The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  As was often the case, Angleton’s conspiracy theories lacked substance. There was—and is—nothing to indicate Meyer’s death had anything to do with Golitsyn. There was no compromise of Kennedy’s inner circle. Hoover did not tell the Soviet Union about JFK’s love affair with Mary Meyer, and, no, the Soviets had not penetrated the FBI or the CIA, at least not in any way that pertained to Meyer.

  * * *

  ANGLETON PRESSED ON WITH the mole hunt, playing Svengali to CIA director John McCone. He convinced McCone that Golitsyn’s suspicions of a mole had to be investigated. McCone met no fewer than eleven times with the former KGB man. Golitsyn told him that at least five Agency employees, and possibly as many as thirty, were KGB agents.143 McCone discussed the allegations with J. Edgar Hoover, who in November 1964 finally agreed to a joint FBI-CIA investigation.144

  Angleton was grimly pleased. Instead of one-off investigations of individual suspects, such as Peter Karlow, a team of Bureau and Agency operatives would collaborate in studying the penetration problem comprehensively. To honor its leading spirits, Angleton dubbed the investigation HONETOL, a combination of letters from the FBI director’s last name and Golitsyn’s first name. HONETOL was run by a six-man committee, including Angleton and Bill Sullivan and Sam Papich, both of the FBI. The Special Investigations Group, run by Birch O’Neal, reviewed CIA files.141 The HONETOL committee developed a list of forty suspected moles, thirteen of whom would be investigated in depth.

  CICELY

  ANGLETON DID NOT HAVE the time or the interest to attend the trial of Ray Crump, Jr., a twenty-five-year-old African American man who was arrested and charged with killing Mary Meyer. In the summer of 1965, Cicely did have the time.

  Much had changed in the months since Mary’s murder.146 President Johnson had ordered a massive escalation of the war in Vietnam. The newspapers carried a story about a group of people arrested for planning to destroy the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Liberty Bell. The Beatles were dominating the music charts. Time magazine had a cover story on LSD. The chemical once controlled by the men of the MKULTRA program was now known as “acid” and was sold on college campuses as a drug of liberation, not mind control. The secrets of the CIA were seeping into American consciousness with unexpected results.

  In the Washington courtroom, Cicely listened as the prosecutors presented the testimony of a witness, Henry Wiggins, the mechanic who had seen the light-skinned black man walk away after Mary cried for help. Crump’s lawyer, a righteous lady named Dovey Roundtree, noted that not a hair of Mary’s blue angora sweater had been found on Crump’s hands or clothing. The police claimed Crump had thrown the gun in the river or the canal. The Marine Corps divers found nothing.

  Cicely tried to make sense of it all—for herself, for the kids, for Jim.

  “It was a struggle, a terribly long struggle to keep your family together, and yourself together, and your husband together in the Cold War, in the CIA,” she later told an interviewer. “That was one of the great traumas that I had.… It was something you had to wrestle with all the time.”147

  When Cicely looked around the courtroom, she wanted to think things were working. Judge Corcoran was objective. The prosecuting attorney, Mr. Hantman, was competent. So was Mrs. Roundtree. The jurors, colored and white alike, seemed attentive. She missed Mary’s warmth, her concern, her joy.148

  On July 30, 1965, the jury found Ray Crump not guilty of murdering Mary Meyer.

  “They apparently decided there was just not enough evidence to remove all reasonable doubt,” she told Cord Meyer when she got home.

  Meyer typed out the news in a terse letter to his mother-in-law, Ruth Pinchot. He added the passing suggestion that she talk to Cicely about the verdict. He was not going to. Cord Meyer did not want to talk or think about his ex-wife’s death.149

  Angleton made his own inquiries. Later that summer, Peter Jessup, the former Tel Aviv station chief, wrote a note to Angleton saying that he’d had a long conversation with the wife of Judge Corcoran, the man who had presided over Crump’s trial. Mrs. Corcoran advised Angleton not to press her husband on the details, “as he was too upset by the case.”150

  Cicely was left alone in her sorrow. She knew all too well how to stifle her grief. The deaths of her own brothers, Charles and Hugh, in 1944 and her family’s stoic reaction never left her. She would write a poem about the desolating effects of sorrow called “Erosions,” in which she said, “Our family wrapped their grief in heavy parcels.” The poem ended:

  On sad occasions

  a ball of string was always rolling

  and fish hooks seal our eyes.151

  Cicely had lost her brothers; she had lost Jim, who was often absent from her life; and now she had lost Mary, who had been like a sister to her. All she had were her children and the blinding pain of a CIA wife.

