Elliott and Ustinov focused first on the remnants of the wartime Soviet spy system in Switzerland, notably the network codenamed the Rote Kapelle, which at its height had run some 117 agents, including forty-eight inside Germany, producing high-grade intelligence. One of the most important members of the network was British, a young communist named Alexander Foote. Born in Derbyshire, Foote had served in the RAF before deserting to join the British Battalion of the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Shortly before the Second World War he was recruited by Soviet military intelligence and sent to Switzerland as a radio operator for the fledgling Rote Kapelle. In January 1945, Foote moved to Moscow, convinced his interrogators of his continued loyalty, and was redeployed to the Soviet sector of post-war Berlin under the pseudonym ‘Major Grantov’. There, in July 1947, he defected to the British. Foote produced a detailed picture of Soviet intelligence methods, offering a ‘unique opportunity to study the methodology of a Soviet network’, from which Elliott and Ustinov were able to draw up a ‘blueprint for communist activities during the Cold War’. Foote’s debriefing contained some deeply worrying elements, most notably the revelation that Moscow had many long-term, deeply embedded spies in Britain, some of whom had been recruited long before the war. Elliott and Ustinov concluded that most of these spies were ‘lifelong communist activists’, but not necessarily with any overt connection to the party.
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James Angleton had come to see the task of combating Soviet espionage as ‘not so much an ideology, as a way of life’. In the last years of war and the first years of peace, Angleton’s agents pervaded every corner of Italy, the civil service, armed forces, intelligence services and political parties, including the Soviet-backed Italian Communist Party. Like Elliott, Angleton cultivated a brand of high eccentricity: he gave his agents botanical codenames, such as Fig, Rose or Tomato, and sported a fur cape with a high collar, which made him look ‘like a British actor emulating a thirties spy’. Behind his back, colleagues called him ‘the cadaver’ and wondered at his strangeness. ‘The guy was just in another world,’ said one. But he was good. By 1946, he had successfully penetrated no fewer than seven foreign intelligence services, and had a roster of more than fifty active informants – most of them quite dodgy, and some of them entirely so. Among the most glamorous, and least trustworthy, was Princess Maria Pignatelli, the widow of an Italian marquis with links to Mussolini who had offered her services to the OSS as an informant on what remained of Italian fascism. Angleton discovered, however, that she had previously been in contact with the German intelligence service; he was never sure how far he could trust the spy he knew, with only limited affection, as ‘Princess Pig’. Even more dubious was Virgilio Scattolini, a corpulent Italian journalist who wrote bestselling, semi-pornographic novels, including one entitled, rather unenticingly, Amazons in the Bidet. This sideline did not prevent him from obtaining a job on the Vatican newspaper. In 1944, he offered to supply the OSS in Rome with Vatican diplomatic documents and cable traffic, including copies of reports from the papal nuncio in Tokyo, who was in direct contact with senior Japanese officials. Angleton paid Scattolini a princely retainer of $500 a month. His reports were sent straight to Roosevelt, and were considered so secret that only the President or Secretary of State could authorise access to them. Angleton, however, began to have doubts when it emerged that Scattolini was hawking similar material to other intelligence organisations, including MI6. The crunch came when Scattolini reported a conversation between the Japanese envoy to the Holy See and his American counterpart, which the State Department discovered had never taken place. Scattolini was making it up, and he continued to do so, even after he was sacked by Angleton. In 1948 he was imprisoned for fabricating two entire volumes purporting to be the ‘Secret Documents of Vatican Diplomacy’.
The Scattolini episode was deeply embarrassing, the first blemish on Angleton’s career. It also ingrained his natural propensity for extreme suspicion. His time in Britain, observing the successful Double Cross operation against the Germans, had taught Angleton ‘how vulnerable even the most supposedly secure counter-intelligence service is to clandestine penetration’. On reflection, he wondered whether Scattolini might have been a Soviet double agent, deployed to plant damaging disinformation. The duplicity of spies like Princess Pig and Virgilio Scattolini seemed to reinforce Angleton’s distrust of all but a few intimates; he became increasingly obsessed with double agents and ‘the Byzantine possibilities open to the counter-intelligence practitioner’. On Angleton’s visits to Berne, Elliott noted his American friend’s deepening mistrust, his compulsive compilation of secret files, his adherence to secrecy as a sort of religion. Every day, Angleton scoured his Rome office for bugs, ‘crawling around on his hands and knees’, convinced the Soviets were attempting to listen in on his conversations, just as he was eavesdropping on theirs. ‘His real love was unravelling the web of deception, penetration and general intrigue woven by the KGB,’ wrote Elliott. ‘Above all, he loved secrecy, perhaps even secrecy for its own sake.’