The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

Kisevalter and Bagley were curious about how Nosenko could give such confident assurances about the KGB’s lack of interest in Oswald. He replied that when his bosses heard a man named Oswald had been arrested for killing Kennedy, they ordered Oswald’s file flown from Minsk to KGB headquarters in Moscow. He told Kisevalter and Bagley that he was there when his fellow officers paged through the entire file. He said they were relieved to find nothing incriminating.110

  Nosenko told his American interrogators he wanted to leave the Soviet Union for good.

  “He said, ‘I’ve been ordered home,’” Kisevalter recalled, a claim that Nosenko later admitted was untrue.111 Despite reservations about his veracity, the CIA accepted him. On January 30, 1964, Dick Helms approved a $50,000 payment to Nosenko, with an annual contract of $25,000 a year for an indefinite period, along with provisions for retirement and benefits.112

  The CIA men were keen to hear his story. Angleton made the case that Nosenko was a false defector, sent by the KGB to mislead the Agency. Bagley agreed. So did David Murphy, the chief of the Soviet Russia Division.

  * * *

  DAVE MURPHY WAS ONE of those strivers who worked their way into the upper ranks of the CIA without the advantages of an Ivy League degree or family money. Born in upstate New York, Murphy had graduated from high school at age sixteen, and college by age twenty. He joined the army and married a Russian woman who had fled communism. After the war, Murphy enrolled in the army’s language school, where he learned Russian to complement the German and French he had already mastered. His language skills won him a promotion from Washington to the Berlin base, where he worked for Bill Harvey. In 1961, he was promoted to chief of the Soviet Russia Division. He had responsibility for handling and resettling Nosenko.

  Nosenko was flown to the United States, where he was admitted as a temporary resident under a secret arrangement that gave the CIA the authority to admit up to one hundred persons a year. He was interrogated by Pete Bagley, and it did not go well. Bagley found Nosenko’s responses to be evasive, inconsistent, and inaccurate.113

  Angleton connected Nosenko’s defection to Soviet propaganda about Kennedy’s assassination.114

  “Nosenko’s defection,” he later told investigators, “came after the Soviets had been asked [by the Warren Commission] to provide all information about Oswald’s visit [to Mexico City] and around the time Khrushchev pulled aside a journalist in Egypt and said that Kennedy’s death was the work of an American conspiracy.”115

  Angleton reasoned that if the Kremlin had gone so far as to murder the American president, it almost certainly would attempt to conceal its involvement by talking up a right-wing conspiracy. He hypothesized that Nosenko was sent with the improbable message that the Soviets had taken no interest in Oswald in order to shield the KGB’s real role.

  At Angleton’s behest, the CIA reneged on its promises to Nosenko. On orders from Dave Murphy, he was taken to a CIA safe house in southern Maryland and “involuntarily detained” in the attic.116 The room featured a metal bed attached to the floor. He was fed weak tea, watery soup, and porridge. There was no air-conditioning or ventilation.117 Nosenko had landed in what a future generation would call “a black site,” an extrajudicial CIA prison. He would remain in detention for more than four years.

  * * *

  ANGLETON WOULD LATER CLAIM he had opposed the incarceration and hostile interrogation of Yuri Nosenko. Pete Bagley knew better.

  “Angleton never opposed the incarceration,” he said.118

  Not only did Angleton support incarceration; he agreed that Nosenko needed to be “broken.”

  Time was running out. On June 27, 1964, Angleton, Rocca, and Murphy questioned Anatoly Golitsyn about Nosenko with a tape recorder running.

  “He is a provocateur, who is on a mission for the KGB,” Golitsyn insisted. “He was introduced to your Agency as a double agent in Geneva in 1962. During all the time until now he has been fulfilling a KGB mission against your country.”119

  When Murphy raised “the problem of breaking Nosenko,” Angleton did not object or propose any alternatives.120 He only expressed the opinion that it was going to be difficult.

  “We have a limited body of information,” he told Murphy, “And you’ve already thrown up to him a very great number of questions that are complex and he managed to get through the histrionics and not break. In fact, [he] has been a long way from breaking. He is nowhere near breaking now.”121

  On July 24, Helms accompanied Murphy and Bagley to a closed-door session with the Warren Commission’s seven members. They wanted to know if Nosenko’s claim that the KGB didn’t have anything to do with Oswald was credible.

