberately employing the logical
fallacy of “equivocation,” that is, using a word with two different meanings
without specifying which sense the writer intends so as to mislead the reader
or draw the reader to a false understanding.
The word here is ‘democracy,’ which we in the West understand to mean “a
government by the people” but by which Mader and the communist East mean “a government
in the name of and for the people” (such as, the German Democratic Republic, the former East Germany, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,
the present-day North Korea).
Leaving aside the descriptive “fanatical,”
which is certainly intended to be a hot-button word to inflame the reader, the
whole of the U.S. government—yea, even our entire culture at large—could be
said to be “anti-communist” during the Cold War, as we are also “anti-fascist”
and “anti-imperialist.” (Okay, I’m
talking officially and theoretically. I
know we don’t always live up to the ideal.)
That’s no surprise. But we’re
only an “enemy of democracy” if you define ‘democracy’ as a single-party socialist
state and not a country with a government of freely elected representatives of
the citizens.
Mader wants you to read
the passage above and think we’re opposing such nations as France, Australia,
Japan, Sweden, or India. (Granted, we
have sometimes overstepped our bounds, such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in
’54, and Chile in ’73.) Whatever differences
we have with the so-called liberal democracies, we don’t oppose them; at the
same time, we do oppose countries like Cuba and the DPRK, sometimes with a
ferocity and tenacity that exceeds logic, I’ll acknowledge—but we have also
reconciled with other nations such as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a
one-time implacable enemy who essentially defeated us.
Mader wants readers of Who’s Who to think
the United States is secretly fighting our capitalistic allies on behalf of
some crypto-fascism—hence, the Marxist equivocation in his rhetoric.
Who’s Who in CIA was largely regarded in the
West as an act of disinformation. The
errors and omissions, the inclusion of so many people who weren’t connected to
any kind of intelligence work, was seen as a way to roil the waters of
East-West Weltpolitik by sowing
distrust among the citizenry of friendly or neutral nations.
The omission of so many actual intelligence
personnel, especially working agents abroad, was interpreted as a tactic by the
communist agencies like the Stasi and the KGB to divert attention from the U.S.
agents so that it would be easier to keep an eye on what they were up to or to
make use of them in various ways—feeding them false information or preventing
them from successfully acquiring useful intelligence.
Despite its official dismissal by the United
States’ intelligence community, the CIA nevertheless felt Who’s Who was
worthy of some kind of response. The
agency helped journalist and investigative writer John Barron, publisher
of Reader’s Digest, to
write KGB: The Secret Work of Soviet Secret Agents (Reader’s Digest Press, 1974).
The book’s appendix, on which the author
admitted that the CIA collaborated, names 1,600
alleged KGB and GRU officers posted abroad as diplomats. (The
KGB, whose initials are an abbreviation of the Russian name Committee for State
Security, was the main security organization and secret police of the Soviet
Union; the GRU, the Main Intelligence Directorate, was the principal military
intelligence agency of the USSR—and is still the largest foreign intelligence
organization of the Russian Federation.
Remember that I said earlier that Soviet and present-day Russian diplomats were
also spies?)
In the New York Times, reviewer Hugh Trevor Roper,
an Oxonian historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany, wrote, “How the
K.G.B. functions, how it uses its unchallenged, arbitrary power, is the subject
of Mr. Barron’s book,” which sounds to me like a direct reaction to Mader’s
book.
Reviews of Who’s Who in CIA included
Daniel Brandt’s assessment for his website NameBase,
which focuses on people involved in
international intelligence activities and related subjects, such as
reviews of books and articles on intelligence and espionage.
In his review, Brandt, once an activist with
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a counterculture organization in the
1960s and ’70s, states, “Mader paints with a broad brush,” admitting to listing
“former OSS, military intelligence (even during WW2), State Department
personnel . . ., FBI counterintelligence, and also the occasional
politician who sat on this or that intelligence committee.”
