Once the war was under way, the CIA believed that the Chinese would not intervene in the situation, despite numerous coded and open warnings from the Chinese authorities. The authorities in Beijing made it clear that they would take action as they saw fit to protect their country as General MacArthur and his troops pushed the DPRK Army back towards the 38th Parallel and then across it, entering North Korean territory on 1 October. ‘While full-scale Chinese Communist intervention in Korea must be regarded as a continuing possibility, a consideration of all known factors leads to the conclusion that barring a Soviet decision for global war, such action is not probable in 1950,’ stated the CIA report on 12 October. The next day, the Communist Chinese army entered North Korea. By mid-November, they were in full operation.
In light of these errors — and even before the Chinese intervention in the Korean War was confirmed — in October 1950, President Truman appointed General Walter Bedell Smith to the post of DCI with instructions to shake up the three-year-old agency and make it fit for purpose.
Smith created three directorates — intelligence (CDI); plans (DP); and administration (DA) — and the Korean War became a baptism of fire for the newly reorganized CIA. Turf wars between them and the Army’s intelligence units continued, reaching as high as the President, who backed the CIA, although he required them to liaise with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Agency carried out a number of successful operations. Both they and the Army created units for special ops, and the CIA trained thousands of Koreans for infiltration into the DPRK for intelligence gathering and sabotage, as well as setting up escape and evasion networks. Missions, such as Operation Bluebell, were run by an operational arm known by the acronym JACK (Joint Advisory Commission, Korea), and, while the Agency acknowledged that some of the North Koreans and Chinese who volunteered for service were simply using them as a way of getting transport back home, many provided intelligence which helped the war effort.
In addition, the CIA also tried to continue its mission of subverting Communism by carrying out missions in China. The Agency created a cover airline, Civil Air Transport Co. Ltd (CAT), which was used to drop agents and supplies into China, not always successfully. America still officially backed the nationalist government of China, which had been replaced by the Communists in 1949 and had moved to Formosa, and the CIA’s Operation Paper supported invasion attempts from Burma by the Kuomintang, which it was hoped might draw some troops away from the Korean conflict.
Not every mission was a success, and misjudgements could have catastrophic consequences. Details of one such, in which agents John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau were shot down on their first mission over northern China in 1952, were only released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011. Believing that they were extracting an undercover agent, they were actually walking into a trap. Their plane was shot down, and both men were captured alive, tortured and put on trial by the Chinese, and then held prisoner for the next twenty years. Although the CIA initially told their families that they had been lost in a CAT plane crash, back channel diplomacy would eventually lead to their release. Jack Downey refused to return to the Agency, pointing out, ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this line of work!’ Both men were able to retire with full pensions from the CIA and were awarded the Director’s Medal for Extraordinary Fidelity at a special ceremony at CIA Headquarters in 1998.
While the CIA was concentrating on the conflict in south-east Asia, the FBI was having more success winding up Russian networks. The arrest in Britain of atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs as a result of the Venona project would lead to many more agents coming to light. Interrogated by MI5’s James Skardon, Fuchs tried to conceal his contacts’ identities, but Skardon did learn about a courier named ‘Raymond’, to whom Fuchs had passed top secret information about the atom bomb in June 1945, on the Castillo Street bridge over the river in the small town of Santa Fe near the Las Alamos base. ‘Raymond’ had made contact with Fuchs through the scientist’s sister and the descriptions given by her and Fuchs tallied with someone the FBI had already interrogated as a result of Elizabeth Bentley’s testimony: Harry Gold. Faced with evidence found at his own apartment that placed him in Santa Fe (which he had denied visiting), Gold confessed.
However, parts of Gold’s story didn’t add up, in particular why he had stopped in Albuquerque on one of his trips to Santa Fe. Eventually he admitted that he had visited a soldier who gave him technical drawings from Los Alamos — and this turned out to be Fuchs’ colleague, David Greenglass. In turn, Greenglass broke under interrogation, and confessed that his wife Ruth and brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg were spies. This tallied with further Venona transcripts, which identified Rosenberg as a key agent known as ‘Antenna’ or ‘Liberal’, David Greenglass as ‘Kalibr’, and his wife as ‘Osa’. Another agent, radar engineer Morton Sobell, was also taken into custody in Mexico when he tried to flee.
Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel were arrested and charged with espionage, but unlike the other members of their spy ring, they refused to admit their guilt. Accordingly they, along with Sobell, were brought to trial, where the FBI had to rely on the testimony of David Greenglass, which included details of the way the side piece of a box of Jell-O was used as a means of identification between agents Harry Gold and Elizabeth Bentley. Sobell was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. They were executed at Sing Sing Prison in June 1953, after multiple legal appeals and pleas for clemency.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who succeeded Harry S. Truman in January 1953, summed up the general public’s revulsion at the Rosenbergs’ activities:
These two individuals have been tried and convicted of a most serious crime against the people of the United States. They have been found guilty of conspiring with intent and reason to believe that it would be to the advantage of a foreign power, to deliver to the agents of that foreign power certain highly secret atomic information relating to the national defence of the United States. The nature of the crime for which they have been found guilty and sentenced far exceeds that of the taking of the life of another citizen; it involves the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation and could very well result in the death of many, many thousands of innocent citizens. By their act these two individuals have, in fact, betrayed the cause of freedom for which free men are fighting and dying at this very hour.
The Rosenbergs’ trial concluded in April 1951; a month later, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the USSR. Questions were asked about the strength of the British security vetting that had been taking place: Fuchs had gained clearance from MI5; Maclean and Burgess had similarly passed muster. There was much talk of a ‘Third Man’ in the British set-up who had warned Burgess and Maclean, and many in MI5 were convinced it was Kim Philby. The mistrust didn’t prevent the two countries working together, though.
Two of the most important joint operations took place in continental Europe — the Vienna-based Operation Silver, and its Berlin equivalent, Operation Gold. The Russians were increasingly using landlines for phone calls and teletype traffic. This presented a problem for intelligence-gathering, as it was no longer a case of monitoring radio frequencies.
Like Berlin, Vienna was partitioned into different sectors in the immediate post-war period, and Operation Silver was the brainchild of the MI6 head of station in 1949, Peter Lunn, who realized that they were in a position to tap into the Soviet landlines. A tunnel was dug from a house seventy feet away from the lines, and to provide cover for the project, MI6 opened a store selling Harris Tweed — which proved to be almost too successful!