  “Nosenko is a KGB plant,” Bagley declared, “and may be exposed as such sometime after the commission’s report.”122

  That was all Chief Justice Earl Warren needed to hear. Much to Angleton’s satisfaction, the commission decided to exclude Nosenko’s information from its report.

  * * *

  ANGLETON ESCAPED ACCOUNTABILITY. ON September 29, 1964, the Warren Commission presented its findings to President Lyndon Johnson. The commissioners endorsed the December 1963 FBI report: Oswald alone and unaided had killed the president for reasons known only to himself. The findings were stated categorically, as if there was no dispute about any of the facts.

  There was no hint of intelligence failure in the report. Just the tragedy of inattention. The FBI had received no information that Oswald might pose a threat to the president, the commission said. The CIA had simply missed him when he contacted the Cubans in Mexico City. As for the Agency’s extensive covert intelligence activities regarding Oswald, Angleton and Helms effectively erased the story from the historical record.

  When the Italian press weighed in on the Warren Commission report, Bill Harvey, now settled in Rome, sent a cable to Angleton. He noted approvingly that the Christian Democratic paper Il Popolo gave the report “excellent straight coverage stating that Oswald was the killer of Kennedy and the crime was committed without the assistance of foreign or domestic conspirators.” By contrast, the “cryptocommunist” afternoon daily Paese Sera said the report contained “many contradictions, and omission and concealment of testimony.” The Warren Commission “had arrived at arbitrary facts and conclusions.”123

  Harvey’s alcoholism soon consumed him, and Dick Helms removed him from the Rome station and active duty. Harvey was the proverbial burnout. His hatred of the Kennedys was as legendary as his big gut and fondness for guns. More than one associate in Rome told of Harvey ending arguments by pointing a loaded pistol at the head of the person daring to disagree with him. His admiring but appalled biographer called him a “flawed patriot.”124 His longtime colleague John Whitten described him as “a thug.”125 When Sam Giancana, a mobster who had worked with the Agency, was shot dead in his Chicago apartment in 1975, Whitten thought Harvey might have been the killer. Some JFK authors wondered if he had a role in JFK’s death. One CIA associate told a journalist that he saw Harvey on a commercial flight to Dallas in November 1963, an odd destination for a Rome station chief. Thanks to Angleton and Helms, the Warren Commission never interviewed Harvey.

  The Warren report was supposed to put to rest “rumors” and “speculation” about the causes of Kennedy’s murder. It did not quell Angleton’s curiosity. He wanted to see the evidence for himself.

  On October 9, 1964, Jane Roman asked Sam Papich for the FBI’s copy of the home movie of JFK’s assassination made by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas businessman. The film, obtained by Life magazine, had never been shown publicly. It would only be used for “training purposes,” Roman said. Angleton’s friend, deputy FBI director Bill Sullivan, approved the request. And so it is likely that Angleton saw Zapruder’s film eleven years before the American people did.

  It would not have been easy to watch the murder of a man he knew from many a dinner party. It would not have been reassuring, either. The Warren Commission’s report, written with the help of Allen Dulles, quoted Secre
t Service agent Clint Hill saying he saw JFK “lurch forward and to the left” when hit.126

  Watching Zapruder’s twenty-six seconds of color film, Angleton would have seen how mistaken Hill and the Warren Commission were. The footage showed Kennedy grimacing and raising his arms as he was jolted by the first gunshot, which hit him in the back. And then, a few seconds later, he was blasted backward and to the left by the fatal shot.127

  Angleton lived in a violent world. Three days after Jane Roman requested a copy of Zapruder’s film, Angleton experienced another murder. His friend Mary Meyer was killed in broad daylight.