Adding, “Generally when Mader includes a
name, it’s merely an indication that Mader found this person interesting for
one reason or another,” Brandt quipped. “Some
of his names . . . appear to have been compiled by looking for the word
‘intelligence’ in the State Department Biographic Register.”
He cautioned that “further research and
corroboration is needed before any conclusions can be drawn.” Nonetheless, “Mader apparently had access to
some information on CIA officers that was not publicly available,” and the
reviewer concluded, “For the occasional investigator who is too experienced to
expect easy answers, this book continues to be quite useful.”
Brandt’s review is clearly a much later evaluation (it’s
undated, but NameBase wasn’t started
until 1995), however a contemporaneous notice was published in the Los Angeles Free Press (28 March 1969),
an alternative weekly with a radical political perspective.
In “Who’s
Who in the CIA: A Review of the Real Underground,” which also reproduces
some of the charts and listings from the book, Freep (as the paper was known) founder and editor Art Kunkin asserts,
“‘Who’s Who in CIA’ was undoubtedly compiled
as a weapon of Russia against the United States,” adding, however, “It is not
surprising, therefore, that this book has much to say about the obviously
anti-democratic effect of the United State’s [sic] huge intelligence apparatus but
not one word about the other noted enemy of human freedom, the equally sizeable
and repressive Russian espionage system.”
Pointing out all the evil work of the Soviet secret police that Mader
neglects to mention—perpetrating domestic terrorism to maintain the
power of Soviet leaders, murdering or assassinating political opponents,
“forging” evidence for show trials, planning the invasions of Hungary (1956)
and Czechoslovakia (1968), murdering opponents in the Spanish Civil War
(1936-39) including communist partisans in anti-Stalinist factions—Kunkin observes, “However, it must be underscored
that these omissions do not detract at all from the book’s graphic demonstration
of the power and size of ‘invisible government’ in the United States.”
Kunkin maintains that “the
reasoning of spy hunters is that any person who has ever been associated with
intelligence work is always suspect” (which I suppose is an explanation for my
father being labeled a CIA operative off of a few months’ assignment with the
CIC in World War II), and he illustrates his contention with a quotation from Who’s
Who regarding the “knowledge that imperialist intelligence services usually
‘buy-up’ the recipients of their pay, and also those who have fallen into their
clutches till the end of their lives.”
Kunkin
does admonish Mader (parenthetically) because he’s “not very clever. The nature of his real employer is verified
not only by his convenient cold war omissions but by his communist cliches.”
(Let me make a personal
observation concerning Kunkin’s first statement above, that among “spy
hunters,” especially those of the Warsaw Pact, I suspect, once someone’s been
associated with an intelligence agency, he or she is forever after tagged with
the label “intelligence operative.” My
father, as I noted, was temporarily assigned to the CIC during the beginning
months of the occupation of Germany, from May 1945, when the Third Reich
government surrendered, until Dad was shipped to the Pacific in August. He never had any contact with an intelligence
organization before that or after.
(I, on
the other hand, was an officer in Military Intelligence, the successor of the
CIC, for almost five years. It was the
whole of my army service, including 2½ years as a counterintelligence special
agent in Cold War Berlin. Once I got out
of the army, however, I never had any dealings with MI or any other
intelligence agency. No one ever
contacted me or tried to recruit me. I’m
proud of my service and what I did during that time, but that part of my life ended
in 1974.
(What I have left is what I
learned about myself from the experience—and a lot of stories. I have never had call to use any of the
tradecraft I learned again. Neither had
my father, and neither, I’m sure, had any of the people in Mader’s book who had
a one-off connection with some intelligence agency at one time in their
lives. To believe otherwise is
absurd—and paranoid.)
The Freep editor further suggests:
In
this shadowy cloak and dagger world it must also be assumed that the Russians
do not even want to expose certain American agents. It is obviously easier in some circumstances
to tolerate a known agent whom you can watch and divert from important information
than continually have to cope with uncovering new agents.
