Jim Angleton’s career was ending; Dick Cheney’s was just beginning.
* * *
ANGLETON’S FRIENDS AND FAMILY rallied to his side. Cicely came back from Tucson. Dick Helms, who had indulged Angleton for years, returned from Iran to deal with the furor. He thought Angleton’s dismissal was completely unjust.97 Tom Karamessines, who had ordered Angleton to set up Operation CHAOS, told Cord Meyer he thought Hersh’s piece was “a contemptible shot in the dark with almost no facts to back up his wild allegations.”98
From Israel, his friend Efraim Halevy wrote a “Dear Jim” letter:
The wisest of men once said that there is a time for everything. This is not the time for me to write and dwell on all that I feel at this hour or for that matter ever since your move of a few days ago. In so saying, I deliberately refrain from using administrative terms like “retirement” for you never functioned as one of the others. Your sphere of action was never defined by titles and name. What you did for so many years was not at the behest of those fleeting transitory luminaries, the big ones or the more minor ones. And you will not cease to be what you are or do what you believe in because one of them has signed a piece of paper.99
“He is not in good shape,” his old friend Reed Whittemore said after visiting Angleton. “He is depressed; he doesn’t especially want to see people; his friends are not able to help him much and can’t seem to persuade him to go to Arizona or Florida for a bit.”100
* * *
AS THE TIMES’ REVELATIONS about the extent and duration of domestic spying sank in, a sense of anger and betrayal spread in Congress. The now-departed Nixon and his henchmen had violated the law, but they had never compiled files on ten thousand Americans. They had not opened mail or infiltrated peaceful political groups in the United States. The representatives just elected in November 1974 were especially indignant. Ten new senators took their seats in January 1975, along with seventy-five new congressmen and congresswomen. Coming to Washington after the unprecedented debacle of a presidential resignation, “the Watergate babies,” as they were known, felt determined to reestablish Congress as an equal branch of government.
The new Congress was hardly satisfied by the creation of the Rockefeller Commission or impressed by the independence of the totems whom Ford had named to investigate the CIA: Ronald Reagan, governor of California, was an instinctive defender of the CIA and the military. Lane Kirkland was chief of the AFL-CIO, which had received secret CIA funding via Jay Lovestone. Lyman Lemnitzer, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was still notorious for the militarism that inspired the coup d’état scenario of Seven Days in May. And the commission’s executive director, David Belin, had also held a position with the increasingly suspect Warren Commission. One poll found that half of all respondents said the Rockefeller Commission would be too influenced by the White House. Four in ten believed the commission would turn into “another cover-up.”101
In late January 1975, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana put together a resolution creating a select committee to investigate the CIA, which passed by a vote of eighty-two to four. The Senate committee would be cochaired by Frank Church, a liberal Democrat from Idaho, and Howard Baker, of Senate Watergate Committee fame.
Angleton thought the “orgy of self-criticism convulsing the Congress and the press alike was something more primitive than witch burning or the whiplash of Puritan conscience.” The indignation was positively evangelical, he said. He took to quoting a German diplomat who said of scandalized America circa 1975, “You don’t have a country over there. You have a huge church.”102
* * *
WHAT THE UNITED STATES of America experienced in 1975 and 1976 was a constitutional crisis. The struggle was precipitated by the lawless presidency and unprecedented resignation of Richard Nixon. It was joined by the exposure and firing of James Angleton. The crisis lasted for close to two years, until President Jimmy Carter was elected and the Justice Department decided not to prosecute Angleton.
One witness to this epic conflict was a Capitol Hill veteran named Bill Miller. As Senator Church began to organize the Senate investigation, he called on Miller to serve as the committee’s chief of staff. Miller, a former Foreign Service officer, had helped the Nixon administration secure Senate approval of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty in 1972. As Miller hired the staff to investigate, he negotiated with his bosses, Church and Baker, in the Senate, and their adversaries, Rumsfeld and Cheney, in the White House, along with Colby and others at the CIA.