  MARY

  MARY MEYER WAS WALKING west on the towpath next to the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Georgetown at lunchtime on October 12, 1964. She was forty-four years old, the mother of two teenage boys. She was now divorced from husband Cord, whose youthful idealism had hardened into mature self-righteousness. Liberating herself from the narrow role of CIA wife, Mary had moved to Georgetown and become a painter, while remaining friends with Jim and Cicely Angleton. She walked the towpath almost daily, loving its shady trees and lovely vistas of the Potomac River. She was accosted by a light-skinned African American man. They struggled. He produced a pistol and shot her twice. She tumbled onto the grass by the canal and died. An auto mechanic fixing a car on nearby Canal Road saw the man walk away from her body and head down toward the Potomac River. He called the police.

  That afternoon, Cicely Angleton was at home in Arlington when she heard a bulletin on the radio reporting a woman had been killed in Georgetown on the C&O Canal towpath. She knew Mary often walked there and feared the worst. When Angleton came home, he dismissed his wife’s anxiety. They would see Mary that evening, he said. She was going with them to hear Reed Whittemore speak on Capitol Hill. His former Yale roommate was giving a droll talk on “Ways of Understanding Poetry and Being Dismal.”128

  Cicely was panicky as Jim drove the Mercedes to the front of Mary’s town house on N Street in Georgetown. Mary had a painting studio in the back, where a canvas, still damp from her velvety strokes, was drying under a whirring fan.129 Mary’s car was in the driveway, yet the lights were out inside. A sign hanging on the door said FREE KITTENS—RING BELL OR CALL.

  Angleton pushed the doorbell. No answer. He tried the door, which was unlocked. He went into the house. It was empty. In the car, Cicely was close to tears. She had told Mary not to walk along the canal. It used to be safe; it wasn’t anymore. Mary had paid her no mind. To reassure his wife, Angleton called Mary’s answering service.

  The voice on the phone informed him that Mrs. Meyer had been murdered earlier that day.

  * * *

  CICELY WEPT AND JIM blinked. They went straight to the home of Ben and Tony Bradlee, who lived a few blocks away. Their gathering friends, were shocked as they were. Ben Bradlee had been pulled out of a meeting at Newsweek to go down to the police station. He returned, still stunned by the sight of Mary’s lifeless body in her angora sweater.

  More friends gathered. The phones rang; doorbells buzzed. Someone remembered the cats that Mary was trying to give away. Angleton walked back to Mary’s house and rescued the three kittens.130 Food and drink materialized, ordered by Cicely, Tony, and the other women. The radio said a suspect had been arrested.

  Cicely never cared to talk about that awful day, but she did remember Anne Truitt’s phone call. The Truitts had recently moved to Japan, where Anne’s husband worked as a Newsweek correspondent. Anne called from Tokyo, asking to speak to Angleton.

  Angleton took the call in a quiet room. Anne Truitt told him that Mary had kept a diary in her sketchbook, a journal about her life and her thoughts, along with her drawings. She said that Mary had told her that if anything ever happened to her, she wanted Angleton to have the sketchbook for safekeeping. Truitt said that Mary usually left it in the bookcase in the bedroom.131

  Bradlee, then in line to become the next editor of The Washington Post, recognized how Angleton’s aura of intrigue attracted his friends. They trusted him with their most intimate confidences, he observed, “as if the secret would be somehow safer in his keeping than in theirs.”132

  Together, these friends combed Mary Meyer’s house for the diary. They tapped walls and looked in the fireplace. They turned over bricks in the garden but found nothing. Given the dismal circumstances surrounding Mary’s death, drinking came easily as night fell. Angleton washed the dishes, and the whiskey flowed. Someone wandered out into the garden and shouted to the sky, “Mary, where’s your damned diary?” Cord Meyer lit a fire to ward off the chill.133

  Everyone agreed that Angleton should have Mary’s diary—everyone save Ben Bradlee.

  * * *

  IN HIS MEMOIR, the Washington Post editor told a different story.

  “We didn’t start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary’s house,” Bradlee wrote. “It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary’s diary.”

  Bradlee’s surprise suggested that he did not know what Anne Truitt had said—that Mary wanted Angleton to have the diary

  “We asked him how he had gotten into the house, and he shuffled his feet,” Bradlee wrote. “… We felt his presence was odd, to say the least, but we took him at his word, and with him we searched Mary’s house thoroughly. Without success. We found no diary.”