  … and fish hooks seal our eyes.

  BOMB

  ANGLETON WAS A MAN unbound. His empire now stretched from Mexico City to London to Rome to Jerusalem. He was in Israel when he heard the news: The Soviet Russia Division had decided to subject Yuri Nosenko to hostile interrogation.152 Although Angleton had talked with Dave Murphy and Ray Rocca about how to “break” Nosenko, he would say he felt that he hadn’t been consulted on the final decision.

  The news did not disrupt his trip. Even as the mole hunt consumed more and more work hours at Langley—reading personnel files, analyzing travel records, and collating interrogation reports—Angleton did not miss his regular trips to Israel.

  “He used to come from time to time, to meet the head of Mossad, to get briefings,” recalls Efraim Halevy, who served as the Mossad’s liaison officer to the CIA station in Tel Aviv in the early 1960s. Halevy escorted Angleton on his rounds and recorded his meetings with Israeli officials.

  “He used to meet with David Ben-Gurion, who[m] he knew for many years,” Halevy recalled. “Ben-Gurion ultimately left office [in 1963] and Angleton went down to Sde Boker [Ben-Gurion’s home in the Negev] to meet him. I didn’t attend those meetings. Those were just the two of them. He had business to transact.”153

  Angleton’s appreciation for the men who built the Jewish state had only grown over the years. He admired Isser Harel and the Mossad for capturing Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and did not fail to notice that operational prowess translated into respect at Langley.154 But it was Harel’s dynamic conception of secret intelligence, as much as any individual act of derring-do, which most impressed Angleton.

  Angleton shared his impetus for action.

  “Harel was a key player and strategist in implementing the concept of Ben-Gurion to reach out to the ‘periphery’ beyond the Arab world,” Halevy explained. “He set up relations with the Shah of Iran and the Turkish Intelligence service, the MIT. He created the threesome of Israel, Turkey, and Iran under the name Trident.”155 The three services met annually in Tel Aviv, Ankara, and Tehran to plot strategy against their common Arab enemies.

  For Angleton, the Mossad’s operations showed that Israel wasn’t just a partner or a client of the United States. It was a strategic ally around the world. The Israelis noted that the African policies of Egypt’s Nasser blended into the overall interests of the Soviet Union. The Moscow-Cairo axis sought to win over the emerging independent states of Africa as allies. So Harel and the Mossad countered by establishing links with national leaders across Africa, with friendly offers of security training, timely intelligence, and commercial contracts, or more subtle approaches involving bribery and blackmail.

  “At that time, the East-West conflict—USA versus the Soviet Union—raged throughout the continent,” Halevy noted. “The struggle for control over the mineral and other natural assets, many of key strategic importance, was a major feature of the Cold War. Angleton immediately understood the significance and value of the Israeli role and applauded it and encouraged it.”

  In March 1963, Harel had a falling-out with Ben-Gurion in part because of the latter’s handling of Israel�
�s secret nuclear project.156 Harel resigned, and Ben-Gurion replaced him with Meir Amit, the methodical military man who had led the Israeli forces in the Suez War.

  “Angleton also had a good relationship with Amit,” Halevy said, which strengthened the CIA-Mossad relationship.

  “We did not discuss Middle East affairs with the Agency until the 1960s, when Amit came in,” Halevy said. “Amit demanded Israel and Mossad be able to talk to the CIA about the Middle East and the Soviet Union, and they agreed.”

  One result was KKMOUNTAIN—KK being the CIA’s designation for messages and documents dealing with Israel. Millions in annual cash payments flowed to Mossad. In return, the Israelis authorized their agents to act as American surrogates throughout North Africa and in such countries as Kenya, Tanzania, and the Congo.157

  Angleton was at ease in Israel. “Jim had a weakness for Jews,” said his friend Peter Sichel. “He just liked us.”158 When doing business in Jerusalem, Angleton still stayed at the King David. He found a spot down the hill from the hotel where he could get a closer look at the ancient walls of the Old City. There he contemplated and harmonized his struggles.

