This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved.
Eisenhower emphasized he was talking about “the very structure of our society.”
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.113
The influence of the military-industrial complex feared by Eisenhower was felt after the Bay of Pigs debacle. The hostility to President Kennedy in his own government was so pervasive and palpable, two enterprising news reporters thought they should write about it.
In September 1962, Fletcher Knebel, a reporter for the biweekly magazine Look, and Charles Bailey II, Washington correspondent for The Minneapolis Tribune, published Seven Days in May, a fictional thriller about an incipient military coup in contemporary Washington. It resonated in the capital and with the public at large.
In the book, the embattled liberal president was named Jordan Lyman, his last name linking the fictional tale to its real-life inspiration, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The fictional coup leader was “Gentleman Jim” Scott, a popular general and war hero who bore a passing resemblance to the real-life U.S. Air Force general Curtis LeMay, the man who had firebombed Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.
To rescue the nation from Lyman’s misguided liberal policies, Scott orchestrates a plan to force the president to cede powers to his generals. With the help of a wily aide, President Lyman thwarts the overbearing general and makes peace with the Soviet Union. It was a liberal fantasy grounded in Washington’s conservative realities. It quickly became a bestseller.114
Never had the Joint Chiefs and the commander in chief been so alienated. Knebel thought Lemnitzer’s private tirades about Kennedy showed disrespect for the office of the presidency and for democratic government. LeMay was even more contemptuous of JFK. A burly man fond of cigars, LeMay commanded the U.S. nuclear missile arsenal and its nuclear-armed aircraft. He thought the world a dangerous place, where the United States sometimes had no choice but to bomb its foes into submission. He had no fear of nuclear war. Indeed, he thought the time might come when it would be necessary. In retirement he would liken JFK and his entourage to “cockroaches.”
The top CIA men were not quite so harsh on Kennedy. As a group, they were more educated, more liberal, and more cosmopolitan than the uniformed men in the Pentagon. Many of them knew JFK socially, if not personally. Some thought he embodied the organization man: a bright, self-seeking conformist. Allen Dulles liked JFK until Kennedy fired him for the Bay of Pigs. After that, Dulles thought Kennedy had lost his nerve115 and began acting more like a god than a president.116
EMPIRE
ANGLETON WAS NOW ACCORDED a mixture of deference and awe. He consciously enveloped himself and his staff in an aura of mystery, hinting at knowledge of grave secrets and hidden intrigue too sensitive to share.117
Only J. Edgar Hoover controlled as much secret information. Angleton’s team at the post office in New York was opening ten thousand letters a year for the LINGUAL/HUNTER program. Angleton received a steady stream of actionable intelligence on leftists in touch with people in the Soviet Union, as well as the correspondence of senators and congressmen who visited Moscow. He was assembling files on thousands of individuals and hundreds of organizations.
His relationship with the FBI was strong. He had purchased Hoover’s grudging cooperation with the hard currency of useful secrets. William Sullivan, the assistant director of the FBI’s Intelligence Division, had become a friend of Angleton’s and a student of his counterintelligence theories. The Bureau and the Agency had collaborated effectively in rolling up a Soviet spy network headed by an intelligence officer named Rudolf Abel.118
Through Cord Meyer’s International Organizations Division, Angleton waged intellectual Cold War in dozens of countries, supporting the National Student Association (the largest student group in the country), the Congress for Cultural Freedom (a prestigious group of European anti-Communist activists), Encounter magazine (a leading intellectual journal), and even the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (home to many budding American novelists). Allen Ginsberg would argue that Angleton had even succeeded in turning American literary criticism against the so-called Beat writers like himself and Jack Kerouac.119
Angleton’s friendship with Jay Lovestone and Louise Page Morris enabled him to keep the actions of the American Federation of Labor (now joined with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the AFL-CIO) aligned with CIA operations around the world.
