◆ SpookStack

Waterloo was an enormous ( tg moustaches and behind them the great. head of Osbert Lancaster, an apparition which assured me of food company on the voyage. Be- fore we sailed, J was called to the ship’s telephone. Jack Easton was o:. the line to tell me that Dwyer ‘ac just telegraphed his resigna- tion, It was not clear why, but I hed been warned. Finally, a case of campagne was delivered to my cabin with the card of a disgusting- ly rich friend. I began to feel that I would enjoy my first transatlantic crossing. ' made my first slip almost im- mediately after entering American territorial waters. An FBI repre- sentative had come out in the pilot’s launch to greet me. I gave him a gisss c2 Tio Pepe which he sipped unnapolly while we made polite con- versation. I was later to learn that ze meu of the FBI, with hardly an exeepliou, were proud of their in- » shat, of having sprung from the geriss rox‘s. One of the first senior Geine-. 1 tet in Washington claimed to neve aad a grandpappy who kept a general store at Horse Creek, Mis- souri. They were therefore whisky- _drinkers, with beer for light re- freshment. By contrast, CIA men flaunted cosmopolitan postures. They would discuss absinthe and serve Burgundy above room tem- pevniture. This is not just flippancy. i. iints to a deep social cleavage kL. -veen the two organisations, “hich accounts for at least some of the asperity marking their ex- changes. My FBI friend saw me through the landing formalities and bedded me down in a hotel with a view of Central Park. Next day at Penn- aylvania Station, I boarded the train for Washington. The sumac was still in flower and gave me a the few glories of America which Americans have never exaggerated, because exaggeration is impossible. Peter Dwyer met me and explained, over our first bourbon, that his res- ignation had nothing to do with my appointment to succeed him. Yar personal reasons, he had jong . .ted to settle in Canada, where @ congenial government post wa: awaiting him. The news of my post- ing to Washington had simply de- — termined the timing of his north- ‘ward move to Ottewa. So we atarted on a pleasant footing. Nothing could exceed the care and astuteness with which he inducted me into Washington politica. q Mntly succeeded Admiral Raboue as head of the whole organisation and promptly fell foul of the Senate. The driving force of OSO at the ' time was Jim Angleton, who had It is not easy to make a coherent picture of my tour of duty in the United States. Indeed, such a pic- ture would give a wrong impression of the type of work I was engaged in. It was tao varied, and often too amorphous, to be reduced to simple terms. Liaison with the FBI alone, if it had been conducted thoroughly, would have been a full-time job. It was the era of McCarthy in full evil blast. It was also the era of Hiss, Coplon, Fuchs, Gold, Green- giass and the brave Rosenbergs— not to mention others who are still nameless, Liaison with the CIA cov- ered an even wider field, ranging from a serious attempt to subvert - an East European regime to such questions as the proper exploitation of German documents relating to General Vlasov. In every question that arose, the first question was to please one party without offend- ing the other. In addition, I had to work in with the Royal Canadian ’ Mounted Folice and with individ- vals in the Department of External Affairs who were dickering with the idea of setting up an independent Canadian secret service. ’ Where to begin? As the end of my story chiefly concerns the FBI, I should perhaps concede to the CIA . . the beginning. The head of the or- ganisation when J] arrived was Ad- miral Hillenkoetter, an amiable gail- or who was soon to give way to General Bedell-Smith without leav- ing much of a mark on American intelligence history. The two divi- sions with which I had mest to do were the Office of Strategic Op- erations (OSO) and the Office of. Policy Coordination (OPC). In plain English, OSO was the intelli- gence-gathering division and OPC was charged with subversion. There was also a jittle work with the planning division, associated with the name of Dick Helms, who re- t formerly served in London and had earned my respect by openly reject- ing the Anglomania that disfigured the young face of OSO. We formed the habit of lunching once a week _at Harvey’s where he demonstrated regularly that overwork was not his only vice. He was one of the thin- nest men I have ever met, and one of the biggest eaters. Lucky Jim! After a year of keeping up with Angleton, I took the advice of an elderly lady friend and went on a diet, dropping from thirteen stone to about eleven in three months. Our close association was, I am | sure, inspired by genuine friendli- . nessa on both sides. But we both had ulterior motives. Angleton wanted to place the burden of ex- changes between the CIA and SIS on the CIA office in London—which was about ten times as big as mine. By doing so, he could exert the maximum pressure on SJS’s head-_ quarters while minimising SIS in- trusions into his own. AS an exer- cise in nationalism, that was fair enough. By cultivating me to the full, he could better keep me under wraps. For my part, I was more - than content to atring him along. The greater the trust between us overtly, the less he would suspect . covert acticn. Who gaing most from this complex game I cannot say. But I had one big advantage. I knew what he was doing for the CIA and he knew what I was doing for SIS. But the real nature of my interest was something he did not know. Although our discussions ranged over the whole world, they usually ended, if they did not begin, with Beanan an an ee cans had an obsessive fear of Com- munism in France, and I was aston- ished by the way in which Angleton devoured reams of French newspa- per material daily. That this w:.- not a private phobia of Angle’ became clear ata later datev.. 4 British proposal for giving * <«- andre Parodi, head of the D’O: