The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Dulles knew from the beginning that working with Wolff was an extremely risky proposition—not just because of the Allies’ strict prohibition against a separate peace deal but because Himmler’s right-hand man was certain to be placed high on the list of Nazi war criminals. Even many years later, when the evidence against Wolff had grown to utterly damning proportions, the old spy refused to pass judgment on him. “The conclusions (#litres_trial_promo) [about Wolff] must be left to history,” wrote Dulles in his carefully calibrated Operation Sunrise memoir. He was delaying a judgment that, for many, had long since been obvious.

When Wolff was later confronted with the obscenity of the Nazi leadership’s war crimes, he would inevitably plead ignorance, claiming he occupied such a lofty perch in the Reich’s clouds that he did not learn about the death camps until the final days of the war. When this tactic failed, he would claim that he had been powerless to stop the mass slaughter, or he would fall back on legalisms and other technical evasions. But the stains on Wolff were not so easily erased.

Karl Wolff, who would go down in history as “one of the unknown giants (#litres_trial_promo) of Hitler’s Reich,” was content to operate in the shadows. While little known by the public, however, he played a prominent administrative role in Hitler’s lethal assembly line. He was, as Time magazine later branded him, the “Bureaucrat of Death.”

The Nuremberg trials would firmly establish the principle that administrators of murder—not just the actual executioners—could be found guilty of war crimes. Although he was not a central cog in the daily operations of the Holocaust like Adolf Eichmann, Wolff, as Himmler’s top troubleshooter, frequently intervened to ensure the smooth efficiency of the extermination process.

During the Nuremberg trials, a highly incriminating letter written (#litres_trial_promo) by Wolff would emerge that made it clear how important his intervention could be in keeping the trains rolling to the death camps. In July 1942, after the trains hauling Polish Jews to the Treblinka gas chambers were temporarily halted because of the German military’s demand for railcars, Wolff appealed to a Nazi transportation official for help. After the rail shortage was successfully resolved, Wolff sent off a heartfelt letter of thanks.

“I was especially pleased,” Wolff wrote the transportation minister in a chillingly bureaucratic note, “to receive the information that, for the last 14 days, a train has been leaving daily for Treblinka with 5,000 members of the chosen people, and that in this way we are in a position to carry out this population movement at an accelerated tempo.”

Wolff also played a key administrative (#litres_trial_promo) role in a series of medical experiments on human subjects at the notorious Dachau camp from 1942 through 1943. The research was conducted by Luftwaffe doctors who were intent on increasing the survival rates of German pilots, and was strongly supported by Himmler, who fancied himself a man of science. In the first round of experiments, human guinea pigs culled by the SS from Dachau’s ranks of the damned were forced inside special low-oxygen chambers to determine how long Luftwaffe pilots could fly at high altitudes before passing out. Inside the chambers, victims gasped for air, frantically cried out, and finally collapsed. It was up to the Luftwaffe doctor in charge of the experiments, a sadist named Siegmund Rascher, whether the victims would be revived in time or allowed to die. Rascher oversaw about 150 such high-altitude experiments, of which at least half resulted in death.

A subsequent round of medical experiments at Dachau was aimed at finding the best ways to revive German aviators who were rescued after crashing into the frigid North Sea. Camp inmates were forced to stand naked in freezing weather for up to fourteen hours. Others were submerged in tanks of iced water for three hours at a time. The subjects of the initial freezing experiments all died. But then the doctors added a new twist to their experiments. They “rewarmed” their victim in a hot bath and then revived him further with “animal heat” provided by four female Gypsies. The victim, after being nearly frozen to death, suddenly found his naked body warmly embraced by four women who brought him back to life.

Wolff should have been sitting in the dock at Nuremberg as part of the first round of defendants. But it was the cruder and less-connected executioner Ernst Kaltenbrunner who would hang for the sins of the SS. Nor was Wolff in the dock the following year, when the Doctors’ Trial began, though he would be singled out by prosecutors as one of the principal “masterminds” behind the Dachau experiments. Throughout the Nuremberg proceedings and the legal challenges that confronted him in later years, Wolff was watched over by his twin guardian angels—Dulles and Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz. They made sure that the sword of justice never came down with its full might on SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Among the few lives saved by the Operation Sunrise peace gambit, as it turned out, was that of Wolff himself and those of the SS officers who conspired with him.