He had his own network of agents operating outside the CIA’s reporting system, including Morris and Nir Baruch.120 His friend George White still operated two CIA safe houses, funded under MKULTRA accounts, where White ran LSD experiments on unwitting subjects. And Angleton had scores of others friends, assets, agents, and sources whom he never talked about. “I probably recruited more agents than any person in the CIA who would be known to you,” he later told investigators.121
Angleton had good relations with the National Security Agency. He personally investigated the case of Sidney Joseph Petersen, an NSA employee and suspected homosexual arrested in 1954 for passing sensitive cryptographic material to the Dutch government. Angleton came away satisfied that the information had not reached the KGB, and he allowed Petersen to plead guilty and avoid a public trial.122
Angleton’s ties to British intelligence remained robust thanks to friendships with senior officials, including SIS chief Maurice Oldfield; senior officer Nicholas Elliott, whom he knew from his OSS days; and newer acolytes in MI5, such as Arthur Martin and Stephen de Mowbray, who were intrigued by his analysis of KGB deception operations. He kept up with Kim Philby, now working as a journalist in Beirut.
Angleton retained sway over CIA operations in Italy through his connections in the Vatican and the intelligence services. In the mid-1950s, when Rome station chief Gerry Miller and political action officer Bill Colby proposed an “opening to the left”—funding center-left parties to increase American influence with more progressive political forces—Angleton resisted, regarding all leftist parties as the cutting edge of communism. Thanks to his influence, the Agency’s funding continued to go to the more compliant centrist Christian Democrats, as well as to the anti-Communist right, including his longtime ally Valerio Borghese, now running the neo-fascist National Front movement.
Angleton was welcome in Israel, where he visited with friends Amos Manor in Shin Bet, Isser Harel in the Mossad, and even Prime Minister Ben-Gurion.123
And his influence on Cuban operations was growing now that Bill Harvey had taken over the Agency’s Cuban task force.
Angleton was running his own personal intelligence service.
“His secret travels in Western Europe, not to mention Israel, to meet with senior liaison officials with whom he had developed confidential relationships constituted a form of independent operational activity,” wrote George Kalaris, the man who succeeded him as counterintelligence chief, in a secret report. “… [T]he local station would effectively be cut out and command channel and communications would run direct to counterintelligence headquarters in Washington.”124
And he had the permission of his bosses. The new CIA director, John McCone, was an outsider who knew little of how the Agency operated. On all but the biggest policy issues, McCone deferred to Deputy Director Helms, who trusted Angleton completely. A firm believer that “no intelligence service can for very long be any better than its counterintelligence component,” Helms let Angleton do as he pleased, few questions asked.125
President
Kennedy thought he had reined in the CIA by firing Dulles and Bissell after the Bay of Pigs, but his actions did not much affect Angleton’s power. The counterintelligence chief was now the third-most-powerful man in the CIA and he was accountable to no one.
GOLITSYN
ON A COLD NIGHT in Finland in December 1961, a heavyset man with hazel eyes presented himself at the home of Frank Friberg, the chief of the CIA station in Helsinki. He explained that he was not “Anatoly Klimov” as Friberg thought.126 His name was Anatoly Golitsyn, and he was chief of the KGB rezidentura in Finland. He said he wanted to defect to the United States—immediately.
Angleton was notified. Never before had such a high-ranking KGB officer offered his services to the CIA. Angleton approved. In the moment, Friberg regarded Golitsyn’s defection as the highlight of his career. In time, he would regret it as the fateful first step toward an epic fiasco.127
The Agency’s first psychological evaluation of Golitsyn arrived on Angleton’s desk a few days later.
“The Subject himself is a very alert, perceptive and shrewd individual,” the Agency’s doctor wrote. “Part of this may stem from his intelligence training and experience but no doubt some of this is a reflection of his make-up.”
Golitsyn required more study, the doctor judged.
