* * *
JOHN HORTON RETURNED TO 16 Rio Escondido the next day. He spent several hours behind the locked door of Win Scott’s study.
“I was amazed at what I found,” Horton wrote in a memo.27 Scott’s office was a mine of precious intelligence: stacks of secret files, as well as tapes and photos of Oswald, and several copies of the unpublished memoir. When no one was looking, Horton lugged three large cartons and four suitcases to an unmarked truck parked at the curb. The packages were shipped by plane back to Angleton’s office.
“We have retrieved all papers or will soon have done so,” Horton wrote to Langley. He referred to Angleton by his cryptonym, “Hugh Ashmead,” and to Janet Scott by Win Scott’s cryptonym, “Willard Curtis.”
“[I] think worst has been avoided, through Ashmead’s persuasiveness and Mrs. Curtis’ good spirit,” Horton said.28
* * *
WIN SCOTT HAD WRITTEN his memoir in self-defense. He had read the JFK conspiracy theories and the wild claims of people who knew a lot less about the subject than he did. He wanted to establish some facts. He especially objected to the Warren report’s assertion, on page 777, that Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate was not known until after the assassination.
The passage implied his station had missed something basic and important about the enemy: an American visitor to the Cuban consulate. Scott knew better. He wrote:
Every piece of information concerning Lee Harvey Oswald was reported immediately after it was received to: U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Mann, by memorandum; the FBI Chief in Mexico, by memorandum; and to my headquarters by cable; and included in each and every one of these reports was the entire conversation Oswald had, from Cuban Consulate, with the Soviet [embassy].29
And Scott had the tapes of Oswald’s phone calls to prove his point.
Scott wrote to distance himself from the CIA’s misrepresentations to the Warren Commission. Helms and Angleton might have some explaining to do about Oswald. He did not.
Scott did not live to testify about CIA operations and the accused assassin. His chapter on Oswald would not be declassified for thirty years. Angleton had buried his former friend.
HELMS
ON THE MORNING OF June 19, 1972, Dick Helms held the usual Monday staff meeting at CIA headquarters. His demeanor was calm, his tone offhand. Over the weekend, The Washington Post had reported that two former Agency employees, James McCord and Eugenio Martinez, had been among five men arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Foggy Bottom.
Most everybody in the meeting knew the names, Angleton included.
McCord had retired from a twenty-year career in the Office of Security. He had been cleaning up the Agency’s dirty work since the fall of Frank Olson in 1953.
Martinez had served in the Bay of Pigs operation and still reported to the WAVE station in Miami.
Making matters worse, veteran officer Howard Hunt had also been implicated in the burglary. Hunt had made a name for himself in Guatemala in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
“We are going to catch a lot of hell because these are formers,” Helms said, referring to former CIA employees, “and we knew they were working for the White House.”30
That was a frank admission, noted by Bill Colby, former chief of the Far East Division and soon to become the CIA’s executive director. Colby had distinguished himself in the OSS. After serving in Italy in the 1950s, he moved on to South Vietnam. He now held the new position of executive director, ranking just below the director and deputy director.
Angleton expressed a fear that the press might blame the CIA for the botched burglary. Photographs of Howard Hunt were passed around. Angleton claimed not to recognize him. “I’d never seen him before in my life,” he said.31
That may not have been true. Hunt said he knew Angleton. When Hunt was serving as station chief in Uruguay in the 1950s, the two men once had an angry confrontation over control of an FBI informant, he said.32 Angleton and Hunt also once met in room 16 of the Old Executive Office Building, next to the White House, according to a Watergate grand jury witness. Under oath, Angleton said he did not know Hunt and had never been in room 16.33
Angleton certainly knew who Jim McCord was. The arrest of the veteran Office of Security man was a hell of a problem for Helms. And Angleton knew that if the DCI had a problem, he had a problem, too.
* * *
ANGLETON’S CAREER CANNOT BE understood without reference to Richard McGarrah Helms, his friend and enabler. They had first met in London during the war. Inspired by the can-do example of the British and intrigued by the profession of secret intelligence, they had found their mission in life. They had worked together for a generation, seen their children born, grow up, and go away. Yet Dick Helms and Jim Angleton were not the best of friends.
In the 1950s, Helms and his wife, Julia, invited Jim and Cicely to play charades at their annual New Year’s Eve party, but they didn’t often visit each other in their homes.34 Their social styles were different: Angleton was an intellectual, a man of ideas; Helms, a mandarin, a man of power. They admired each other and went their own ways.
Helms’s problem in the summer of 1972 was that he had never won the confidence of Richard Nixon, the way he won the confidence of Lyndon Johnson. It wasn’t for lack of trying; Helms sent many a flattering letter to Nixon.35 In the few meetings where Helms was actually in the same room as the president, the CIA director invariably found cause to praise Nixon for his exemplary statesmanship.
The Watergate burglary tested their wary relationship. As far as Nixon was concerned, the men arrested were CIA employees. They had come recommended by Helms. He expected Helms to call off the FBI’s investigation. That was the sort of thing a CIA director was supposed to do for his commander in chief.
