The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  Sullivan had no good answers and blamed the problem on his boss. In a fit of pique, J. Edgar Hoover ended the FBI’s contacts with the CIA. “I want direct liaison here with CIA to be terminated and any contact with CIA in the future to be by letter only,” Hoover wrote in a furious memo.8 The consequences of Hoover’s stubbornness were nothing short of catastrophic, Sullivan told Huston. “The barriers that Hoover had erected between the FBI and other intelligence agencies had led to a condition of total isolation of each organization,” he said.9

  Angleton and Sullivan plied Huston with the best data in the LINGUAL/ HUNTER and CHAOS files. The letters of Kathy Boudin, a member of the Weather Underground, who was still at large; reports on the travels of Eldridge Cleaver, minister of information for the Black Panthers; and the finances of the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist think tank in Washington. Huston fashioned this intelligence into several memos for the White House staff, which evolved into the plan that would bear his name.

  After the explosion on Eleventh Street and the disorder on college campuses, Nixon’s conservative soul was tormented by America’s upheavals: the vicious bombings, the unruly longhairs, the Negroes out of control, and a permissive liberal elite excusing it all.

  On June 4, 1970, Nixon summoned the four highest-ranking intelligence directors in the U.S. government: Hoover of the FBI, Helms of the CIA, Lt. Gen. Donald Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Vice Adm. Noel Gayler, director of the National Security Agency. These men commanded budgets in the billions and had thousands of subordinates.

  Nixon lectured them like schoolchildren.

  “We are now confronted by a new and grave crisis in our country—one which we know too little about,” he said. “Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans are determined to destroy our society.… They are reaching out for the support—ideological or otherwise—of foreign powers and they are developing their own brand of indigenous revolutionary activism, which is as dangerous as anything they could import from Cuba, China, or the Soviet Union.”

  “I do not intend to sit idly by,” Nixon growled, “while self-appointed revolutionaries commit acts of terrorism throughout the land.”

  He demanded “an intensified domestic intelligence collection effort,” beginning with the Huston Plan. He ordered Helms to appoint a subcommittee with an urgent task: “I want to have a full range of options for dramatically expanding our domestic intelligence collection efforts.”10

  Angleton, wreathed in the usual haze of cigarette smoke, seized the moment to identify himself with Huston.

  “There was no question in my mind nor in the minds of others that he [Huston] represented the Commander in Chief in terms of bringing together this plan,” Angleton said.11 He said he was ready to “practically drop everything” in order to resolve the “conflicts that had grown specifically between the CIA and FBI.”

  The Huston Plan offered Nixon a full range of options, but there was one delicate issue. Angleton and Helms had never told President Nixon about the Agency’s long-standing mail-opening program, LINGUAL, or about HUNTER, which fed selected correspondence to the FBI. So Angleton wrote a clever lie into the Huston Plan. He told Huston that the CIA had once had a mail-opening program but had shut it down in the face of controversy. The recent emergence of the Weather Underground and other violent groups required “re-activization” of the program, he said.

  The plan went to Nixon, who approved of the particulars. The president agreed to lifting existing legal restrictions on domestic intelligence collection. He approved the expansion of NSA operations involving warrantless surveillance of Americans’ phone calls and telegrams. He approved of more FBI “black bag” jobs. He agreed to expand the existing CHAOS coverage of the antiwar movement. And he reinstated the CIA’s authority to open the mail of Americans.

  Sullivan and Angleton had prevailed. The plan bolstered Sullivan’s position at the FBI and enhanced Angleton’s influence over domestic CIA spying operations. They would be the senior representatives on a new Intelligence Evaluation Committee in the White House, which sought to stem the tide of violence and subversion.

  On July 9, 1970, the U.S. intelligence chiefs endorsed the president’s directive. The Huston Plan became U.S. policy. Angleton, not Hoover, now controlled domestic counterintelligence.

