American capabilities for covert operations came too late for some. In the Baltic states, where nationalist partisans waged a tragic struggle against the reimposition of Soviet control, the issue had largely been decided before Wisner’s OPC got into the act. Western cooperation proved too little and too late. Nevertheless an attempt would be made. Wisner’s move into paramilitary action was preceded by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), whose Controller North became the first to make contact and give the Balts hope and support.

  At the end of the war there had been a moment when news of the atomic bomb reached Lithuania. In Baltic cities one heard speculation that the Americans would hand Stalin an ultimatum and force Soviet withdrawal. To the enthralled partisans, it seemed freedom must lie around a single diplomatic bend. But Truman made no atomic threat; there was no rollback. In the words of an interested Lithuanian, “Reality methodically and pitilessly destroyed whatever hopes remained.”

  Stalin garrisoned Lithuania with strong forces, but the brunt of the struggle was borne by the Soviet secret police, which resorted to military assistance only in extraordinary circumstances. The Russians annexed the German port of Koenigsberg, which became Kaliningrad, and added Memel to Lithuania, renaming it Klaipeda. Soviet control measures confronted a people in turmoil. More than 150,000 were sent to the Gulags. Production “norms” for Lithuanian farmers and agricultural collectivization made paupers of many of the rest.

  The Soviets countered the partisans with many measures, including amnesties, attacks, and ambitious “false flag” operations, in which entire Russian security units pretended to be partisan bands. Resistance reached a plateau in 1947. The largest recorded Lithuanian attack on a Russian post occurred in February 1948. But their strength was in decline—by 1950 the partisan BDPS had no more than five thousand fighters. Collectivization robbed the partisans of their food sources while the swelling ranks of Lithuanian Communists indicated that many people had decided to cast their lot with the Russians.

  Without question the Baltic partisans could have used outside help. Before the close of 1945 the Lithuanians had contacts among the DPs. Some of these persons were in touch with Western intelligence, particularly the British. The Lithuanians had a regular courier service, mostly by land across Poland and East Germany. Little is known to have come immediately from these relations, though arms dealing is thought to have been going on in the Baltic. When, in 1947, the Swedish police set out to investigate a ring of rum runners, they wound up instead with a gun-smuggling operation involving deserters from the Soviet army. That August the Soviet newspaper Pravda accused the Estonian government-in-exile in Sweden of being a mere front for American espionage.

  Moscow ought to have suspected the British. As early as 1943 the Secret Intelligence Service had sent an officer to Stockholm to recruit Balts. As with the Displaced Persons after the war, they found a ready pool of potential enlistees. Infiltration of SIS teams began in 1945. The experience was similar in all the Baltic nations. When the British gathered most Baltic refugees in a small number of DP camps among others of the same nationality, it made recruiting easier. British authorities also refused Stalin’s demands to hand these DPs back to the Russians.

  The British Controller Northern Area, Harry Lambton Carr, masterminded the SIS operation. Partisans who at first relied on leftover German and captured Russian weapons began to get help from British intelligence. The key Lithuanian resistance figures Stasys Zymantas and Walter Zilinskas were promised aid and helped organize opposition. The Soviets tumbled to the game toward the end of 1945 when they captured an SIS agent team, four Latvians who had landed on the Courland coast.

  Russian security specialist Janis Lukasevics broke one of the Latvian prisoners, Vivuds Sveics, and induced the radio operator, Augusts Bergmanis, to cooperate. Lukasevics then initiated a deception effort, with Bergmanis radioing false reports of progress, asking for help and new teams—intercepted in turn. Sveics eventually returned to the West as an agent under Russian control, masquerading as a victorious partisan fighter, able to supply the Soviets with data on Balts receiving British training, SIS procedures, bases, and safe houses, and the covert supply network.

