The Ghost

by Jefferson Morley

  The idea that Frank Olson had killed himself by hurling his body through a closed window could not withstand much scrutiny, so the Agency quickly offered the Olson family generous financial compensation and a meeting with President Ford, which was coordinated by Dick Cheney. The CIA and the White House adopted the cover story found in the files: that Olson was the unwitting victim of an LSD experiment and had committed suicide.

  Nobody was more alarmed about these developments than cool, collected Dick Helms. He had risen through the ranks of the CIA on the strength of his discipline and loyalty. He had prevailed over talented and ambitious men in the competition for the top job. As DCI, he had served two presidents through seven years of war. The revelations of murder plots and mind-control experiments threatened his reputation and his livelihood. He was no longer seen as an apolitical public servant but, in the words of one journalist, as “a gentlemanly planner of assassinations.” The prospect of disgrace, if not jail time, was looming.

  In April 1975, Helms testified to the Rockefeller Commission in the federal courthouse in Washington’s Judiciary Square. As he left the building, he encountered Dan Schorr, who stuck a microphone in his face. A supremely self-satisfied and self-controlled man, Helms exploded in a spluttering, spitting rage.

  “You son-of-a-bitch!” he screamed at the newsman. “You killer! You cocksucker! ‘Killer Schorr,’ that’s what they should call you!”117

  Helms finally managed to compose himself, but his outburst exposed something the sleek former director worked hard to hide: raw fear.

  * * *

  IN THIS SEASON OF upheaval, Angleton was honored by his employer. On April 25, 1975, Gen. Marshall Carter, fishing buddy and former deputy director, presided at an award ceremony in the Langley headquarters. Bill Colby was conspicuous by his absence. Angleton’s wife, Cicely, and daughters Siri Hari and Guru Sangat Kaur Khalsa, watched as Angleton received one of the Agency’s highest awards, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal. The honor was given for “performance of outstanding services or for achievement of a distinctly exceptional nature in a duty or responsibility, the results of which constitute a major contribution to the mission of the Agency.”118 No one doubted Jim Angleton’s contributions to the CIA were major and exceptional.

  In a letter to Cord Meyer later that day, Angleton wrote that the ceremony was “especially meaningful” for his family. He made a poignant admission of how little his wife and children knew of his professional life. In his fourteen years working in Langley, he had never once taken them to his office. The occasion of his honor, he said, “was their first and perhaps last visit to the building.”119

  INCONCEIVABLE

  ANGLETON ARRIVED AT ROOM 318 of the Russell Senate Office Building on September 24, 1975, anxious for vindication. In June, he had testified behind closed doors to the Rockefeller Commission about what he knew of spying on the antiwar movement (not much, he said, shading the truth) and the mail-opening program (uniquely productive, he insisted). He had followed up his appearance with a thirty-seven-page brief detailing the dire state of counterintelligence under Colby. He warned of the Agency’s “mounting inability to cope with the growing menace of hostile clandestine activity.”120

  Angleton peered about curiously through his big glasses, as the hearing room filled up with staffers in skirts, scrappy reporters, well-appointed lobbyists, garrulous lawyers, and interested tourists. Angleton watched the men on the dais in front of him. He saw Senator Church, Senator Baker, Senator Mondale, and the rest. He saw people coming and going, whispering, fussing with papers, adjusting microphones, getting ready, and settling in for the committee’s second day of public hearings. The topic was the Huston Plan, President Nixon’s abortive scheme to centralize domestic intelligence gathering in the White House, and Angleton was first on the witness list.

  Angleton wanted to challenge Senator Church, who was settling into his center-stage seat as the committee’s chairman. The two men had a common heritage. Like Angleton, Church had grown up in Boise, Idaho, and had come to maturity in elite institutions (Stanford and Stanford Law School). At the early age of thirty-two, Church was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As President Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam, Church turned into a war critic, and not a quiet one. By 1975, he had served four terms in the Senate. An eloquent (some said long-winded) public speaker, Church lent his voice to the liberal cause of checking the imperial presidency with congressional power.