  The Huston plan started fast and faltered faster. Angleton and Sullivan, it turned out, had laid their plans well in all ways but one. No one had thought to inform John Mitchell, the attorney general. The chief law-enforcement officer in the United States knew nothing about the decision to abandon previous legal restrictions on spying on Americans, and nothing about the creation of the Intelligence Evaluation Committee.12

  Mitchell was appalled. He was no civil libertarian. He was a grumpy, pipe-smoking Wall Street lawyer who specialized in bond issues. He had little tolerance for political adventurism and less for legal improvisation. As Nixon’s campaign manager, he worried about the repercussions if such a plan were exposed before the 1972 election.

  Mitchell asked to meet with Hoover. Without the blessing of the attorney general, the FBI director suddenly felt vulnerable, too. Hoover told Mitchell he would deploy his men on the expanded domestic counterintelligence mission only with written authorization from the president. Mitchell told Nixon not to sign any such authorization. Hoover replied that the FBI would no longer participate. Nixon did not want a fight with his FBI director or his campaign manager, so he folded. On July 27, 1970, he issued a memo killing the whole arrangement. The Huston Plan, so skillfully advanced by Angleton and Sullivan, was dead.

  Angleton was undaunted. In his memo, President Nixon had rescinded the “re-activization” of the mail-opening program, which meant that LINGUAL no longer had presidential approval. As an officer of the CIA, Angleton was obliged to follow the orders of the commander in chief. He chose not to.

  The program yielded eight thousand letters a year, a bounty that Angleton could read at his leisure, a guide to the inner thoughts and plans of radicals, senators, and Communist sympathizers around the world.13 The counterintelligence chief would not surrender such a bounty, not even under written orders from the president. He assumed no one would ever learn of his decision.

  As George Kisevalter said, Angleton had a bit of Iago in him. Like the Shakespearean counselor, he lived by his own creed. What Iago said, Angleton lived.

  But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

  For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.14

  GOLEM

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1969, Angleton took a new friend out to lunch for the first time. His guest was Yitzhak Rabin, former general staff chief of the Israeli Defense Forces and now Israel’s new ambassador to Washington. They met at Rive Gauche restaurant in Georgetown, Angleton’s latest favorite dining venue. Angleton was proud to be seen with him. He knew the homely Rabin, far more than the telegenic Moshe Dayan, was the real architect of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.15

  With Nixon in the White House, Angleton basked in the mood of improved relations between the governments of the United States and Israel. In September 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meir came to Washington to meet President Nixon, and a new strategic relationship was consecrated. Israel was not just another Middle East country. It was a U.S. ally, like England or France.

  “Jim saw this as a wonderful development that should have happened a long, long time ago,” said Efraim Halevy, now chief of the Mossad station in Washington, who accompanied Rabin on what became a monthly lunch appointment.

  Rabin’s English was not fluent, so he relied on Halevy for interpreting and keeping notes. When Rabin returned to the diplomatic party circuit, Angleton cultivated the younger man as a source and a friend.

  Angleton’s family had found new lives. In 1970, Cicely, Truffy, and Lucy became disciples of Yogi Bhajan, the Indian spiritual leader who introduced kundalini yoga and Sikhism to America. “I was 11 when I saw Yogi Bhajan give a lecture in Tucson,” Lucy Angleton later told
a journalist. “I had no attention span, but for the first time in my life I paid attention.” In their new Sikh faith, Angleton’s daughters abandoned the names that Jim and Cicely had given them. Lucy changed her name to Siri Hari Angleton-Khalsa. Truffy became Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa.16

  Angleton was more alone than ever. He needed comfort and company, and Halevy was glad to oblige.

  “There were weeks in which I met him four or five times a week,” Halevy recalls. “There were times he came to my house regularly at ten o’clock at night, and left me around five [in the morning] after polishing off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label. There were times when I used to have lunch with him beginning at twelve thirty, and we were still at the restaurant at six thirty. And sometimes, that very evening, he came again.”

  For Halevy, Angleton was a mentor.

  “Jim was a man who understood, in my view, more than anybody else, the true nature of this ongoing battle of espionage and counterespionage,” he said. “He had no illusions.”

