The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  Angleton’s disintegration was hastened by a cable from Beirut station that brought sickening news: Kim Philby had turned up in Moscow.

  * * *

  THE NEWS WAS ALMOST incomprehensible to Angleton. Philby had taught him the profession. They had worked together on Albania, Italy, Germany, and Ukraine. They had analyzed NSA material and studied KGB techniques. They remained friends after Philby’s dismissal in June 1951. Angleton had believed Philby when he said he knew nothing of Burgess’s and Maclean’s spying. For a while, Jim had thought his friend would be cleared and would return to the top of SIS. Later on, he disbelieved Bill Harvey and J. Edgar Hoover, both of whom insisted Philby was a Red.

  And when Angleton did have suspicions, Kim had allayed them.

  After his expulsion from Washington in 1951, Philby retired from secret intelligence work to become a journalist, while taking on occasional missions for SIS. He moved to Beirut, where he wrote about politics and business for the Economist magazine. In 1957, Angleton had asked his colleague Miles Copeland, then working undercover as an oil company executive, to investigate. Copeland arranged for a senior official of the Lebanese security service to subject Philby to occasional spot surveillance. The policeman reported back that Philby habitually shook off anyone who was following him. But Philby wasn’t meeting up with his KGB handler. He was sneaking off for a regular rendezvous with the wife of a friend. Angleton and Copeland were satisfied: Kim was a rogue, not a Red.2

  What Angleton didn’t know was that his British friends had reopened their investigation of Philby in 1962. New information received from recent defectors made it increasingly clear to the SIS that the Soviets had placed another spy in Washington between 1949 and 1951, someone other than Burgess and Maclean.

  Nicholas Elliott, one of Philby’s oldest friends, decided not to tell Angleton. He flew to Beirut to confront Philby.3 The abashed Philby executed an artful maneuver, offering a partial confession that wove together the indisputable facts—he had tipped off Maclean with additional lies—that he had stopped spying for the Soviets after 1946. He agreed to meet Elliott again to explain further. Another lie.

  On January 22, 1963, Philby skipped out on his wife and a dinner party. Four days later, he was at Moscow Center, headquarters of the KGB, where he received a warm reception from the comrades whom he had served for decades yet never met.

  * * *

  ANGLETON WAS CRUSHED. PHILBY was his friend, his mentor, his confidant, his boozy buddy. And through every meeting, conference, debriefing, confidential aside, and cocktail party, his friend had played him for a fool.

  The news that Philby had fled to Moscow came as a “terrible shock,” said Cicely Angleton.4 The betrayal affected her husband “terribly, deeply,” she said. “It was a bitter blow he never forgot.”5

  “I tried to repair the damage by telephoning Jim Angleton,” said Nicholas Elliott, “but it was too late.”6

  Angleton had already heard. Philby’s final flight was desolating. Angleton’s faith in the goodness of his fellow man had never been strong. He had at least clung to the British notion that the inner ring of good men could always be trusted. No more.

  “Poor old Jim Angleton,” Elliott told John le Carré, the former SIS man turned novelist. “He’d made such a fuss of Philby when he was the head of the Service’s station in Washington, and when Angleton found out—when I told him that is—he sort of went the other way.”7

  That was British understatement: went the other way.

  “He had trusted him and confided in him far beyond any routine relationship between the colleagues of two friendly countries,” Elliott said. “The knowledge that he, Jim, the top expert in the world on Soviet espionage, had been totally deceived had a cataclysmic effect on his personality. Jim henceforward found it difficult to trust anybody, to make two and two add up to four. Over-suspicion can sometimes have more tragic results than over-credulity. His tragedy was that he was so often deceived by his own ingenuity, and the consequences were often disastrous.”8

  “The uncovering of Philby as a mole was, without a doubt, one of the most important events in Jim’s professional life,” said Walter Elder, a senior CIA officer. “The affair had a deep and profound effect on Jim.”9