  One CIA man started to wonder if Angleton wasn’t too close to his Israeli friends.

  * * *

  “I REMEMBERED A LONG drive out into the desert in his Ford Falcon,” wrote John Hadden, Jr., in a memoir about growing up in a CIA family. Hadden was twelve years old when his father, John Hadden, Sr., served as CIA station chief in Israel in the mid-1960s.

  “We stopped in the middle of nowhere,” the son wrote. “Pop got us all out of the car and passed out peanut butter sandwiches wrapped by my mother in wax paper. He dove into the trunk and withdrew a small pruning shears. I’d never seen him handle a garden tool. He darted about quickly, clipping bits of shrubbery, keeping a lookout on the horizon. There was a fantastic dome a mile or two in the distance beyond some barbed wire. It was the nuclear reactor at Dimona.”159

  Angleton had selected Hadden for the job as station chief, and the two men got along personally, but they had very different conceptions of their mission.

  “I thought we ought to learn things about the Israelis, like whether or not they had a bomb,” said Hadden. “He didn’t think so.”160

  John Hadden’s espionage picnic produced one critical clue: the isotopic signature of the radioactive deposits on the plants he collected near the Dimona site. The plant samples indicated a radiation source of 97.7 percent enriched uranium.161 For CIA scientists, that was notable. Almost all the nuclear reactors in the world used 93 percent enriched uranium. The more highly enriched uranium, which generates nuclear power more efficiently, was reserved for special purposes, such as powering U.S. nuclear submarines. Subsequent samples from around Dimona confirmed Hadden’s finding.162 The Israelis had obtained their nuclear fuel from an unusual source. But where?

  * * *

  THE STATE OF ISRAEL’S pursuit of the ultimate destructive deterrent originated in the mind of David Ben-Gurion. Even as Israel secured its independence and its borders in 1948, Ben-Gurion felt its vulnerabilities keenly. He decided early on that the Jewish state needed nuclear weapons to defend itself, an audacious idea at a time when only four nations possessed atomic arsenals.

  Ben-Gurion vowed to use science and technology to ensure the Jewish people would never be as helpless as they were in Nazi Germany. Mastering atomic energy was Jewish self-defense, he said. “What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller—the three of them are Jews—made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel for their own people.”163

  To advance this ambition, Ben-Gurion surrounded himself with a group of like-minded men who could keep a secret. Angleton knew at least six of them.

  In Washington, he and Cicely had spent many evenings with Memi de Shalit, a Lithuanian-born military intelligence officer stationed in the Israeli embassy. Angleton “adored” de Shalit and his wife, Ada, said Efraim Halevy.164 The de Shalits moved back to Israel in the 1950s, but the friendship continued, and it brought Angleton into the circle of other knowledgeable Israelis.

  Amos de Shalit, Memi’s brother, was a professor of nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Tel Aviv. He would be a major contributor to the Israeli nuclear program. Angleton’s close ties with the de Shalit family and others in Israel “made it inevitable that he would learn about the construction [of the Dimona reactor] in the Negev,” wrote reporter Seymour Hersh.165

  Angleton had first encountered Asher Ben-Natan, chief of nuclear procurement for the Israelis, as an OSS informant during the war. Ben-Natan was an Austrian Jew who had been born with the name Arthur Pier. After the war, he reported to OSS on the Jewish Agency’s efforts to help war refugees emigrate to Palestine. His code name was CONDUCTOR, and he was probably a source for Angleton’s reporting on “Jewish escape routes” after the war.166

  In 1956, Ben-Natan helped arrange for the initial transfer of French nuclear technology to the Dimona site.167 When the reactor became active in 1965, his job was to arrange diversion of technology and material from European sources to fuel the reactor and amass a supply of weapons-grade uranium.

  Another protégé of Ben-Gurion was Shimon Peres, a Russian-born, kibbutz-raised newcomer in the Defense Ministry, a man whose ego was exceeded only by his ability. With Ben-Gurion’s cabinet divided about the enormous expense of pursuing nuclear weapons, the old man put Peres in charge of a private fund-raising campaign for Dimona.