Helms balked. As far as he was concerned, the Agency had no connection to the burglary, only past relationships with its perpetrators, which he insisted were irrelevant to the FBI investigation. Nixon didn’t want to hear it. On June 23, Nixon instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to call in Helms and give him the order. Nixon’s temper was boiling.
“We protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things,” he growled. “You open the scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further.”
Nixon wanted Haldeman to convey a very specific message.
“When you get these people in,” he instructed, meaning Helms, “say, ‘Look the problem is that this will open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that’ uh, without going into the detail—don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement—but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it. ‘The President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.’”36
When Haldeman sat the CIA chief down in his office later that day and delivered the president’s veiled threat about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” the usually composed Helms rose out of his chair.
“The Bay of Pigs hasn’t got a damned thing to do with this!”37 he shouted.
Helms felt threatened. According to Haldeman, “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was Nixon’s way of referring to the CIA’s unspeakable secret—the assassination of JFK. Whatever the specifics of Nixon’s veiled language, his purpose was evident. Nixon conveyed “a desire to touch a sore spot,” said two CIA historians, “to apply pressure.”38
* * *
ANGLETON WAS DILIGENT IN his service to Helms. He retained considerable powers, thanks to the director.
Operation CHAOS remained robust under Dick Ober’s leadership. His Special Operations Group now had 40 employees and utilized another 130 agent sources.39 By 1972 CHAOS accounted for more than 20 percent of the Counterintelligence Staff. The Agency’s analysts had repeatedly concluded that the antiwar movement was not funded or controlled, or even much influenced, by any
foreign power. That did not affect the program’s growth.
Angleton still guarded the LINGUAL program. Unbeknownst to Nixon, the mail-opening program continued in full force. Per Angleton’s standing orders, the Counterintelligence Staff shared with the FBI the personal information culled from the international mail of Americans suspected of no crime. The Bureau’s COINTELPRO operatives continued to use Angleton’s information to harass, disrupt, deceive, and discredit people and organizations opposed to the policies of the U.S. government. The targets were black nationalist groups, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers, and pacifist organizations such as the Women’s Strike for Peace and the American Friends Service Committee.
Angleton had lost sway in the Soviet Russia Division with the release of Yuri Nosenko in early 1969. His warnings about a KGB mole were ignored. His dream of an expanded domestic counterintelligence program had been thwarted by the collapse of the Huston Plan. And his friend Dick Helms was about to get fired.
* * *
ON NOVEMBER 7, 1972, Richard Nixon was reelected as president, winning forty-nine of the fifty states, with the largest popular vote in American history. For a man who had been scorned by many during his rise to power, he was not magnanimous in victory. Nixon wanted to remake his second administration with a free hand. He asked for the resignation of his entire cabinet, prompting a round of critical headlines, suggesting he was acting undemocratically.
Nixon informed Helms that he wanted to appoint a new CIA director. What ensued was a delicate negotiation, pregnant with unstated meanings. Senator Howard Baker had observed the tension between the two men. “Nixon and Helms have so much on each other,” he said, “neither of them can breathe.”40
Helms did not want to leave public service under the taint of Watergate. He said he wanted to stay on through his sixtieth birthday, a few months hence. Nixon suggested an ambassadorship. The president mentioned Iran, and Helms said he would consider it.
Within the week, Nixon had reneged on the deal. He surprised Helms by announcing the appointment of James Schlesinger, the chief of the Office of Management and Budget, as the next director of Central Intelligence. Helms quickly cleaned out his office, shredding all files related to MKULTRA and destroying tapes of his phone conversations.
The CIA’s farewell ceremony for Helms in February 1973 was an emotional event.
“When Helms left the building, all the troops jammed the headquarters entrance for his departure,” said his assistant Sam Halpern. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Everyone knew we were in for a bad time after that.”41
Especially Angleton.
COLBY
THE MUTUAL DISLIKE OF Jim Angleton and Bill Colby was no secret or surprise to colleagues who knew them both. Their differences had flared throughout the course of their intertwined careers.
In Italy in the 1950s, they clashed over the wisdom of the CIA’s funding an “opening to the left.”42 In Vietnam, they differed on the need for special counterintelligence units. At home, they disagreed about the value of Operations CHAOS and LINGUAL. Colby distrusted Angleton’s methods and mentality. Angleton did not care for Colby’s actions, tone, or style.
In one sense, theirs was a professional struggle. Each man was doing what he thought his job required. Colby was a paratrooper, a paramilitary man, a covert operator. He wanted the CIA to focus on running spies and stealing secrets. Angleton was a literary critic, an analyst, a counterintelligence officer. He was looking for double agents, disinformation, and penetration operations.43 But the antagonism between them flowed from deeper sources, ones that were both personal and political.
Angleton came of age in Italy in the 1930s, when fascism was popular and attractive. In the eyes of his friend Ezra Pound, Benito Mussolini was not a strutting dictator; he was positively Jeffersonian. As a young man at least, Angleton had admired the fascist ideal of a strong cooperative state with some communal ownership of property and a leading role for the church. After the war, he treated fascist allies with care. On Election Day, he tended to vote Republican. Intellectually, he was secular, anti-Communist, and Zionist.