  Church opened the proceedings by referring to one of biggest revelations of the Rockefeller Commission’s report: the LINGUAL mail-opening operation, which the commission called “illegal” and “beyond the law.” He added new details that his investigators had found in the LINGUAL files: a letter that Senator Hubert Humphrey had written from Moscow; a letter that Richard Nixon had received from his speechwriter Ray Price, who had been visiting in Moscow. The Agency had even swiped a letter that Church had written to his mother-in-law from Europe. With that preemptive strike, Church asked Angleton to stand and swear that he would “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”121

  Angleton obliged. In a brief opening statement, he sought to identify himself with the mood of public opinion. “It is the ultimate function of the intelligence community as part of our Government, to maintain and enhance the opportunity for peaceful change,” he said.122

  There was something anticlimactic about Angleton’s much-anticipated appearance. The vaunted spymaster resembled an old man asking for his porridge, said one reporter.

  The senators wanted to know more about the Huston Plan. Nixon’s scheme had been abetted by Helms at the CIA and (initially) by Hoover at the FBI. The committee had found Angleton’s June 1970 memo in which he sought to gain Nixon’s approval for expanding the mail-opening operation. They had found his little lie about the “re-activization” of the LINGUAL program.

  The committee’s chief counsel, Frederick Schwarz, Jr., asked Angleton to read his memo stating that LINGUAL had been discontinued. Angleton obliged.

  “Now the sentence that says ‘covert coverage has been discontinued’ is a lie,” Schwarz went on. “… Is that correct?”

  Angleton mumbled something.

  Senator Church took back the microphone and moved in for the kill.

  Wasn’t it important, Church asked, given the turbulence of the times, that the president be fully informed about the actions “of the very agencies we entrust to uphold and enforce the law?”

  Angleton agreed.

  “You have said that there was an affirmative duty on the CIA to inform the President?” Church said.

  “I don’t dispute that,” Angleton replied.

  “And he was not informed, so that was a failure of duty to the Commander in Chief; is that correct?”

  “Mr. Chairman,” Angleton protested, “I don’t think anyone would have hesitated to inform the President if he had at any moment asked for a review of intelligence operations.”

  “That is what he did do,” said Church, exasperated. “… The President wanted to be informed. He wanted recommendations. He wanted to decide what should be done, and he was misinformed. Not only was he misinformed, but when he reconsidered authorizing the opening of the mail five days later and revoked it, the CIA did not pay the slightest bit of attention to him.”

  Church had caught Angleton in his little lie and turned it into a big one.

  “The Commander in Chief, as you say,” he said sarcastically. “Is that so?”

  “I have no satisfactory answer for that,” Angleton said.

  Angleton was silenced, Church victorious.

  Senator Baker tried to bolster Angleton by asking if he thought some of the activities he supported should be made legal in consultation with Congress. This was the argument of the Constitutionalists, and it was increasingly popular in Washington. Rein in the CIA; don’t destroy it.

  Angleton couldn’t quite bring himself to agree. The pro
blem wasn’t the lack of authorizing legislation. The problem was Kissinger’s policy of détente, he said.

  “My view is that there is complete illusion to believe on the operative, clandestine side—which is in a sense a secret war that has continued since World War II—that the Soviets or the Soviet blocs have changed their objectives.”

  When Angleton insisted the Huston Plan was a matter of national security, not politics, Church was roused to attack again. He brought up something Angleton had told the committee in executive session two weeks earlier. Angleton had been asked why the CIA had ignored an order in 1970 from President Nixon to destroy a small stockpile of biological weapons. Angleton could have ducked the question, but he wanted to make his point.

  “It is inconceivable,” he replied, “that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of government.”

  Those were the most notorious words Angleton would ever utter. Under Church’s withering interrogation, he tried to withdraw them, but he surely believed what he said. There was nothing shocking to him about the CIA doing its job.

  “When I look at the map today and the weakness of this country,” Angleton said, “that is what shocks me.”123

  * * *

  ANGLETON’S ORDEAL IN ROOM 318 was the lead story on all three national news broadcasts that evening.