  Angleton suffered “severe psychic damage,” said Cleveland Cram, a senior operations officer, who later wrote a top secret study of Angleton. “If Philby achieved nothing else in the Soviet service,” said Cram, “he would have earned his keep by the peculiar thralldom he obtained over Angleton’s thinking.”10

  * * *

  BEREFT AND BETRAYED, ANGLETON sought certainty. He gravitated to the theories of Anatoly Golitsyn. The former KGB man lent credence to the suspicions Angleton had entertained since Popov’s arrest and execution. Golitsyn’s insider account of KGB deception operations was intellectually appealing, suggesting a historic continuity in Soviet intelligence since the 1920s. If one of his long-buried fears—about Philby—had been confirmed, Angleton concluded, not quite logically, that another long-buried fear—about the mole—must be true, as well.

  Compounding Angleton’s unease, Golitsyn had left the United States. After a second meeting with Robert Kennedy in December 1962, the former KGB man gave up on the U.S. government. The FBI didn’t trust him. The CIA’s Soviet Russia Division, led by George Kisevalter, was uninterested in his theories and unwilling to share their files.

  In contrast, MI5, the British FBI, embraced him. In February 1963, Golitsyn and his wife and daughter moved to England, where he was greeted by Arthur Martin, chief of counterintelligence for MI5.11 Golitsyn told his new hosts a disturbing story. Just before he left the Soviet Union in 1961, he had had contact with the KGB’s Department Thirteen, responsible for assassinations, where he heard the KGB was planning to kill a high-level figure in Europe in order to get a Soviet asset into a top position.12 The sudden death of Hugh Gaitskill, leader of the British Labour Party, in January 1963 was suspicious, he said. After a short illness, Gaitskill had died of a rare blood condition. Gaitskill, Golitsyn said, was poisoned by the KGB.13

  Golitsyn pointed out that Gaitskill was pro-American, while his most likely successor as Labour Party leader, Harold Wilson, took a more independent and leftist position toward Washington. The assassination of Gaitskill, he said, delivered Wilson, Moscow’s agent of influence, into a position of power. The British, spooked by Philby’s defection, believed him. Angleton would later deny that he believed Gaitskill was assassinated, but he would come to express certainty that Wilson was a Soviet agent of influence, which he most certainly was not.

  As Angleton lost perspective, he retained authority. As he repudiated uncertainty, he was entrusted with complexity. As his judgment failed, he won more responsibility. His convoluted certitudes, soaked in alcohol, would eventually bring him to the brink of being a fool. Christopher Andrew, a leading historian of Anglo-American intelligence, concluded Angleton’s belief that the hostility between the Soviet Union and China was a KGB deception operation demonstrated that he did not have “the judgment required even of a junior intelligence officer.”14

  Yet men of power called on Angleton for assistance. In May 1963, for example, Angleton advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff on U.S. policy toward Cuba, which had been foundering since the October crisis. Declared U.S. policy still called for the immediate overthrow of Castro and his government. Angleton was asked to assess Cuba’s defenses.

  PROVOCATION

  “THE CASTRO-COMMUNIST REGIME WILL remain in power for the indefinite future with its security and control apparatus relatively intact.”15

  That was Bill Harvey writing in a comprehensive memo on the state of the CIA’s operations in Cuba one month after the October crisis. Harvey had gained prestige in the Agency for his tunnel into Communist East Berlin and other feats of derring-do. Dulles brought him into the Cuba operation when talk turned to assassinating Castro. Dick Helms put him in charge of the Cuba Task Force that the Kennedy brothers shut down. Now Harvey wa
s on the way out for cursing Bob Kennedy, and he was blunt about the CIA’s poor prospects.

  Castro, he wrote, had “the capability not only of crushing unsupported resistance activity but of making operational conditions in Cuba increasingly difficult.”

  Harvey’s memo, all seventeen single-spaced pages of it, arrived on Helms’s desk on November 27, 1962. Helms forwarded it to Director McCone, who agreed with its principles.