Colby was the son of an army officer. He spent his boyhood on military bases, absorbing the democratic esprit of the mess hall and the barracks. It was a point of family pride that Colby’s grandfather, also an army officer, had gotten into trouble for writing an article denouncing the unjust acquittal of a white military officer who murdered a black soldier.44 Colby came of age supporting the Republicans of Spain, not Wall Street. Politically, he was progressive. Intellectually, he was a liberal Catholic.45
If Angleton was a poet-spy, Colby was a soldier-priest. Angleton thought Colby was a naïf; Colby thought Angleton a reactionary. Ultimately, Angleton was a creative theorist, Colby a disciplined moralist, and that made the difference in who would lose his job first.
People had a tendency to underrate Colby. He was slight of build, modest in his manner. Angleton’s Israeli friends thought him an unworthy adversary. “They saw Angleton as a man of imagination, of history,” said Ted Jessup, son of former Tel Aviv station chief Peter Jessup, who heard his father’s conversations with top Mossad officers. “They thought Colby was some clerk.”46
Colby’s advantage was that he had common sense. He understood that the postwar world in which the CIA was born had passed. The Agency had to absorb the new realities in America. The antiwar movement—which many CIA wives and children supported—was not the product of a Communist conspiracy, even if the movement heartened the Soviet Union and its allies. The animosity between China and the Soviet Union was real, not the sham that Angleton still argued it was. Even Nixon, impeccably anti-Communist, had gone to Moscow and Beijing to inaugurate a new spirit of superpower relations called “détente.”
Colby tested Angleton’s theories against known realities. He said he sat through several long sessions with Angleton, “doing my best to follow his tortuous theories about the long arm of a powerful and wily KGB at work over decades.”
“I confess that I couldn’t absorb it,” Colby said, “possibly because I didn’t have the requisite grasp of this labyrinthine subject, possibly because Angleton’s explanations were impossible to follow, or possibly because the evidence just didn’t add up to his conclusions. At the same time, I looked in vain for some tangible results in the counterintelligence files and found little or none.”47
* * *
PRESIDENT NIXON’S GOVERNMENT WAS falling apart. After being sworn in for his second term in January 1973, Nixon had never seemed more potent. His opening of diplomatic relations with China and his policy of détente toward the Soviet Union surprised and disarmed liberal critics who had long denounced him as a shrill and dogmatic anti-Communist. The antiwar movement that had once plagued him was dying out, thanks to his abolition of the draft. In January 1973, he directed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to sign the Paris Peace Accords, which promised the war-weary country a plausible plan to finally extricate U.S. troops from Vietnam.
At the same time, Nixon was undermined by the almost daily revelations generated by the investigations of the Watergate burglary, which revealed the burglars worked for the White House. Political reporters, most of them liberals, were appalled by Nixon’s lawlessness. With the help of leaks from the FBI and Justice Department, they forged a stream of new stories in the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times and in the news broadcasts of the three television networks. They depicted a pattern of perjury and obstruction of justice leading toward the Oval Office. In April 1973, Nixon’s chief of staff, Haldeman, and his chief adviser, John Ehrlichman, had no choice but to resign.
The CIA men faced a new challenge. Helms was gone and his artful evasions no longer kept Washington reporters at bay concerning the CIA’s support for the burglars. On April 27, 1973, the Department of Justice made an extraordinary disclosure to the judge presiding at the trial of Daniel Ellsberg. A former national security consultant, Ellsberg had
been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking the top secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. The government revealed that former CIA officer Howard Hunt, on trial for his role in the Watergate burglary, had also burglarized the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, at the behest of the Nixon White House,48 and he had used equipment and papers supplied by the CIA.
The judge dismissed all charges against Ellsberg, citing egregious governmental misconduct. Ellsberg, who had faced forty years in prison, walked out of the courtroom to claim vindication in front of the TV cameras. America had a new kind of hero, and the CIA had a new kind of notoriety.
The new director James Schlesinger was startled by the revelation. The Agency had furnished Hunt with a camera, disguise materials, and false identification. With another such disclosure, Schlesinger might have feared he would find himself out of a job. In self-defense, he sought to preempt any further revelations. He ordered “all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.”49 He ordered Bill Colby to oversee the preparation of a report of the testimony of those who came forward.
And so Angleton’s nemesis inherited the stack of secrets that would become known as “the family jewels.” The phrase, Ivy League slang for testicles, evoked the Agency’s aristocratic code, its masculine ethos, and the locus of its vulnerability. The family jewels were especially threatening to Angleton because many of the complaints from the ranks of the CIA focused on the propriety of two programs in which he played a leading role—namely, CHAOS and LINGUAL.
And then Bill Colby got the top job in Langley. Nixon suddenly decided he wanted James Schlesinger to ride herd on the Pentagon and named him Secretary of Defense. Almost as an afterthought, Nixon appointed Colby as the eighth director of the CIA.
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