“There are indications of rather grandiose and omnipotent ideas as well as some paranoid feelings about his own intelligence service,” he went on. “These are highly suspect as far as motivation for his defection go [sic], but additional data is needed from a psychiatric standpoint to further substantiate the possibility of emotional illness or imbalance.”128
Angleton forwarded the report to J. Edgar Hoover.
* * *
ANATOLY GOLITSYN WAS BORN to a poor family in Ukraine. He joined the Soviet army in 1944 and was assigned to a military counterintelligence unit. After the war, he was transferred to the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, where he ran operations against the United States. He claimed he had personally presented his proposals for reforming the KGB to Josef Stalin in 1952. According to Golitsyn, Stalin had accepted his proposals but died before they could be implemented. The CIA could never corroborate any such meeting, but the story was consistent with Golitsyn’s style.
“He wanted to immediately meet with the president and with the Attorney General and with the Director of CIA,” said Vasia Gmirkin, a CIA officer who worked with Golitsyn. “He didn’t want to deal with anybody below that level. So he came with grandiose demands, saying that he had very valuable information to present, and we bought it.”129 Pyotr Deriabin, another KGB defector working at the CIA, recalled Golitsyn “had a big mouth and tended to invent stories which would make him look important.”130
In terms of actionable intelligence, Golitsyn offered some real revelations.131 He detailed the organization of the Helsinki rezidentura. “This information was specific, accurate, and useful, though not exactly earth-shaking,” said one analyst. Golitsyn said the Soviets had a spy in the British Admiralty, which proved to be true. He provided insights into Soviet efforts to penetrate NATO. Golitsyn had delivered “a wealth of information on KGB personnel, organization, and methods,” said one CIA memo. “His counterintelligence and penetration leads, however, were considerably less helpful.”132
Golitsyn intrigued Angleton. He said he had learned that the KGB had a high-level source inside the CIA, someone they called “Sasha.” This mole supposedly had been recruited by the KGB in 1950, or perhaps even earlier, he said. According to information Golitsyn had picked up, Sasha’s real name began with the letter K and ended in ski or sky, he said.133 Sasha, he said, had been stationed in Germany after the war and had technical skills in electronic eavesdropping.134
Golitsyn’s information about the mole meshed with Angleton’s fears about the betrayal of Pyotr Popov. Angleton was impressed when Golitsyn’s information led straight to a suspect: a career officer in the Technical Service Division named Peter Karlow. He had served in the OSS, where he lost a leg when his PT boat hit a mine off the Italian coast.135 Recruited by the CIA in 1950, he served for six years in Germany before returning to headquarters.136 Karlow fit the profile of Sasha in more than one way. His last name began with a K and, it turned out, he was born Peter Klibansky. He possessed technical skills—he had studied a cavity resonating microphone found in the U.S. embassy in Russia—and a check of his file revealed there had been security issues in some of the TSD projects he worked on.
Angleton told Helms that Karlow might be the mole and insisted that he be removed from any position where he would have access to intelligence. In January 1962, Helms put Karlow on administrative leave without offering an explanation. The FBI interviewed him and administered a polygraph test, which he passed. Still, he was not returned to duty.137
Angleton was intrigued by another story Golitsyn told, which was supported by the documents he had brought with him. In May 1959, the KGB had held a conference, attended by two thousand officers, where chairman Alexander Shelepin announced an aggressive long-range strategy toward the West.138
The United States did not know much about how Premier Nikita Khrushchev and other top officials in the Kremlin made their decisions. Angleton was skeptical that anything had changed since the death of Stalin in 1953, and Golitsyn’s account strengthened his conviction. Shelepin called for mobilization of the security and intelligence services to destabilize the Soviet Union’s enemies and to weaken the alliances among them. Traditionally, Communist doctrine held that the Soviet Union’s “main enemies” were the United States and the NATO countries. Shelepin had broadened this criteria to include West Germany, Japan, and smaller U.S. allies.139 He called on the KGB Department of Disinformation to coordinate with all ministries and undertake joint political operations with allied Communist countries. The goal, according to Golitsyn, was nothing less than a KGB strategy that would affect the fundamental reasoning power of the Western powers.140
Angleton appreciated the potency of deception operations. He had seen how the British used the ULTRA secret to fool the Germans on D-Day. He analyzed how the Polish Communists had created and coopted WiN. He had studied the history of the Trust and Rote Kapelle, two ingenious operations mounted by the Cheka, a predecessor organization of the KGB, which effectively dismantled the tsarist opposition to Soviet rule in the 1920s.