Miller found himself navigating between two Washington factions, which he dubbed “the King’s Party” and “the Constitutionalists.”103 These were not actual organized entities, and the participants themselves did not use Miller’s terminology. But the labels captured the two political tendencies vying for power in the vacuum of legitimacy left by Nixon’s resignation.
The King’s Party, epitomized by Ford and Cheney, had an expansive view of presidential power. To them, the chief executive embodied the sovereignty of the American people. In their view, any limitation on the powers of the chief executive, and, by extension, the CIA, was, almost by definition, harmful to the American people. The president, they asserted, could and should act in defense of national security as he saw fit.
But the King’s Party was on the defensive in the spring of 1975. Its assertive credo had been discredited by the divisive and unsuccessful war in Vietnam and by Nixon’s crime spree, as abetted by the CIA. The Constitutionalists, based in the resurgent Congress, demanded a new legal framework to restrain executive power and the CIA. They voiced the widespread belief that no president was above the law. The revelations of domestic spying, they believed, strengthened the case for constitutional principles to protect the liberties of Americans.
Miller noticed one of the most interesting aspects of this struggle: The CIA itself was split. Even in retirement, former director Dick Helms was an influential voice in the King’s Party, while the current director, Bill Colby, had effectively joined the Constitutionalists.104
Along the way, Miller got to know Angleton. He concluded that his tenure as counterintelligence chief had destroyed him psychologically.
“The Senators looked at Angleton as an example of an extraordinarily intelligent man and interesting phenomenon,” Miller said in an oral history of the Church Committee. He embodied the “temptation of falling prey to a fascination with the workings of the dark side.”105
And the dark side was fast coming to light.
* * *
“DEAR CORD,” ANGLETON WROTE to his friend Cord Meyer on January 26, 1975. Meyer was now serving as London station chief and anxious about Angleton’s condition since his forced retirement.
“Sorry not to have written sooner,” Angleton said, “but how can one describe a nightmare?”106
With a single word: assassination.
WARNING
ANGLETON’S WAKING NIGHTMARE GREW more frightening on February 28, 1975. Daniel Schorr delivered a revelation on the CBS Evening News more sensational than anything Seymour Hersh had reported: The CIA faced investigation for the assassination of foreign leaders.
“President Ford reportedly warns associates that if current investigations go too far, several assassinations of foreign officials that had CIA involvement could be uncovered,” Schorr said.107
The retired orchid grower of 33rd Road knew more than a little about the subject of assassination.108
* * *
THE SOURCE FOR SCHORR’S story was, in a roundabout way, Dick Helms. In the aftermath of Angleton’s firing, Helms returned to Washington. The sleek ambassador was feeling betrayed by his choirboy colleague Bill Colby. To demonstrate that the Agency did not hold itself above the law, Colby had taken it upon himself, without consultation, to share the family jewels documents with the Justice Department to see if there was any criminal behavior. Some of those documents showed that Helms had lied to a congressional committee when he denied that the CIA had sou
ght to overthrow the government of Chile in 1970 by means of an assassination. Some at the Justice Department thought Helms should be indicted for perjury.
Helms had indeed stonewalled the Senate—in service of his legal obligation to protect CIA sources and methods, he said. The story was not pretty. In September 1970, Nixon and Kissinger had ordered Helms to do something, anything, to block the duly elected leftist president Salvatore Allende from taking office in Chile. Helms put his protégé David Phillips in charge. The Agency’s allies in Santiago, a clique of ultrarightist officers, took it upon themselves to kidnap the country’s top general, René Schneider, who said the military would not interfere with Allende’s lawful election.
A gang ambushed Schneider’s car in morning traffic, and the general suffered fatal wounds in the shoot-out. Allende assumed office without military intervention. The CIA paid off its thugs and retired from the scene with barely plausible denials of any involvement. Not surprisingly, Helms did not care to explain that homicidal fiasco to the Congress, or to the Justice Department, much less to the television cameras.