  When Rabin became prime minister, Angleton ran into him at an embassy function in Washington. The event was attended by hundreds of people, but Rabin dropped all protocol. He dismissed his bodyguards and pulled up a chair to talk confidentially with Angleton. The crowd kept a respectful distance as the two men of power chatted. The bystanders, Angleton later joked, could only wonder “who was the goy and who was the golem.”17

  Angleton, of course, was the goy, the non-Jew, so perhaps Rabin was the golem. Or was it the other way around? In Jewish folklore, the golem is a body without a soul, an inanimate being who is summoned to life by magic. In some tales, the golem protects the Jews from their tormentors. In others, he runs wild and terrifies the innocent.

  Angleton was both goy and golem.

  GHOUL

  AT HIS PERSONAL BEST, Angleton was a kindly and avuncular man, an original thinker and a thoughtful friend. He was godfather to Quentin Meyer, Cord Meyer’s oldest son, who suffered mental health issues after his mother’s murder and his tour of duty in Vietnam. Angleton contributed one of his trademark black homburgs to the hat collection of Ted Jessup, the teenage son of Tel Aviv station chief Peter Jessup. Another college-age friend recalled Angleton giving him the I Ching, the collection of classical Chinese divinatory writings, which enjoyed a revival in the sixties counterculture.18

  Yet he was also damaged. In his work, he was driven by an all-consuming sense of duty, lubricated by martinis, and suffused with suppressed rage at Philby’s betrayal. He was obsessed with his theories and enthralled by his means of surveillance. He read the letters of the Weathermen to their Moscow contacts. He knew about the latest trip of the Black Panthers to North Korea, where they could expect training in sabotage and intelligence collection. He could get access to CHAOS informant reports. He had a special file of the correspondence of Senators Church and Kennedy. All of these secrets crowded the in-box on his desk. With America’s enemies emboldened everywhere, he felt he had to guard against them all.

  And the damned questions about the assassination of JFK would not go away. Angleton’s problem was not the theories multiplying on U.S. college campuses as bootleg copies of Abraham Zapruder’s film began to circulate. He worried about official efforts to reopen the JFK investigation.

  When he read a news report in January 1969 that Jim Garrison had created a new national committee to investigate the assassination, Angleton ordered his deputy, Jim Hunt, to pass a memo to Sam Papich, asking the FBI to investigate its members. (Under orders from Hoover, Papich was forbidden from meeting Angleton in person.)

  Angleton informed the FBI that attorney Bernard Fensterwald had said the committee’s purpose was “to embarrass or force the government to make investigations they have been putting off since November 22, 1963.” Angleton wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. Any reinvestigation of JFK’s murder was sure to revisit the question of what the CIA knew about Oswald before the assassination, not something he cared to discuss.19

  Most ominously, one suggestion that the government investigate further originated within the government itself. In September 1969, Angleton received a detailed report from the State Department, written by Charles Thomas, the earnest Foreign Service officer who had previously reported conversations with several Mexicans who recalled meeting Oswald in September 1963. Thomas had collected credible evidence that Oswald had some kind of relationship with Sylvia Duran, the receptionist in the Cuban consulate in Mexico City, who was known to the CIA for her good looks and Communist sympathies.

  Thomas felt obliged to report again what he knew, assuming the FBI or the CIA would want to know more about Oswald’s Cuban contacts. The FBI wasn’t interested. So the State Department referred Thomas’s reporting to Angleton.

  Angleton had more than enough reason to act. Thomas was a capable Foreign Service officer. If Oswald had had some kind of relationship with Duran, then, presumptively, he’d had some connection to Cuban intelligence. The accumulating evidence again begged an obvious question: Had Castro, knowing the CIA was out to kill him, deployed Oswald to assassinate Kennedy first?

  If Angleton was serious about investigating the possible involvement of a hostile foreign power in JFK’s murder, he now had credible evidence and ample opportunity. He wasn’t interested. He sent the State Department a note acknowledging receipt of Thomas’s information and said he saw “no need for further action.”20

  * * *

  GOY OR GOLEM? ANGLETON was a ghoul, a specter who showed up around the time of death.