  The next day, Bradlee said he returned to look for the diary in Mary’s padlocked studio. He had brought along some tools to pick the lock. He recounted that he was surprised to run into Angleton again. He was already picking the lock, according to Bradlee.

  “He would have been red-faced, if his face could have gotten red, and he left almost without a word,” Bradlee wrote. He said Tony Bradlee found the diary an hour later, and they turned it over to Angleton.134

  The story had a ring of truth when published in 1995. Angleton was a legendary covert operator and an accomplished lock picker. Bradlee was an honored editor with a Pulitzer Prize. But in this storytelling contest, at least, the spy was perhaps more credible than the scribe.

  “Much has been written about this diary—most of it wrong,” Bradlee wrote.135 Since Bradlee took thirty years to publish his account of the search for Mary Meyer’s diary, more aggressive journalists had beaten him to the story, tainting ever so slightly his reputation as the fearless, crusading leader of The Washington Post’s Watergate coverage. Those reporters inevitably made some minor factual errors when they broke the story, but Bradlee knew that the story they reported was true in all of its essentials: His sister-in-law Mary Meyer did have an affair with his friend, the president. She did keep a diary that made reference to their relationship. And Bradlee did acquiesce in giving it to a top CIA man rather than write anything about it.

  In his social circle, Angleton was a reassuring figure, a man with a record and reputation that seemed beyond reproach. Perhaps Angleton was furtive in his searching of Mary’s home and studio. If so, he was merely engaged in the same task as Bradlee: preventing the diary from falling into the wrong hands.

  Bradlee’s story was self-serving. In 1964, he didn’t think twice about turning Mary’s journal over to the CIA. A decade later, he didn’t care to admit it. So he wrote an account of the incident that made himself look good (or less bad) by portraying Angleton as a would-be thief. Cicely Angleton had reason to complain to The New York Times.136

  * * *

  MARY MEYER’S DIARY MATTERED because she mattered to the man who had been president. During her affair with JFK in 1961–1963, Meyer sought to bring her lover the kind of unique experiences he would never encounter in his work or in the embrace of his conventional friends and family. Meyer had become friends with Timothy Leary, a professor at Harvard Medical School with an interest in the uses of LSD. She asked Leary how to take LSD so that she could introduce the drug to her circle in Washington.

  “I have this fri
end who’s a very important man,” she told Leary without mentioning names. “He’s impressed by what I’ve told him [about LSD].”137 Meyer later told Leary that she had smoked marijuana and taken LSD with her important friend. The day after the assassination, Meyer called Leary. “He was changing too fast,” she said. “They couldn’t control him anymore.” Mary’s use of “they” implied that she thought JFK had been struck down by powerful enemies.138

  “I remember her inability to fathom violence,” recalled Kary Fischer, a male friend who had a crush on her. “It was more than a personal loss for her. I remember saying, here was a punk [Oswald], rejected by all, looking for a golden boy, the one upon whom all riches and power and beauty had been bestowed, as his victim. And she seemed to agree with that.”139

  At least for a while. Mary saved newspaper clippings about the assassination. And she wondered. The Warren Commission’s report came out and supposedly laid all the rumors to rest. The loner Oswald had killed the president for reasons known only to himself. Like many Americans, Mary Meyer wanted to believe it. Like many others, she just couldn’t.

  They couldn’t control him anymore.

  * * *

  AT MARY MEYER’S FUNERAL service in the Bethlehem Chapel of the National Cathedral, Angleton served as an honorary pallbearer.140 Afterward, he read the diary of his deceased friend. He learned that Mary had taken LSD with Kennedy, after which they had made love. Or so Angleton would claim.141 He showed the sketchbook to Mary’s son Quentin. Angleton did not destroy it, despite having told Anne Truitt that he would.

  Rather, he sifted its counterintelligence implications.

  “Did the death of a woman in whom the late president might have confided have anything to do with the Soviet penetration that Golitsyn had warned about?” Angleton asked journalist Joseph Trento. “Had someone in Kennedy’s inner circle been compromised? Was Hoover’s FBI, which kept track of such personal matters with astonishing competence, the Soviets’ source? Had the Soviets penetrated the FBI as well as the CIA?”142