Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War (review)

The rather pathetic story of intelligence operations conducted in postwar Europe by the United States and Soviet Union—murky missions that amounted to the opening clashes of the Cold War—is gradually coming into focus. During this period, an "iron curtain" was falling across the center of Europe. Policymakers pretended that the World War II alliance was surviving into the peace. In most capitals, "de-Nazification" of defeated Germany was the priority, but on the ground Soviet and Western occupation armies confronted each other as rivals, and even open enemies. The target—and prize—in their competition was success in recruiting former Nazis from the fascist intelligence networks to serve new masters.

It was a bleak era, a dark age, in American intelligence history. From October 1945 to September 1947, the United States was, in effect, unilaterally disarmed in the field of espionage. The new president, Harry S. Truman, was distrustful of Franklin Roosevelt's wartime spymaster, the daring (and Republican) William J. Donovan. Truman therefore at war's end abolished the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the civilian intelligence organization that Donovan had created. Not until two years later was Truman sufficiently convinced of the Soviet threat that he agreed to restore a civilian intelligence capability in the form of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Declassification of official documents in both the United States and post-Soviet Russia is of little help in tracing the kinds of things that went on during that two-year interregnum. These operations, quite intentionally, were not recorded in any written documentation. On the American side the efforts were so naïve and ineffective that most of the practitioners have had little incentive to produce inspirational memoirs recounting their exploits.

Into this void comes Richard Cutler, who has written an engaging and credible memoir of a forgotten transition that is difficult for a new generation to picture. Cutler, a native Midwesterner who had joined Donovan's New York law firm before the war as a young associate, was a "news junkie and history buff" (p. xi), blessed with a natural curiosity and a gift for learning languages—an ideal candidate for the OSS. After the war, Cutler, unlike most of his colleagues, chose to stay on in the business of intelligence. The challenges of old-world espionage seemed an attractive career alternative to a life in corporate law.

In November 1945, Cutler found himself in Berlin leading a five-man counterintelligence team, the sole remnant of abandoned OSS networks that by then were working uneasily under the authority of the War Department in a bureaucratic stepchild called the Strategic Services Unit. Several years ago I sought out General William Quinn, who had served as head of the SSU early in his long and stormy military career, at his comfortable retirement apartment near the Pentagon. He seemed pleasantly incredulous upon learning what I wanted to discuss with him, and remarked cheerfully "It's been 40 years since anyone has asked me about the SSU days."

Cutler's mission was to try to reassemble the OSS wartime networks on the spot and discreetly redirect their targets of scrutiny from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union. This was the era of the "fabricators," creative entrepreneurs who perfected techniques of telling new masters what they wanted to hear. The more professional spymaster whom the Americans eventually relied on, General Reinhard Gehlen, was hors de combat, under "protection" at the U.S. Army's interrogation center in Fort Hunt, Virginia, between tours as a prisoner of war and the powerful head of the CIA spy apparatus in Germany.

Thus, Cutler became a case officer running a motley stable of agents like Heinz Krull, codenamed Zigzag, a former Abwehr agent who amassed no less than fifteen sets of identity documents as he roamed the streets of occupied Berlin seeking out former comrades in Nazi intelligence. Most were unemployed and desperate...