Who’s
Who’s listings, Kunkin observes, “are usually people whose
Intelligence background has already been publicized.” Furthermore, he says, “Their past and present
affiliations probably could be determined simply by close study of telephone
directories, newspaper files, etc.”
There may even be a few “ringers” in the entries as well, “thrown . . .
at us for [the Soviets’] own political purpose.” But Kunkin bemoaned that some private
citizens where lumped in with the intelligence workers, and what he feared
most was “that these suspect listings
may be correct,” after all.
He singled out the entry for Frederick Amos Praeger
(1915-94), founder of Praeger Publishers, who issued books on communism (as
well as other topics such as art and archeology). Feared Kunkin, “Praeger’s ‘listing’ may
simpl[y] be a result of his anti-fascist affiliations in World War Two [Praeger
was born in Austria], but, then again, the widespread rumor that he has
published ‘cold war books’ with CIA money may indeed be true.”
Who’s Who in CIA, says the reviewer,
shows “how American trade union leaders, businessmen, college professors,
government officials, and military men are entangled in the web of the
so-called Intelligence agencies.” The
lesson Kunkin took away from the book is:
On the one hand, we had an
elected government presumably responsible to the people; on the other hand, the
military-industrial complex which President Eisenhower warned about linked its
future with the development of a super-secretive intelligence-operational group
manipulating domestic and international affairs with a total disregard for
democratic procedures anywhere.
The Free Press
editor and publisher concludes his anti-establishment treatise (Kunkin had much
more to say that wasn’t directly pertinent to the book) by affirming: “The
public needs to be informed of the urgency of the problem. Given these considerations, ‘Who’s Who in the CIA’ is a valuable
book despite its compromised source.”
None of this is to say, of course, that the
Washington world of the foreign service and intelligence apparatus like the
State Department, USIA, and the CIA wasn’t entirely engaged for months in the
summer of 1968 looking to see who was named and who wasn’t.
At social functions which my dad’s former
foreign service colleagues attended, there was always insouciant
chatter about the book and its listings.
Almost immediately upon its release, Who’s Who in CIA became
impossible to find in bookstores and reports are that it even disappeared from
many libraries across the country.
Art
Kunkin guessed that the book’s popularity was partly spurred by government
secretaries and clerks who bought it to see what their bosses were hiding in
their backgrounds.
Dad obtained a copy of Who’s
Who in CIA as soon as it was released, but my mom gave it away
with most of her and my father’s books after
he went into a nursing home and she moved to a smaller apartment, not realizing
what it represented.
I wanted to replace it, but it was hard to find in
the early ’90s and I used to check the used bookstores, of which there were then
dozens near my home in New York City. I even checked Revolution Books, a
Marxist bookstore off Union Square near where I live, that had a section
devoted to military history and related subjects.
After the Internet had become available and I
used it to search for a copy of the English edition in good condition for a
reasonable price, I eventually replaced the book in 2005, nine years after my
father’s death. (I paid €18,
or $23 at that time. Today, some
copies are selling for anywhere from just over $100 to well over $300.)
The world in which Who’s
Who in CIA could exist is gone now and for those born
after the Cold War ended and the Soviet empire collapsed, it probably seems a
little ridiculous and silly. In “Berlin
Memoir, Part 4” (posted on Rick
On Theater on 9 February 2017), I wrote: “The Cold War
was a wondrous time—if you’re Franz Kafka!”
(I’ve blogged a lot about my MI experiences in Berlin; see “Berlin
Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009; “The Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009; “Berlin
Stories: Three SNAFU’s,” 18 August
2012; and “Berlin
Memoir,” 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9
and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017. I also wrote a little about my dad’s work
with USIA in Germany in “An American Teen In Germany,” 9 and 12 March 2013, and “Home Alone,” 12, 15, and 18 June 2015.)
This article is about a little piece of that
world-spanning absurdity that briefly touched my own family a little. It’s obviously a memory I still carry with me
after 50 years.