  Kennedy’s government was fractured. The liberals in the White House assumed Harvey had been relieved of all Cuban responsibilities after his profane outburst at RFK during the missile crisis. Arthur Schlesinger said, “The CIA, taking care of its own, made Harvey station chief in Rome, where he was soon sodden with drink.”16

  Not that soon. In his memo, Harvey soberly explained to Helms and McCone how Kennedy’s handling of the missile crisis undermined the CIA’s ability to operate on the island.

  “The assurance of no invasion and no support of an invasion will, in effect, constitute giving to Castro and his regime a certain degree of sanctuary,” he wrote.17

  Angleton agreed. He thought Harvey had been mistreated by Bob Kennedy. He thought U.S. policy toward Cuba was adrift, if not feckless. And he thought the Rome station was a worthy reward for Harvey’s service.

  “I got him the job,” Angleton boasted.18

  * * *

  IN MID-1963, ANGLETON MADE his most ambitious contribution to U.S. policy toward Cuba, a secret working paper entitled “Cuban Control and Action Capabilities.”

  For the CIA men and other advocates of overthrowing Castro, the spring of 1963 was disheartening. In late March, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the FBI to crack down on Cuban exiles who were using South Florida to stage armed attacks on ships doing business with the Communist regime. Two dozen militants were ordered not to leave metropolitan Miami without permission. The Cuban colony exploded in outrage. The Cuban Revolutionary Council, the umbrella organization of exile groups that planned to establish a new pro-American government in Havana, dissolved in acrimonious denunciation of President Kennedy. The national security agencies in Washington were concerned. Castro was getting stronger. The Communists were solidifying their foothold in the western hemisphere, while Kennedy was pursuing a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets that the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought was ill advised.

  The situation was urgent. In a meeting on May 1, 1963, the Joint Chiefs resurrected a secret plan known by the deceptively bucolic code name of NORTHWOODS. The NORTHWOODS plan, first developed after the Bay of Pigs, sought to create a justification, a pretext, for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. Since Castro could no longer be overthrown from within (thanks to Kennedy’s weakness), the only solution was to remove him from without. The idea was to orchestrate a crime that placed the U.S. government “in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government in Havana.” Then the president could declare war and send in the Eighty-second Airborne Division.

  One NORTHWOODS scenario envisioned the use of violence on the streets of America.

  “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington.… The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated).”19

  That merciless parenthetical makes it clear that the Pentagon’s planners were willing to kill innocent persons who opposed Castro and to blame their deaths on the Cuban leader in order to justify a U.S. invasion.

  Kennedy wasn’t interested in so-called pretext operations. When Lyman Lemnitzer had first presented the NORTHWOODS concept at a White House meeting in March 1962, JFK had brusquely rejected it.20

  With Castro emboldened in the spring of 1963, the Joint Chiefs revived the NORTHWOODS option. They recommended an “engineered provocation,” which would provide advantages in “control, timing, simplicity, and security.” The chiefs passed their recommendation to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who ignored it. The Kennedy White House preferred the idea of “autonomous operations” against Castro. The result was that, after May 1, 1963, the U.S. government effectively had two divergent Cuba policies.

  The White House policy, led by Robert Kennedy, sought to foment a rebellion against the Cuban government, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro. The Defense Department, the armed forces, and the CIA had a different approach: They sought to create or find a pretext for a full-blown U.S. invasion, possibly in conjunction with the assassination of Castro.

  With U.S. policy in flux, Angleton offered clarity. Under the counterintelligence responsibilities entrusted to him, he contributed his assessment of the Cuban target: What were Cuba’s capabilities? What would the U.S. military have to overcome in order to retake Cuba from the Communists? Could Castro be overthrown from within, as the Kennedy brothers assumed?

  Angleton studied the files and wrote up his findings in a twenty-seven-page paper. On May 23, 1963, he distributed the document to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and heads of fifteen other U.S. agencies. The paper, he stated in his cover letter, was not “merely a provisional statement on the Cuban situation” but an all-source assessment of the Communist control system. Angleton intended his paper to serve as nothing less than the foundation of a new national policy.