On May 13, 1945, shortly after the Operation Sunrise surrender, Karl Wolff celebrated his forty-fifth birthday at the villa of the Dukes of Pistoia in Bolzano, the royal estate he had requisitioned as his final SS command post. Before his lunch party began, Wolff relaxed on the (#litres_trial_promo) villa’s terrace with his SS aide and Sunrise partner Eugen Dollmann, who had served as the interpreter for Hitler and Himmler in Italy. “It’s really rather pleasant here, Eugenio,” remarked the SS-Obergruppenführer, using his affectionate name for the Italy-besotted Dollmann as the two men gazed at Wolff’s children and Dollmann’s Alsatian hound gamboling in the rose garden. But Dollmann, who could hear American tanks rumbling nearby, could not let himself enjoy their idyll. “I have a feeling that this is going to be your last birthday in sunny Italy, Herr General,” he remarked. Dollmann’s grave mood brought a burst of laughter from Wolff. “My dear Eugenio! You’re not going to get the wind up in these lovely surroundings? And on my birthday too!”

Shortly afterward, Wolff’s wife, Ingeborg, a tall, blond beauty and former countess, who had left her aging, aristocratic husband for her perfect Aryan match, came onto the terrace and announced that lunch was ready.

Dollmann’s instincts, as usual, proved correct. As Wolff and his guests—staff officers of the Wehrmacht in dress uniform—sipped champagne in the villa’s flower-adorned entrance hall, they suddenly heard the growl of tanks outside. “The Americans,” Wolff said in a deflated voice, as he looked out the windows. Soldiers in the white helmets of military policemen burst through the doors, carrying machine guns and herding Wolff’s children in front of them. One of their officers, chewing a wad of gum, unceremoniously approached the SS commander and announced that he was under arrest.

Wolff was aghast, protesting indignantly that Allen Dulles, the president’s personal representative in Switzerland, had promised him (#litres_trial_promo) “honorable treatment.” But the military police officer was unimpressed. “Put your things in a small case,” he snapped at Wolff, still working his Wrigley’s. “Go on, get a move on.”

As the Obergruppenführer bid farewell to his wife and children outside the villa, a mob of Italians gathered to also send the SS officers on their way, pelting Wolff and Dollmann with rocks and rotten eggs as the MPs stood by laughing. The two Nazi VIPs were then stuffed inside an American jeep and whisked away—first to a gloomy Bolzano dungeon and then, more hospitably, to Cinecittà, the sprawling film studio in Rome that the Allies had transformed into a POW camp.

Wolff began invoking the name of Allen Dulles to anyone who would listen as soon as he was behind bars. The question of whether Dulles had promised Wolff immunity from war crimes prosecution in return for his Sunrise collaboration would nag the intelligence chief for many years. Dulles would repeatedly insist that Wolff had never asked for such protection and he had never offered it. According to Dulles, the SS commander had maintained all along that he was no war criminal and “he was willing to stand on his record.”

In truth, Wolff’s growing confidence as he successfully dodged prosecution over the following years derived from the fact that Dulles had indeed offered him immunity. Two of the Swiss intermediaries involved in the Sunrise negotiations would later confirm that such an arrangement had been made. Dulles’s negotiating team went so far as to promise Wolff that he and other “decent” and “idealistic” members of the Nazi high command would be allowed to participate in the leadership of postwar Germany. Wolff was even given to believe that he might be awarded the minister of education post.

Dulles threw his cloak of protection over Wolff from the very start. The SS general spent the first days of his confinement as a privileged guest of the U.S. military. He had been warned by Gaevernitz that he might have to spend some time behind bars, to deflect any criticism of preferential treatment. But Wolff enjoyed VIP treatment, receiving better food than other prisoners and even being allowed to wear his full uniform, complete with sidearm. In August, he was transferred to a small U.S.-run POW camp near Gmunden, Austria—a lakeside resort known for its health spas, featuring pinecone and salt-bath treatments. According to a highly embarrassing article that ran in the New York Herald Tribune, Wolff enjoyed a pleasant summer (#litres_trial_promo) idyll on the lake, where he was reunited with his family and even asked for his yacht to be delivered to him.

That summer was the period of greatest jeopardy for Wolff, as the Nuremberg prosecutors selected their first list of defendants and the world outcry for justice was at its peak, on the heels of the appalling revelations about the Final Solution. Justice Robert Jackson and the Allied legal staff considered Wolff to be a primary target, circulating a list that named him one of the “major war criminals.” With Hitler and Himmler both dead, Wolff was among the highest Nazi officials to survive the war, clearly outranking most of the defendants who were subsequently put on trial at Nuremberg.