  British intelligence had its own methods for recruiting and training agents for the Baltic secret war. It was not only the Russians who practiced false-flag operations. Making contact with the Balts, SIS officers usually pretended to be Swedish. The pretense would be maintained throughout training, the only exceptions being a few carefully selected recruits sent to Germany or Britain for specialized instruction. Carr and SIS chiefs reasoned that spies whom the Russians inserted among the Baltic emigrés would hold back from signing on with the Swedes in hopes of contacting SIS. Since the British occupation zone in Germany included the Baltic coast, from an early date Carr tried infiltrating agents by sea. This was preferable to airdrops, noisy and likely to attract the attention of authorities along the flight path. Landings from boats could be made silently and secretly.

  London had a perfect force for sea infiltration. This was the Baltic fisheries patrol maintained by the Royal Navy beginning in 1949. Designed to protect local fishermen from interferences by Soviet naval vessels and to recover and disarm numerous mines strewn throughout the Baltic Sea during the war, the patrol consisted of minesweepers that were converted E-boats (patrol boats) taken over from the Germans at the end of the war. The British permitted these unarmed ships to wear the Royal Navy ensign. The SIS then enlisted a former German naval officer, Hans Helmut Klose, who had led a torpedo boat flotilla in the Baltic, to skipper their infiltration boat. Klose in turn recruited former comrades for his crew.

  The Controller Northern Area ran the missions. Harry Carr needed eight months of negotiations with the Royal Navy and the British Foreign Office to secure all necessary permissions. A real problem was the tight British budget; for covert operations especially it was spread very thin—£500,000 was considered sufficient for the SIS according to one account. That was supposed to do not merely for Carr but for all British covert action programs. Here was where the Central Intelligence Agency could be quite helpful. In particular, Frank Wisner and his OPC had money to burn. Not only was Wisner liberally funded by three different agencies but a portion of Marshall Plan funds, up to 5 percent in each European country where it was active, were being set aside as so-called counterpart funds, which the OPC could spend without accounting.

  The Americans were not ignorant of conditions in the Baltic states. President Truman himself, in a dramatic gesture near the close of 1946, congratulated a group of Estonian refugees who crossed the Atlantic in an old wooden sailing vessel and ordered the Immigration Service to ignore their lack of visas. Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland worked actively to publicize conditions in the Baltic states. More than twelve thousand Estonians in the DP camps signed a petition appealing for the freedom of their nation and sent it to Truman. Partisan activity peaked that same year. Before his death in 1948, Dr. Alfred Bilmanis, former Latvian minister to the United States, wrote a half-dozen works on the urgent needs of his country. The Lithuanians sent a partisan leader to the West to seek outside support. Juozas Luksa-Daumantas went to Britain and to America, where he wrote of partisan action behind the Iron Curtain. The Lithuanian-American Council, a prominent emigré group in the United States, in January 1947 made a public appeal for independence to the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers. The Lithuanians tried to meet with President Truman but were told he was unavailable. Washington, however, made strenuous assertions of support for democratic government in the Baltic states as elsewhere.

  In May 1948 an official study group sent President Truman a report reflecting keen interest in these partisan actions. The report observed that “secret operations, particularly through support of resistance groups, provide one of the most important sources of secret intelligence.” That August army staff officers advocated formation of a small planning group to fashion a war plan especially designed to “cause the people of Soviet Russia to overthrow their present totalitarian government and to render them all practicable assistance in this undertaking.” But the army staff initiative went nowhere. Instead the OPC materialized under Frank Wisner, and paramilitary operations came under Wisner’s mandate for political warfare and preventive direct action.

  The CIA joined British intelligence in the Baltic partisan struggle, using Wisner’s OPC. Wisner in turn relied on Franklin A. Lindsay, his Eastern Europe Division chief. Recruited out of the Marshall Plan offices in Paris, Lindsay was another OSS veteran and one with real paramilitary experience—during the war he had worked in what was then Yugoslavia, arranging secret arms shipments, laboring in the fevered political canyon between right-wing and Communist partisans. It was Lindsay, together with a former State Department official, Charles Thayer, who had needled George Kennan with proposals for a political warfare organization as consultants to him in 1947–1948, so Lindsay can fairly be said to have contributed to the origins of OPC. But, enthralled by the Marshall Plan as an economic bootstrap for downtrodden Europe—as a Harvard grad student Lindsay had watched Marshall’s speech pointing up the necessity for this program—Lindsay had gone to work with congressional foreign aid committees and then signed on with the plan managers. Wisner got to Lindsay and brought him into OPC in early 1949. At that time the British SIS solidified their contact with the Baltic forest brotherhood.