“Golitsyn’s defection from the elite of the KGB was a premeditated political act of a high moral order,” Angleton later wrote. “An act not lacking in great courage, not to mention a significant lifelong sacrifice.… He was moved by a conviction to warn the West of the new uses which the communist countries had devised in stealth for their improved political, intelligence and military potential and of the new menacing dimensions which these developments added to the Soviet threat.”141
BLACKMAIL
ANGLETON WAS RISING. IN late 1961, the CIA moved from its scattered offices in Foggy Bottom and the Mall to a new headquarters, a shiny seven-story office block nestled in the woods of Langley, Virginia. With his stature and reputation, Angleton claimed prime real estate in the new building.
The Counterintelligence Staff, now comprising nearly two hundred people, occupied the southwest corner of the second floor. Angleton’s office was room 2C43.142 In the outer office, there was a large reception room with a sofa, chairs, magazines, and three secretaries. In the inner office, Angleton pulled the venetian blinds shut and sat behind a large executive-style wooden desk that dominated the room.143 Angleton overawed most everyone who disagreed with him and proved persuasive to the rest.
Angleton supported Golitsyn when he asked for a meeting with President Kennedy. When told that was unlikely, Golitsyn said he would accept a meeting with the president’s brother Robert. Angleton supported that, too. The FBI objected, saying they would lose control of Golitsyn if they allowed him to meet with policy makers. Angleton prevailed. A meeting at the attorney general’s office was arranged for July 2, 1962. In attendance, according to RFK’s calend
ar, were Dick Helms and “John W. Stone,” the Agency’s alias for Golitsyn.144
* * *
ROBERT KENNEDY THOUGHT OF himself as a tough-minded man, not so liberal or intellectual or detached as his urbane older brother. RFK was more Catholic, more emotional, and more viscerally anti-Communist. Unlike Jack, Bob hadn’t had much of a problem with Joe McCarthy, for whom he had worked in the Senate. Bob hadn’t worried about the Red Scare or the Lavender Scare. He thought Communists working for the government should be fired, and the homosexuals, too.
Bob Kennedy had fewer reservations about the CIA than did his brother. Since serving as JFK’s eyes and ears on the committee to review the Bay of Pigs fiasco, RFK had become friendly with Allen Dulles. On Cuba, he clashed with the president’s liberal advisers who thought Castro would survive.145
RFK wanted to hear Golitsyn out. The meeting was tape-recorded for the protection of all concerned, according to George Kisevalter, who later heard the tape. Golitsyn raised the idea of a multimillion-dollar institute dedicated to destroying the Soviet Communist Party. Bob only promised to tell the president about their meeting. In taking his leave, Golitsyn said he had a letter for the president explaining the problem of Soviet penetration; Bob said he would deliver it.146
Angleton thought this was a splendid idea.
Kisevalter and his colleagues in the CIA’s Soviet Russia Division thought it was a terrible idea. So the CIA men told Golitsyn that Kisevalter would deliver his letter.
“I was authorized to promise to deliver it to the President,” Kisevalter recalled, “and, if it was not innocuous, to stop it.”147
When the two men met, Golitsyn handed over the letter. Kisevalter scanned it, his attention lingering on a key passage: “In view of the fact that the President who has promised me things through his brother, Robert, may not be the President in the future, how can I be sure the United States government will keep its promise to me for money and a pension?”
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