  The distribution of his “Cuban Control and Action Capabilities” paper illuminated more than Angleton’s high standing in the U.S. intelligence community. It also revealed the alienation of the Kennedy White House and U.S. national security agencies in mid-1963. Angleton sent his analysis to the Pentagon, the CIA, and NSA, as well as to the intelligence chiefs of the State Department, army, navy, and air force. He also copied domestic security agencies such as the Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Justice Department’s Interdepartmental Committee on Internal Security.

  Angleton chose not to send his assessment to the White House, the National Security Council, or the attorney general, who styled himself the leader of his brother’s Cuba policy.

  The “Cuban Capabilities” memo is one of the most important documents bearing Angleton’s name to ever surface. It confirms his leading role in U.S.-Cuba policy in 1963 while also demonstrating his intellectual power. Angleton’s analysis of the strengths of Castro’s government was lucid, historical, and comprehensive.

  “Before the events of late October 1962,” he began, “the Cuban government had been engaged for a little over two years on measures to insure a complete control over the Cuban population under a centralized authority resting largely in the hands of the prime minister, Fidel Castro, and his immediate coterie.”21

  Angleton’s analysis echoed Bill Harvey’s: President Kennedy’s no-invasion pledge had demoralized Castro’s foes.

  “After the promise of outside interference was dispelled,” Angleton wrote, “greater caution in expression of sentiments appeared. The disappointment in cancellation of action also caused the withdrawal of many persons from any show of support for anti-government ideas or actions and produced an attitude of reserve and mistrust.”22

  Castro had emerged from the October crisis with up to 400,000 men and women now serving in the army and navy. Another bulwark of support for the Communist regime, Angleton noted, were foreign friendship societies like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which sent sympathizers to the island who came back indoctrinated with pro-Communist messages. Angleton had reviewed multiple reports of travelers who wished to conceal their visits to Cuba.23

  “An American citizen, for example,” he explained “can enter Mexico with a tourist card, not even a passport, and obtain a separate visa to Cuba from the Cuban consulate in Mexico City [emphasis added]. He can go to Cuba and return supplied with a new tourist card obtained in Cuba without any indication that he has ever been there.”24

  Angleton was prescient. That is exactly what the defector Lee Oswald would attempt to do four months later.
Thus Angleton’s Cuban Capabilities memo is also an important document related to the assassination of President Kennedy. The paper reveals Angleton’s personal interest in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City in mid-1963. It illuminates a fact that Angleton would hide for the rest of his life. When the defector Lee Oswald showed up at the Cuban consulate in September 1963, Angleton was not surprised or uninformed. He was prepared.

  “GO EASY”

  ON A JUNE NIGHT in 1963, four FBI agents sat in a car outside the lone terminal of National Airport in Washington, D.C. They were watching for the arrival of an old friend, Johnny Rosselli, incoming from Los Angeles. Rosselli was a mobster who cultivated attention. He wore silk suits and dated pop singers and Hollywood actresses. Skimming the take from casinos in Las Vegas was one of his specialties. Killing competitors was another. He was suspected of involvement in thirteen murders. The FBI men wanted to take him down.

  Rosselli knew he was being tailed by the FBI and pretended not to care. If the feds crowded him too much, he could say, truthfully, that he had friends in high places. When the FBI men saw him get into a waiting car, driven by Bill Harvey of the CIA, they were irked. Why was a senior government official meeting socially with an organized crime figure? One of them called their liaison to the Agency, Sam Papich, who just so happened to be having dinner with Jim Angleton at his house in Arlington.

  Papich took the call and then told Angleton.

  “Look, let’s go very easy on this,” Angleton said.25

  With practiced dexterity, Angleton called Harvey’s house and spoke to his wife, Clara Grace Harvey, known as “C.G.” She said Bill was at Duke Zeibert’s, the plush restaurant on L Street that had succeeded Harvey’s Seafood Grill as the restaurant for people who wanted to be seen. Angleton dialed up the restaurant and was put through to the table where Harvey sat with Rosselli. There were murmured exchanges. Papich called off the FBI surveillance team.