Determined to keep Wolff out of the defendants’ dock, however, Dulles went so far as to (#litres_trial_promo)bury incriminating evidence, including one particularly damning OSS report that blamed the Nazi general not only for the “wholesale slaughter of populations” and “the collective reprisals” against Italian civilians, but also for the torture and murder of OSS agents in his Bolzano SS headquarters. The feelings against Wolff were running understandably high in some OSS quarters, where the SS general was suspected of personally interrogating American intelligence officers. But Dulles betrayed his own men, blocking the OSS report on Wolff from ever reaching the Nuremberg staff. Instead, it was Dulles’s portrait of Wolff as a “moderate” and a “gentleman” that was sent to the Nuremberg legal team, along with a recommendation that he not be prosecuted for SS crimes.

Dulles succeeded in keeping Wolff off the Nuremberg defendants list. The general would appear at the trial only as a witness, testifying on behalf of his fellow war criminal Hermann Goering. But as Nuremberg prosecutors prepared for new rounds of trials, and as war crimes tribunals were organized in Italy and other countries that had fallen under the boot of Nazi occupation, Wolff still found himself behind bars. Realizing that the SS general was still not safe from prosecution, Dulles arranged for Wolff to be diagnosed with a nervous disorder, and in spring 1946 he was transferred to a psychiatric institution in Augsburg, Austria.

Wolff knew that Dulles had engineered his psychiatric diagnosis to shield him from prosecution, but he also suspected that it was a way (#litres_trial_promo) “to prevent me [from] talking.” The general knew that he continued to have great leverage over Dulles: if he revealed the immunity deal that the two men had worked out, the spymaster’s career would be jeopardized. Wolff was also privy to another Sunrise dirty secret: the extent to which the separate peace pact was a cold betrayal of the United States’ and Britain’s wartime Soviet allies. In fact, Dulles was so concerned about what Wolff might be telling his interrogators behind bars that he began to have his conversations (#litres_trial_promo) secretly taped.

As Wolff’s imprisonment stretched on, he grew increasingly frustrated and began talking more freely about the “mutual understanding” that he and Dulles had struck and about the way he had been double-crossed. Wolff’s increasingly vocal behavior was not lost on Dulles and the other American and British authorities involved in the Sunrise deal. At one point, his jailers quietly offered him an open door to his freedom. But Wolff did not want the life of a rat on the run, hiding out in Argentina or Chile. He was determined to hold the Sunrise cabal to their deal; he wanted to be fully exonerated and allowed to regain a prominent position in the new Germany.

In February 1947, Wolff played his trump card, writing a letter to President Truman (#litres_trial_promo) in which he boldly revealed the terms of the Operation Sunrise agreement. Wolff informed Truman that, in return for his cooperation on the secret surrender, “I received from Mr. Dulles and his secretary, Mr. Gaevernitz, an explicit promise” of freedom for himself and his fellow “meritorious” SS collaborators on the Sunrise deal. It was now time, Wolff informed Truman, for the United States to honor the bargain made by Dulles.

The German POW followed up his letter to Truman with an equally emphatic note to Dulles, in which he managed to strike a tone at once courtly and threatening. Wolff insisted that Dulles (#litres_trial_promo) must come to his aid, and that of his “entire [Sunrise] squadron,” to win their “honorable release from captivity.” His direct appeal to Dulles, wrote Wolff, “is not only my right but my knightly duty”; by negotiating secretly with the U.S. spymaster, Wolff reminded him, he had “saved your honor and reputation … at the risk of our lives.”

Wolff stirred the pot further by sending a similar letter to Major General Lyman Lemnitzer, who had worked closely with Dulles as the U.S. Army’s point man on the Sunrise negotiations. Lemnitzer shared Dulles’s strong anti-Soviet sentiments, and he had colluded with the OSS official to keep the secret talks with Wolff going forward, even after President Roosevelt and the Allied command thought they had pulled the plug on Sunrise. After the German surrender, the ambitious Lemnitzer had also worked with Dulles to promote Sunrise in the press as an espionage triumph. When Wolff’s letter reached Lemnitzer, he was stationed at the Pentagon, where he had been appointed to a prestigious position with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lemnitzer would ultimately rise to become the Army chief of staff under President Kennedy, where once again his career would be fatefully linked with that of Dulles.