In a meeting in early January 1975, Helms had warned Secretary of State Kissinger that he would not take the blame for accusations related to assassination operations.
“If allegations have been made to Justice, a lot of dead cats will come out,” Helms said, referring to the nineteenth-century pastime in American politics of hurling feline corpses during appearances of rival candidates.
“I intend to defend myself,” he warned Kissinger. “I know enough to say that if the dead cats come out, I will participate.”109 He would sling a few himself.
President Ford wanted to avoid the whole subject. During a meeting with editors of The New York Times later that month, Ford expressed concern that the impending congressional investigations might delve into matters the U.S. government simply could not discuss. Like what? a Times editor asked. “Like assassination,” Ford blurted out before hastily taking his answer “off the record.”110
The Times editors decided they could not take advantage of Ford’s blunder and print what he had said. But Dan Schorr heard the story, confirmed it with his own sources, and went on the air.111
Schorr’s scoop generated another round of damaging headlines in The Washington Post.
CIA IS REPORTED TO FEAR LINK
TO THREE ASSASSINATION PLOTS
CIA officials, the story reported, feared exposure of plots to kill Castro in Cuba, strongman Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and nationalist Patrice Lumumba in Congo.112 The resulting disbelief and dismay—America was going around killing the leaders of other countries?—stoked more demands for investigation.
The revelation strengthened Frank Church, Bill Colby, and other Constitutionalists, who favored more accountability for the Agency. It undermined Dick Helms, Dick Cheney, and the stalwarts of the King’s Party, who defended the most expansive reading of presidential powers. The Rockefeller Commission, set up to investigate allegations of domestic spying, had no choice but to add CIA assassination plots to its agenda.
Then came another unsettling disclosure: Neither Helms nor Allen Dulles had told the Warren Commission about the plots to kill Castro. The story boosted the credibility of the much-maligned JFK “conspiracy theorists,” who had long argued—accurately, it turned out—that the government was hiding relevant information about Kennedy’s murder.
On March 6, 1975, Geraldo Rivera, host of ABC’s late-night television show Good Night America, invited JFK researchers Robert Groden and Dick Gregory on the air to screen Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination, the first time JFK’s death had ever been shown on broadcast television.
The footage was grainy—Groden and Gregory had only a third- or fourth-generation copy of the film—but it showed millions of Americans for the first time what had actually happened in Dallas on November 22. The fatal shot had blasted Kennedy’s body and head backward and to the left, a grisly reality that the Warren Commission had elided by saying the president “fell to the left.”113
Defenders of the Warren Commission were hard-pressed to explain how a bullet fired from behind JFK (and traveling a thousand miles an hour) could have driven the victim’s head and body toward the source of the gunfire. The intrepid reporting of Schorr and Rivera had a combustible effect on public opinion, stirring disbelief and demands for a new JFK investigation. The credibility of the Rockefeller Commission, already stacked with Washington insiders, was in doubt. Executive director David Belin hastened to criticize the CIA’s failure to disclose the Castro plots to the Warren Commission. He was joined by David Slawson, a law professor at the University of Southern California, who had also served on the commission’s staff.
Slawson rejected criticism of the Warren Commission’s findings and disdained the “circus atmosphere” around public discussion of the issue. But when a New York Times reporter showed him an FBI document that had just been unearthed in the National Archives, Slawson also felt obliged to speak out. The memo, written by J. Edgar Hoover and sent to the CIA’s Office of Security in June 1960, concerned Oswald, who was living in the Soviet Union at the time. The memo asked whether an “imposter” might be using Oswald’s birth certificate. The issue had apparently first been raised with FBI agents in Dallas by Oswald’s conspiracy-minded mother, Marguerite.