  Lindsay and Wisner placed great trust in the Gehlen Organization. James Critchfield insists the Org never conducted operations, but in fact Gehlen’s role proved vital from the start. The CIA, the SIS, and the German effort continued at least into the mid-1950s. Operations were mounted from the western zone of Germany, as was preliminary agent training, though certain specialties, such as parachute jumping, were taught in England and the United States. In the DP camps and among the Balt emigrés in Germany, Gehlen’s agents roamed on behalf of OPC. The Org’s talent scouts told the Americans whom to hire. The Germans had fewer language difficulties with the Balts, so they also did much of the basic instructing plus housekeeping at the bases. Some of the Balts suspected SIS motives in this project and were glad when the Americans came on board.

  Gordon Stewart, the German station chief, worried after the first mission began, when on October 3, 1949, a team was parachuted into Lithuania by a Czech air crew working for OPC. Communications remained poor, the agents’ messages garbled. Balts warned that the operation had been penetrated by the enemy. Stewart agreed, but the British resisted that view. In particular, one of the agents had come twice out of Russia, the ultimate denied area, with no difficulty. Harry Carr interpreted the Balts’ suspicions as expressions of emigré politics. At the CIA, Harry Rositzke, chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, sided with Stewart. Arguments ensued.

  In November 1950 Carr sailed to the United States aboard the ocean liner Queen Mary, brimming with proposals to increase the tempo of clandestine missions in Operation Jungle, as SIS had dubbed the enterprise. The CIA agreed. A fairly large pool of potential recruits existed. In western Germany alone the influx from the DP camps included twenty thousand Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians. The CIA also did some recruiting among emigrés living in the United States. Balts working for Lindsay earned $125 a week for three months of training, then $100 per day when in the denied areas, with a bonus of $1,000 if their missions were judged successful. Few returned to claim the bonuses.

  One early recruit to the CIA effort was Juozas Luksa, who parachuted back into Lithuania but soon died at the side of the forest brotherhood. The SIS sent in the team of Vitolds Berkis and Andrei Galdins in the spring of 1950. They succumbed to Soviet security troops masquerading as partisans. Between 1949 and 1951 the CIA reportedly parachuted several more agents, but results were poor. Accounts assert that about half the operatives survived, but known cases mostly encountered trouble of one sort or another. A team of four dropped into Lithuania by OPC in late April 1951, for example, were swept up almost immediately by Russian security. They had been housed in Stockholm, and their mission left from Munich. The Scandinavian Branch of OPC’s Western Europe Division ran the Stockholm end. Branch chief Lou Scherer insisted that no leak had occurred on his watch. Had the betrayal taken place in Germany?

  The CIA’s concern became manifest about this time. The agency sent a delegation of seven officers to London, where they met with Harry Carr and other senior SIS officers concerned with the Baltic operations. Harry Rositzke led the group, and one of the more suspicious Balts accompanied the OPC team. Officers like Lindsay, Gerry Miller, the division chief for Western Europe, where the bases were located, and Lou Scherer, in whose jurisdiction much of the recruiting and support work was done, were under a cloud because of operational failures. With OPC plans for seaborne landings in the works, doubts had to be cleared up. Rositzke also raised questions regarding possible Russian penetration of Ukrainian resistance groups as well as British favoritism toward a group the CIA regarded as hidebound, which the CIA “baron,” as division chiefs were nicknamed, saw as an obstacle to recruitment. The SIS controller reassured the Americans. Carr insisted SIS had as many concerns as the CIA and would take every precaution. Gerhardt Meyer, branch chief for the Baltic under Rositzke, came away unconvinced: “I feel I’ve just spent three days chewing cotton.”