As soon as Lemnitzer received the letter from Wolff, who appealed to him “as one general to another” to make sure the Sunrise deal was honored, Lemnitzer smelled trouble. As with his letter to Dulles, Wolff’s appeal to Lemnitzer melded obsequious German courtesy with a flash of steel. Wolff signed off with a clear warning, telling Lemnitzer that he was hoping to resolve the situation “as a comrade” before he was forced to air his grievances “publicly.” Lemnitzer fired off a letter to Dulles, who was in Switzerland at the time, telling him that he was “anxious to discuss this matter with you” as soon as Dulles returned home.

Thus began a series of carefully worded letters and private discussions between the two most prominent Americans who were associated with the Sunrise deal. Dulles, who was savvy enough to never put his agreement with Wolff in writing, warned Lemnitzer to be “very careful” in communicating with Wolff. “He has proved to be a clever, tricky and wily customer,” Dulles cautioned Lemnitzer. The spymaster appeared to have a certain amount of professional respect for the way the Nazi military man had played him.

The circumspect communications between Dulles and Lemnitzer led to a flurry of behind-the-scenes efforts on Wolff’s behalf. The last thing anyone wanted was a “sensational trial,” as Dulles put it, where Wolff would undoubtedly spill the entire Sunrise story.

In March 1948, Wolff was transferred to a detention center in Hamburg, and instead of being tried for war crimes, he was put through a much less threatening “denazification” hearing in a German court. Dulles supplied Wolff’s defense team with a glowing affidavit that was read aloud in the courtroom and concluded, “In my opinion, General Wolff’s action … materially contributed to bringing about the end of the war in Italy.” The ever-loyal Gaevernitz showed up as a character witness, testifying for over an hour about Wolff’s Sunrise heroism and insisting, falsely, that the SS general had never “demanded any special treatment after the war.”

The German court was impressed by the defendant’s influential friends. Found guilty of the relatively minor charge of “being a member of the SS with knowledge of its criminal acts,” Wolff received a four-year sentence. Through Dulles’s lobbying efforts, the sentence was reduced to time already served, and in June 1949, Wolff walked out of the men’s prison at Hamburg-Bergedorf a free man. Gaevernitz and other Sunrise intermediaries were there to celebrate the war criminal’s release. “It seemed like old times (#litres_trial_promo) and we missed you greatly,” he wrote Dulles.

One of the first actions taken by the newly liberated Wolff was to, once again, demand special treatment. He insisted that the U.S. government owed him at least $45,000 for an itemized list of clothing and family belongings that he claimed were looted by U.S. military police from his SS palace in Bolzano after his arrest. The demand for reparations by Himmler’s former right-hand man was, at last, even too much for Dulles. “Between you and me,” an exasperated Dulles wrote the following year to his Swiss intelligence comrade Max Waibel, “KW doesn’t realize what a lucky man (#litres_trial_promo) he is not to be spending the rest of his days in jail, and his wisest policy would be to keep fairly quiet about the loss of a bit of underwear, etc. He might easily have lost more than his shirt.”

Wolff’s journey now came full circle, as the middle-aged SS veteran returned to the advertising field he had abandoned two decades earlier for a career with Hitler. Landing a job as an advertising sales manager with a weekly magazine in Cologne—courtesy yet again of Dulles, who had helped pave the return to civilian life by ensuring he was not subjected to an employment ban—Wolff quickly proved to be a man on his way up. With the “circle of friends” he had made as Himmler’s banker, Wolff found it easy to establish contacts with the advertising departments of the leading German companies. As his sales soared, so did his commissions. By 1953, he was prosperous enough to buy a manor for his family on Lake Starnberg in southern Bavaria, complete with a dock and bathhouse.

Wolff’s success emboldened him. He began talking more openly about his past to friends and even journalists. He revealed that ten days before Hitler’s suicide in a Berlin bunker, the Führer had promoted him to the rank of senior general of the Waffen-SS, the military wing of Himmler’s empire.

The general wanted it both ways: he wanted to be seen as one of the clean and honorable Germans, but his pride also had him crowing about his grand and loyal service to Hitler’s Reich. Wolff’s ambivalence was highlighted again when he told a newsletter published by an SS veterans club that Hitler had known about and “completely approved (#litres_trial_promo)” of his Operation Sunrise machinations, presumably as a tactic for buying time and splitting the Allies. Wolff, regarded with disdain by his former SS colleagues for his role in Sunrise, might have been trying to ingratiate himself with his old Nazi brethren. But it was a dubious claim. Eugen Dollmann undoubtedly came closer to the truth when he wrote in his memoir that a fading Hitler—pumped full of drugs during their final meeting in the bunker—gave Wolff?“a vague sort of permission to maintain the contact he had established with the Americans.”