As Slawson read through the fifteen-year-old memo, he decided that there was almost certainly nothing to it. Still, he was angry, because he was certain that he had never seen the memo. So he agreed to go on the record with the Times—both to attack the CIA and to join the growing calls for a new investigation of Kennedy’s assassination, if only to determine why this document and so much other information had been withheld.
“I don’t know where the imposter notion would have led us—perhaps nowhere, like a lot of other leads,” Slawson told the Times. “But the point is we didn’t know about it. And why not?”
There was much more that Slawson didn’t know. He didn’t know that Angleton’s staff had controlled access to Oswald’s file from 1959 to 1963 or that his aides had drafted cables on Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in October 1963 or that Angleton had participated in planning the assassination of Castro. Slawson didn’t know it, but when he criticized the CIA for stonewalling the Warren Commission, he was criticizing Angleton personally.
A few days later, Slawson received an unexpected phone call at his home in Pasadena, California.
“This is James Angleton,” the caller said.
The voice was plummy and friendly to Slawson’s ears, the name vaguely familiar. Angleton said he wanted to talk about the Times article, explaining his background.
“He really piled it on, how important and aristocratic he was,” Slawson recalled. Then, Slawson says, the conversation took a menacing turn.
Was it true, Angleton wanted to know, that Slawson was calling for a new investigation of elements of the Kennedy assassination?
Angleton’s tone, more than the literal meaning of his words, seemed threatening to Slawson.
Angleton suggested that the CIA needed Slawson’s help—his continuing help—as a “partner.”
A partner in what? Slawson wondered.
“We want you to know how we appreciated the work you have done with us,” Angleton said. Slawson reminded himself that he had never worked for the CIA; he had investigated the CIA, or so he thought.
“We hope you’ll remain a friend,” Angleton said. “We hope you’ll remain a partner with us.” He spoke slowly, pausing to allow Slawson to take in what he was saying.
“The message was: We know everything you’re doing,” Slawson recalled thinking as he put the phone down. “We’ll find it out. Just remember that. The CIA is watching you.”
Slawson and his wife were both alarmed by the call. It was a warning, Slawson decided: “Keep your mouth shut.”114
It was the same threat Win Scott had received. Angleton was still obstructing justice in the case of the murdered president. He
was still deflecting questions, not answering them. When Seymour Hersh pressed Angleton about who was responsible for the assassination of JFK, he replied cryptically: “A mansion has many rooms.… I’m not privy to who struck John.”
Whatever did Angleton mean by that?
“I would be absolutely misleading you if I thought I had any f*****g idea,” Hersh told author David Talbot. “But my instinct about it is he basically was laying off [blame for the assassination] on somebody else inside the CIA.”
The investigative reporter sensed a man with something to hide.
“The whole purpose of the conversation was to convince me to go after somebody else [on JFK] and not him.”115
* * *
THE RITUALS OF WASHINGTON politics were giving way to fear and loathing, and for good reason. The American ascendancy that had elevated Angleton and Helms and the CIA to unlimited power was over. The military-industrial colossus that had defeated Nazi Germany and vanquished the Japanese was spent. The United States was in the final throes of losing the war in distant Vietnam to a disciplined peasant army that barely had an air force.
Henry Kissinger’s peace treaty of 1973 was just a scrap of paper as the North Vietnamese launched a wide-ranging offensive in March 1975. In almost every battle, the South Vietnamese army collapsed, leaving the pro-American government in control of Saigon and little more. In early April 1975, Bill Colby ordered the Saigon station to start destroying its files and evacuating its personnel. The CIA men faced a new reality: Things might turn out very badly, not just for the country but for them personally.116
The Senate investigation had already drawn blood. The Church Committee gained access to the family jewels documents and found mention of the case of Frank Olson, the U.S. Army scientist who had died after being dosed with LSD. Nobody in Langley wanted to talk about a suspicious death in 1953 that was cleaned up by none other than James McCord, the CIA man now famous as a Watergate burglar.
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