  “The bottom line, for me,” Peres wrote in a memoir, “was that I would have to raise money ‘on the side’ to help pay for the reactor. We set up a discreet fund-raising operation, which raised contributions totaling more than $40 million—half the cost of the reactor and a very considerable sum in those days. Most of this money came from direct personal appeals by Ben-Gurion and myself to friends of Israel around the world.”168

  “The idea was to raise money independently and outside the national budget,” explained Avner Cohen, historian of the Israeli nuclear program. “Money that would go by very few people. Ben Gurion gave the authority, and Shimon Peres did the actual fund-raising, with wealthy Jews all over the world, and in particular, in the United States. He would say, ‘Please give us money for a most secret project to ensure the future survival of the Jewish people.’”169

  “In the eyes of the Israelis,” Cohen explained, “there was no undertaking that was more important, more secretive, more costly, more existential—more sacred—than the nuclear project. Everything is kosher, everything is okay, in order to make it happen. Everything. It was almost like a religious commitment to make it happen: The bomb is a way to ensure survival after the Holocaust. So they didn’t have to give many details. People understood what they were talking about.”

  One of those who understood best was David Lowenthal, a businessman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Lowenthal grew up in the United States and went to Europe after the war to join the Haganah, the Jewish self-defense force. He helped purchase a ship, the Pan York, which enabled some eight thousand Jews to emigrate to Palestine. During the 1948 war, he served in the armed forces under the command of Meir Amit, the future Mossad chief, who was witting of Israel’s secret nuclear program. “I remember you as a big Zionist,” Amit told Lowenthal late in life.170

  Lowenthal returned to the United States in 1955 to go into business in Pennsylvania. With two other investors, he bought a shuttered steel-manufacturing plant in Apollo, a small city forty miles northeast of Pittsburgh. While planning to restart the company’s steel production, Lowenthal used company stock to buy two other bankrupt firms in order to create a new holding company called Apollo Industries.171 The merger provided Apollo with usable assets, financing, and a rationale for the creation of another subsidiary, the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC.172 Lowenthal and his investors planned to develop a new product: nuclear fuel for use in commercial reactors.

  To run NUMEC, Lowenthal turned to Zalman Shapiro, a metallurgist then wo
rking for the Atomic Energy Commission. Shapiro was undeniably brilliant. The son of an Orthodox rabbi from Lithuania, he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering from Johns Hopkins University.173 Before age forty, Shapiro had four patents concerning the production of pure metals. He was considered one of the leading metallurgists in the U.S. nuclear industry, if not the world.174 Within months of NUMEC’s founding, Shapiro had applied for and received a nuclear materials license from the AEC.175

  At the CIA, John Hadden would note the coincidence: The AEC issued its first license to handle highly enriched uranium to a private company financed by a group of active Zionists at a time when Israel was accelerating its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.

  NUMEC started processing highly enriched uranium at Apollo in 1959.176 At that time, the U.S. government owned all supplies of the nuclear fuel, which private companies like NUMEC were allowed to use but had to return. Within a few years, worrisome signs appeared that the Apollo plant’s security and accounting were deficient—even by the lenient standards of the day. Enriched uranium was disappearing from the NUMEC operation with unusual frequency. Unexplained handling losses occurred at other commercial plants, but Apollo’s were proportionately larger. In October 1965, the AEC estimated that 178 kilograms of highly enriched uranium had gone missing from the Apollo plant. By March 1968, the figure was 267 kilograms.177

  And that, John Hadden would conclude many years later, was the answer to his question: Where did Israel get its nuclear material? The Israelis had stolen highly enriched uranium for the Dimona reactor from NUMEC. The unexplained losses at the Apollo plant were the result of a heist.

  * * *

  IN THE SPRING OF 1965, a technician working the night shift at the NUMEC plant went out on a loading dock for a breath of fresh air. It was around nine in the evening. The technician saw an unusual sight. Zalman Shapiro, owner of the company, paced on the dock while a foreman and truck driver loaded cylindrical storage containers, known as “stovepipes,” onto a flatbed truck. The stovepipes, the technician explained, were used to “store canisters of high enriched materials in the vaults located at the Apollo nuclear facility.” These were “highly polished aluminum tubes with standard printed square yellow labels, approximately three inches in diameter by six inches tall. They were used to store high enriched uranium products … defined as 95 percent uranium.” He was sure the men were handling canisters of highly enriched uranium “due to the size and shape of the container and the labeling.” He saw the shipping order, which said the material was bound for Israel.