  One of the earliest CIA landings was along the coast of Latvia on September 30, 1951. On that occasion Russians sighted the E-boat in territorial waters. Two Soviet destroyers gave chase, but Hans Klose maneuvered and his unarmed, unloaded E-boat outran her pursuers. The agent landed during this escapade later defected to the Russians. Major Lukasevics, the Soviet security mastermind, scored his greatest coup at this time when Harry Carr sent orders for agents Berkis and Galdins to return and bring along one of the partisan leaders. The Soviets fooled Berkis, convinced Galdins to remain in Lithuania (where they executed him), and inserted their own agent, Avritis Gailitis, as the purported forest brotherhood chief. Gailitis went completely unsuspected, regaling British case officers with phony exploits. Sandy McKibbin, the senior SIS officer involved, had been working with the Balts for more than seven years but did not detect the trick.

  The partisan war sputtered to its futile end just as the CIA-SIS Baltic operation reached stride. The last battle in Latvia was recorded in February 1950. By that time the partisans in Estonia had been worn down to isolated bands and those in Lithuania reduced to fewer than five thousand. Although the Voice of America began broadcasting in Lithuanian in 1952, its appealing visions of democracy were at odds with the fact, evident to the remaining partisans, that the British and American agents were intent on intelligence missions and not helping them. Estonian appeals for arms brought just a few crates of pistols and submachine guns from the Gehlen Organization, along with two more agents. In Lithuania the national partisan army decided to disband in 1952. A few partisans continued to fight—there are reports of captures as late as 1960 and of deaths in action against Russians as late as 1964.

  The CIA-SIS operation also petered out. Until 1956 agent teams went up the Baltic by boat. But after 1954 the Soviets planted a spy within the boat service too, while toward the end of 1955 the Royal Navy withdrew permission for German ships to use British naval ensigns, removing Hans Klose’s cover. Then the new government of West Germany absorbed the Gehlen Organization and ordered a halt to its missions into Russia. Baltic partisan warfare proved not only futile but costly. Direct civilian casualties in the three states have been estimated at 75,000. Soviet losses are unknown. In Lithuania the partisans claim 80,000 Russian soldiers killed and somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 Communist officials and local collaborators eliminated, while admitting losses of 30,000, including 90 percent of their cadres. The Soviets concede just a quarter of those losses but claim only the same number of partisans killed.

  American intelligence followed these developments from operational bases in Germany and a monitoring station in Stockholm run by the Gehlen Organization. Reinhard Gehlen himself met Frank Wisner only once, a pro forma drop-in during Gehlen’s 1951 visit to Washington. Beginning that April, Wisner’s outfit had direct representation in Stockholm in the form of a field station established under William E. Colby, who had worked in Scandinavia for OSS at the end of World War II. His primary mission was to organize stay-behind networks in the region. These groups of agents would be activated only if the Soviets took over the country. The OPC station chief met many Eastern European and Balt emigrés, and talked for hours about conditions in their homelands—primarily, Colby recalled, to boost their morale and encourage them to maintain links with the resistance. A few were steered toward “the correct channels in Europe through which they could get support for anti-Communist activities.” The Baltic partisan failure particularly upset Bill Colby, with its implications for his own attempts to create prospective resistance groups. The tight compartmentation of information within the CIA, especially regarding clandestine operations, precluded Colby from discovering that other secret wars throughout Europe were developing along much the same lines as the one he could see.

  4

  “The Kind of Experience We Need”

  IN THE END it was not the Baltic coastal plain but the rugged Balkans that witnessed the first big CIA paramilitary operation. This plan, in conjunction with the British, aimed to unseat the Communist government of Albania, a small state on the eastern littoral of the Adriatic Sea. Geography made the campaign possible: Albania bordered on just two other nations, Greece and Yugoslavia, by 1949 both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania’s “Iron Curtain,” isolated from the remainder of the Soviet bloc, became vulnerable. At the same time bases were available on the island of Malta and in Italy, both only a short distance away.