Spycraft - Melton [220]
The obituary ignored Gottlieb’s remarkable contribution to America’s security during his eleven years as Deputy and Director of the Technical Services Division. Under Gottlieb’s leadership, TSD built worldwide clandestine technical capabilities critical to virtually all significant U.S. clandestine operations in the last third of the twentieth century. Eleven of the obituary’s twelve paragraphs focused on drug, poisons, and mind-control themes while ignoring the fact that with Gottlieb at its head, TSD conceived and built the technical devices that enabled the CIA to break the back of KGB counterintelligence inside the Soviet Union. Only the obituary’s closing paragraph alluded to Gottlieb’s humanitarian activities—that after retirement he worked in a leprosy hospital in India for eighteen months.
Another Washington Post story published two years after Gottlieb’s death and three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America more accurately captured his life and work. The author observed that Gottlieb, the longest-serving Chief of the CIA’s Technical Services, had served his country as “the coldest warrior” while also living as a “humble and compassionate [man], an altruist eager to ease the miseries of the weak and sick.”39
Yet, regardless of Gottlieb’s public service and personal charity his name will be inextricably linked to the ten-year MKULTRA program and the sinister implications of associated words such as drugs, LSD, assassination, and mind control. No consensus is likely to emerge on how well MKULTRA and Gottlieb’s role served the national interest at a time when America’s leaders sensed a “clear and present danger” from the Soviet threat. However, whenever the question is debated, an indisputable fact, articulated in the final report of the 1976 Church Commission, remains: Under the administrations of four Presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, “[the] CIA has been responsive to the presidency throughout. No rogue elephant.” 40
CHAPTER 21
Cover and Disguise
They must lead a double life . . . it is a vexing existence.
—David Atlee Phillips, as quoted in The Literary Spy
False or assumed identities are a way of life for intelligence officers. While conducting their work, case officers and technical officers alike have learned to live “normally” with alias names by combining a con man’s verbal skills to spin a plausible cover story with unassailable identification papers. The intelligence officer must convincingly establish that he is who and what he claims, even though it is all a fabrication. Most officers use a dozen or more different alias names during a career.
For the CIA, creating false identities and their supporting documentation had its origin in 1942 in the Documentation Division of the OSS Research and Development branch. Agents infiltrated by the OSS into Occupied Europe required “bullet-proof” identification papers, as the slightest whiff of duplicity could result in summary execution. OSS logbooks from October 1943 show requirements for fabricated documents such as French stamps, ID papers, and travel certificates. Agents dispatched behind German lines by OSS officer William Casey, later Director of Central Intelligence, were regular “customers” for the output of the OSS document fabrication shop in London between 1944 and 1945.1 The London operation, manned by an assortment of craftsmen and forgers, was a field component of Stanley Lovell’s OSS R&D branch and evolved in the postwar years into the Document Intelligence branch in the Operational Aids Division of the CIA’s Office of Special Operations.
In 1951, the CIA’s consolidation of technical and scientific work in the Technical Services Staff included the capability to manufacture documents and identity papers. The significance of documentation for Agency operations was