In the mid-1950s, the increasingly self-assured Wolff, convinced that Germany needed his leadership, became politically active again. In 1953, he took a lead role in establishing the Reichsreferat, a neofascist party, and in 1956, he began organizing an association of former SS officers. The old ideas came slithering out once more: the demonization of non-Germanic races and the Bolshevist menace, the glorification of power.

Karl Wolff was eager to return to center stage, and who better to help his quest than his powerful American patron? Wolff had stayed in touch with Dulles through the U.S. occupational authorities stationed in Germany, passing him notes and books related to Operation Sunrise that he thought the spymaster might find interesting. After his release from prison, Wolff had developed a side business (#litres_trial_promo) with U.S. intelligence agencies, selling information to a notorious espionage freebooter named John “Frenchy” Grombach, who had served in Army intelligence. Grombach gathered information from a far-flung network of SS old boys and other ex-Nazis in Europe, peddling it to the CIA, State Department, and corporate clients. But Wolff knew that his best connection in the American intelligence world was Allen Dulles himself, who by 1953 had become chief of the CIA.

On May 20, 1958, Wolff marched confidently into the U.S. embassy in Bonn and asked to see two CIA officers he knew. Informed that those agents were no longer in Bonn, Wolff was escorted into the office of the CIA station chief. As usual, Wolff thoroughly charmed his host, who later reported that he “was most polite (#litres_trial_promo), almost ingratiating for a former General.” Wolff, the station chief added, was “sporting a tan which looked as though it had been acquired south of the Alps and exuded prosperity.” Wolff informed his CIA host that he wanted to visit the United States. He wanted to see his daughter, who was married to an American, and his son, who was also residing there. He did not mention the other person he wanted to see, but it was obvious to the station chief. Everyone in the agency’s upper ranks knew about the CIA director’s long and intricate history with Wolff.

Chatting with the Bonn station chief, Wolff soon got to the point. He wanted assurances that he would have no trouble securing a visa for his visit to the United States. Informed about his old wartime collaborator’s wishes, Dulles pulled strings on his behalf in Washington. But the two men were never to be reunited in America. Karl Wolff’s name still stirred too much unease in the bowels of Washington’s bureaucracy. Some foreign service functionaries began asking awkward questions about the general’s wartime activities. There were some specters from the past, realized Dulles, that were best left in the past, to be conjured only in one’s smoothly crafted memoirs.

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Ratlines (#ulink_0108ff43-710e-5fae-a5ad-b9a68d6b77b9)

Karl Wolff was not the only prominent SS officer who greatly benefited from Dulles’s Operation Sunrise. In the fall of 1945, former SS colonel Eugen Dollmann, Wolff’s principal intermediary during the Sunrise negotiations, found himself living in a gilded cage in Rome. The apartment, which was located on Via Archimede, a quiet, horseshoe-shaped street in the city’s exclusive Parioli district, contained few distractions for the bored Dollmann. But he did discover an extensive sadomasochistic literary collection left behind by the former tenant, a German mistress of Mussolini, and he whiled away the hours reading about feverishly inventive ways to mortify the flesh. Dollmann was not an entirely free man, since he was a guest of U.S. intelligence officers. But, even though he remained under close surveillance, compared to his accommodations after he and Karl Wolff were arrested in May, the colonel’s Parioli lifestyle was sublime.

Before he was spirited off to Rome by the Strategic Services Unit, the agency that replaced the disbanded OSS after the war, the Nazi diplomat had been installed in a temporary cell at Cinecittà Studios. Spoiled by years of the best Italian cuisine, Dollmann found the rations at Cinecittà so distasteful that he considered joining a hunger strike started by fellow POW Gudrun Himmler, the late Reichsführer’s daughter. Then he was transferred to a POW camp in Ascona, on picturesque Lake Maggiore, where the daily fare—consisting mainly of watery pea soup—was even more objectionable, and the inmates were forced to sleep in tents that floated away in heavy downpours. Dollmann later had the nerve to compare Ascona to Dachau. “At least in Dachau they had wooden huts (#litres_trial_promo),” he observed.

