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   [   ] 4 Spies on the Rise The friendship that grew up between Win Scott and Jim Angleton is evoked in an undated, scratched black-and-white photograph that Michael found among his father’s personal effects. It shows the two men lounging in a garden in Rome, probably taken in 1946 or 1947. Angleton was the chief of the Rome station of the newly created CIA. Win was the chief of the London station. In the photograph, Angleton, lanky and broad-shouldered, sits crosslegged , arms draped across his long legs while leaning a confidential elbow on his friend’s chair. He is penetrating, professorial, coiled, detached, and slightly askew. Win is more upright, open, and ingenuous. His round face, full cheeks, blondish hair, and little ears suggest the scion of a prosperous family. A handkerchief flaring from his breast pocket bespeaks attention to detail and appearances . He sits, slightly slouched, knees apart, hands splayed, a smile playing on his lips as if he has just given a command to the photographer to capture him at his best. They were reunited in Washington in late 1949. Angleton returned from Italy to take the job of chief of Staff A, the foreign intelligence branch of the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination. OPC handled “special operations”—the euphemism of the day for sabotage, subversion , psychological warfare, and all manner of dirty tricks. Win worked in the Office of Special Operations (OSO), which had responsibility for secretly gathering information, that is, espionage. Some of the Ivy League types in OSO, living in a world of cables, dossiers, and index cards, resented the rise of the more swashbuckling operatives in OPC, who reveled in a world of guns, fake IDs, and unmarked cash. Not Win. He had helped Allen Dulles, now a [  ]   c h a p t e r 4 practicing corporate lawyer but still angling to get back into government service, write two influential reports about how the new CIA should operate . Dulles, like Win, felt strongly that it was imperative for the new agency not just to collect information via espionage but to also mount secret operations against communist forces everywhere. Win had good friends on both sides of the OPC-OSO rivalry. For example, Ray Leddy had returned to intelligence work, abandoning his fledgling import-export business to take up the fight against communism in the OPC’s burgeoning operations in Venezuela. “He was very smooth, polished, and a good man to work for,” recalled one subordinate. Before long Leddy was the chief of OPC operations for the whole hemisphere. Win was a spy on the rise, but he was also a mess. His life throbbed with conflicts. Things had not worked out with Besse, mainly because he had never lost his ardor for Paula. Besse had left him in the spring of 1948 and returned to Alabama with their son, Beau, now four years old. Win wanted to marry Paula and take a job in Washington, but she wanted to live in New York, where she could work as a model. Back in Alabama, his father was dying of diabetes. When Win arrived in Washington in December 1949, he was frightened and lonely. “Please tell me you still love me,” he beseeched Paula in one letter. In another, he asked, “You haven’t felt ‘liberated’ and ‘free’ since I left, have you?” Maybe he was just plain frightened by the world he lived in. He had gone away to war against the Germans five years earlier and stayed on for the Cold War against the Russians. He was still on the front lines. As one British official described the mood in London and Washington at that time, “The Soviet menace was everywhere; the dream of a cooperative postwar world was long dead; the iron curtain was solid. The Berlin blockade was a recent and instructive memory; the captive nations were not a slogan but a vivid reality. Soviet hostility and duplicity were taken for granted.” Headlines about the arrest of nuclear scientist Klaus Fuchs, who had passed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, served as a reminder that there might be traitors in his midst. Win knew the cost of failure. The Ukrainian anticommunist forces that he and Philby had helped organize had been decimated by arrests. More recently, Albanian commando squads, sponsored by the U.S. and British intelligence services, had been ambushed as they landed in the Balkans. Some were killed, the rest captured. The Albanian government announced they...

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