"What had we done wrong?" wondered the CIA's John Limond Hart,
who was handling the Albanians in Rome. It took years before the CIA
understood that the Soviets had known every aspect of the operation
from the start. The training camps in Germany were infiltrated. The Albanian
exile communities in Rome, Athens, and London were shot
through with traitors. And James J. Angleton—the headquarters man
responsible for the security of secret operations, the CIA's guardian
against double agents—had coordinated the operation with his best
friend in British intelligence: the Soviet spy Kim Philby, London's liaison with the agency.

Philby worked for Moscow out of a secure room in the Pentagon, adjacent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His friendship with Angleton was sealed with the cold kiss of gin and the warm embrace of whisky. He was an extraordinary drinker, knocking back a fifth a day, and Angleton was on his way to becoming one of the CIA's champion alcoholics,a title held against stiff competition. For more than a year, before and after many a liquid lunch, Angleton gave Philby the precise coordinates for the drop zones for every agent the CIA parachuted into Albania. Though failure followed
failure, death upon death, the flights went on for four years. Roughly two hundred of the CIA's foreign agents died. Almost no one in the American government knew. It was a most secret thing.

Angleton was promoted to chief of counterintelligence when it was
over. He held the job for twenty years. Drunk after lunch, his mind an impenetrable maze, his in-box a black hole, he passed judgment on
every operation and every officer that the CIA aimed against the Soviets.
He came to believe that a Soviet master plot controlled American
perceptions of the world, and that he and he alone understood the
depths of the deception. He took the CIA's missions against Moscow
down into a dark labyrinth.

"A FUNDAMENTALLY BAD IDEA"

In early 1950, Wisner ordered up a new assault on the iron curtain. The
job went to another Yale man in Munich, by the name of Bill Coffin, a
new recruit with the special anticommunist fervor of an ardent socialist.
"The ends don't always justify the means," Coffin said of his years in the
CIA. "But they are the only thing that can."

Coffin came to the CIA through a family connection, recruited by his
brother-in-law, Frank Lindsay, Wisner's Eastern Europe operations officer.
"I said to them, when I went into CIA, 'I don't want to do spy work,
I want to do underground political work,' " he remembered in 2005.
"The question was: can Russians operate underground? And that
seemed to me quite morally acceptable at the time." Coffin had spent the
last two years of World War II as a U.S. Army liaison with Soviet commanders.
He had been part of the heartless postwar process by which Soviet
soldiers were forcibly repatriated. He had been left with a great
burden of guilt, which influenced his decision to join the CIA.

"I had seen that Stalin could occasionally make Hitler look like a Boy
Scout," Coffin said. "I was very anti-Soviet but very pro-Russian."

Wisner placed his money on the Solidarists, a Russian group that
stood as far to the right as possible in Europe after Hitler. Only the handful
of CIA officers who spoke Russian, like Bill Coffin, could work with
them. The CIA and the Solidarists first smuggled leaflets into Soviet barracks
in East Germany. Then they launched balloons bearing thousands
of pamphlets. Then they sent four-man parachute missions in unmarked
airplanes flying as far east as the outskirts of Moscow. One by one the
Solidarist agents floated down to Russia; one by one, they were hunted
down, captured, and killed. Once again the CIA delivered its agents to
the secret police.

"It was a fundamentally bad idea," Coffin said long after he quit the
CIA and became known as the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, the
chaplain of Yale and one of the most passionate antiwar voices in America
during the 1960s. "We were quite na.ve about the use of American
power." Almost a decade passed before the agency admitted, in its own
words, that "assistance to the .migr.s for the eventuality of war with or
revolution within the USSR was unrealistic."

All told, hundreds of the CIA's foreign agents were sent to their deaths
in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the
1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no