Relief for Dollmann came when he was transferred to a low-security prison camp run by the British military in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast. One night, Dollmann found it remarkably easy—one American intelligence agent would call it “suspiciously” easy—to cut through the wires encircling Rimini and flee to Milan, where he knew he would find sanctuary. Here Dollmann presented himself to the well-connected cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster in the prelate’s palazzo adjoining the enormous Gothic cathedral. Dollmann, known as one of Rome’s more elegant peacocks during his SS glory days, now sat before the eminent cardinal in a filthy raincoat, looking the worse for wear after his frantic trek from Rimini.

As they sipped liqueur from long-stemmed glasses, Dollmann reflected on how the cardinal always put him in mind of “a delicate alabaster statue (#litres_trial_promo).” But Schuster, who had worked with Wolff’s SS team on the Sunrise deal, was not as refined as all that. The wily cardinal was part of the Vatican elite that had collaborated with Mussolini’s fascist regime—and, out of self-interest, he was inclined to help Dollmann now, to avoid an embarrassing war crimes trial. Besides, Schuster thought that men like Dollmann might still play a useful role in postwar Italy; he hoped to recruit the former SS officer in the campaign against the Church’s nemesis, the Italian Communists, who had emerged from the war as a powerful political force.

Dollmann, who was conniving by nature but not political, was uninterested in the cardinal’s plot, but he was in no position to quibble. He allowed himself to be safely hidden away in a Church-run asylum for wealthy drug addicts, where his fellow inmates included a fading Italian film diva and an emotionally fragile duchess. As he languished among the delicato junkies, Dollmann decided to sample some of the forbidden fruit that the screen siren kept stashed in her room, snorting a snowy mound of heroin. For a time, Dollmann—who had much to forget in his life, but was plagued by a detailed memory—seemed in danger of disappearing among the lotus eaters.

Salvation came in the form of James Jesus Angleton, a rising young star in U.S. intelligence who had run the X-2 branch (OSS counterintelligence) in Italy during the war and had stayed behind to use his wiles against the Communists. After tracking down Dollmann in the Milan asylum, Angleton sent a big U.S. Army Buick with a chauffeur to pick him up and drive him to the Eternal City, where he installed Dollmann in the Via Archimede safe house in the Parioli district.

Counterintelligence was the spy craft’s deepest mind game—it was not just figuring out the enemy’s next moves in advance and blocking them, but learning to think like him. Not yet thirty, Angleton was already being talked about in American and British intelligence circles as one of the masters of the field. He had been educated in British prep schools and at Yale, where he had edited the avant-garde poetry magazine Furioso and courted the likes of Ezra Pound and e.e. cummings as contributors, and he seemed to bring an artist’s intuition to his profession. But he could get lost in the convolutions of his own fevered mind, which drove him to prowl the streets of Rome late at night in a black overcoat so big it looked like a cape, on the hunt for clues about the growing Communist menace, and to crawl around on his office floor at 69 Via Sicilia in search of hidden bugging devices.

Angleton was as gaunt as a saint. (His wife, Cicely, would rhapsodize about his “El Greco face (#litres_trial_promo).” His colleagues called Angleton “the Cadaver.”) He smoked incessantly, and his bony frame was wracked by consumptive fits of coughing. When he introduced himself to Dollmann, Angleton must have struck the colonel as yet another strung-out soul. But Angleton’s addiction was of a more ideological nature.

As Angleton sat with Dollmann in the comfortable, five-room apartment on Via Archimede, the young spy explained his vision for the new world. Dollmann felt bound to listen politely, since Angleton had gone to the trouble of plucking him from Cardinal Schuster’s madhouse. But Dollmann had heard it all before—with even more fervor—from the Führer himself and his SS overlords: how Bolshevism must be crushed for the new world to be born, why there must be no rules in a clash like this between civilization and barbarity.

Angleton, however, was lost in his own passion. He had found strong support for his views from Allen Dulles in the months after the war, as Dulles lingered in Europe, hoping that President Truman would anoint him commander of the shadow war against the Soviet Union. In October 1945, Dulles visited Rome with Clover, ostensibly to revive their marriage after the strains of separation during the war. But he had another mission as well: to organize the Italian front in the new Cold War. Angleton, who was wired into the Vatican, helped arrange a secret meeting for Dulles with Pope Pius XII, who had maintained a mutually beneficial arrangement with Mussolini’s regime and was a determined foe of Communism.