  On April 12, 1971, Charles Thomas committed suicide at his home in suburban Washington. In a second-floor bathroom, he shot himself with a gun he had bought in Cuba years before. Thomas was despondent because he felt that his Foreign Service career had been cut short. He blamed himself for pursuing the Oswald story too aggressively.21

  Angleton was making plans to go to Mexico City to see Win Scott, who had retired as station chief. Angleton had been disturbed to learn that Scott, emulating Philby, was planning to publish a memoir about his life as a spy. He obtained a copy of the manuscript Scott was planning to publish. In 220 typed pages Scott recalled his career at the Agency, and he was not discreet. He alluded to Philby, whom he had known well in London, but Philby was not the problem. For Angleton, the problem was Scott’s appalling chapter on JFK’s assassination. Scott’s account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s visit to Mexico City flatly contradicted the Warren Commission’s report—and the CIA—on a key issue: Oswald’s Cuban contacts.

  Angleton had to handle Scott with care. Scott was one of the original OSS men who built the CIA. In Mexico City, he had earned a reputation as possibly the best station chief in the world. Two years before, Helms had bestowed on Scott the Agency’s highest honor, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. Persuading him not to publish his book was not going to be easy.

  Then Win Scott dropped dead.

  WIDOW

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF April 28, 1971, Angleton knocked on the door of the modern split-level house at 16 Rio Escondido in Mexico City. He was accompanied by another CIA man. The door opened, framing the figure of a brown-haired woman with grim eyes and pursed lips. Janet Scott had been a widow for barely forty-eight hours. She recognized Angleton. Like many CIA wives, she loathed him.

  “Why did it take so long?” she said, all sarcasm and turning heels. The vultures had arrived.22

  Angleton expressed to Janet Scott the condolences of Dick Helms and the entire Agency. He mentioned, briefly and generally, the benefits to which she was entitled, adding that “our current information is tentative.” He wanted to make sure she consulted with the legal counsel’s office, so that she would obtain “every advantage for herself and her children.”23

  Janet Scott had worked for the Agency. She understood the language of Langley: Do what we say, or else we’ll cut off your pension.

  “Did Win have a will?” Angleton asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know who Scottie’s lawyer or
executor is.”

  “Could you find out”—he nodded at the man trailing him—“and let John know?”

  The man with him, John Horton, was the current station chief in Mexico City.

  God, how I hate him, Janet Scott thought, according to her son. It would have killed her husband to see Jim Angleton in his house, in his living room, calling with condolences while seeking to confiscate his memoir. Her husband had died at the breakfast table two days before, the victim of a heart attack. Earlier in the week, Scottie had shown up one morning, his face covered with bruises and scratches. He said he had fallen off a wall in the garden, but no one had seen him fall. The bruises were so unsightly, she closed the casket at his wake.

  Some of Win Scott’s associates suspected foul play in his death. One of Scott’s most trusted agents, George Munro, told his son, “They finally got Win,” without betraying whom he thought “they” might be.24 Tom Mann, the former ambassador in Mexico City, wondered if Scott had been murdered. Janet Scott expressed no such thoughts. She had to worry about her five children and her house and her suddenly uncertain future.

  Angleton took her into a side room.25

  “I have an unpleasant task,” he began. “There are some papers. If these are published this violates Win’s oath [of secrecy]. We want to recover all of them.”

  The widow feared this ghoul. Angleton looked like a man whose ectoplasm had run out.26

  “I knew something was wrong when he told me he was going to see Helms,” Janet said. “Why do you think he wrote it?”

  That was not a question Angleton was going to answer.

  Janet Scott would later tell one of her sons that Angleton was a “drunken idiot.” She underestimated him. He knew what he was doing. He was excising Scott’s informed opinion about JFK’s assassination from the historical record. He was obstructing justice in the case of the murdered president—again.