  “James Angleton seems almost typecast as counterspy, rumpled, reflective, avid, and a trout fisherman,” said ABC correspondent David Schoumacher. “Angleton was barely settled today when the committee revealed his mail intercept program netted a letter from Richard Nixon to his speechwriter, the mail of Senators Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jay Rockefeller. Even a letter Chairman Church once wrote his mother-in-law.”

  On NBC Nightly News, Angleton was seen saying, “Certain individual rights have to be sacrificed for the national security.”124

  The millions of Americans who had first seen Angleton tottering out of his house on Christmas Eve 1974 now saw an elderly fanatic who wanted to read their mail and insisted the CIA didn’t have to follow orders.

  It was a debacle, and Angleton knew it.

  “Angleton wanted to hear no more about Washington—or the CIA,” said journalist Ed Epstein. Angleton left for the Arizona desert, abandoning his prizewinning orchids and letting his greenhouse fall into disrepair. The next year, he went on a long, solitary fishing trip on the Matapedia River in Canada.125

  LEGACY

  IN RETIREMENT, JAMES ANGLETON was a Svengali to working journalists. In early 1976, when the tabloid National Enquirer broke the story of Mary Meyer’s affair with JFK, Angleton shared his account of searching for her diary with several writers, including Ron Rosenbaum of New Times, a muckraking monthly; Dick Russell, a freelancer interested in JFK’s assassination; and Scott Armstrong, a reporter from The Washington Post.

  Angleton knew how to keep his secrets. He invited Armstrong to his empty house in Arlington and plied him with drinks and gossipy stories about Mary Meyer until his head was spinning. While Armstrong stumbled home drunk, Angleton then called his friend Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Post, and said one of her employees was asking inappropriate questions about extramarital hijinks in the Kennedy years. Graham, whose philandering husband suffered mental illness and committed suicide, loathed such loose talk. According to Armstrong, Graham then called Post editor Len Downie to complain. Downie saved Armstrong’s job by calling him off the story. The Post never did a story about how Angleton walked off with Mary Meyer’s diary.126

  Angleton expounded his views to any and all who cared to listen. In long liquid lunches at the Army-Navy Club overlooking Farragut Square in downtown Washington, he spoke to reporters, congressional investigators, freelancers, and friends. In private conversation, Angleton excelled. His conversation was compelling, his ideas original, his breadth of experience impressive, at least at first. Articles began to appear about him, and then books depicting a complex, if not contradictory, man. He soon became semifamous as an intelligence savant, a literary spy, a Cold Warrior, the spymaster who had launched the mole hunt and pierced the KGB’s legend about Lee Harvey Oswald.

  Edward Epstein, a journalist who estimates he met with Angleton more than one hundred times after his retirement in 1975, said what impressed him most about Angleton was “he invented his own world,” and not just professionally. “He designed every piece of furniture in his house. When I went to visit him one time at his house in Tucson, he said, ‘It’s too bad you got here after sunset. You missed the wonderful view of the mountains.’ And then he drew a picture of the sunset and the mountains for me.”127

  The legend of Angleton, however, was not the same as his legacy. The legend was the public version of his story, as recounted by Angleton himself and by those who interviewed him. Harder to discern was the legacy of Angleton: the impact of his actions on the U.S. government and the American people in the years to come. The legend would be confused with the legacy, but they were far from the same. If anything, Angletonian mythology emphasized his compelling personality at the expense of capturing the full dimensions of his intelligence empire and enduring influence.

  His mole hunt was his most notorious achievement. Veteran case officer George Kisevalter said Angleton’s faith in Anatoly Golitsyn’s theories was a form of madness.

  “Had there been a real Sasha, he could not have done as much damage to the clandestine services group as this phantom Sasha,” Kisevalter told his biographer.128 “The careers of many were damaged, and some were forced to leave the Agency. Some of those maligned at least had the satisfaction of successful lawsuits settled with monetary compensation and the restoration of their good names, albeit many hard years later.”

  Kisevalter’s opinion was not idiosyncratic. In 1997, he received the Agency’s Trailblazer Award, recognizing him as one of the fifty top CIA officers in its first fifty years, an honor Angleton did not receive.129 There was never any doubt in Kisevalter’s mind about the bona fides of Yuri Nosenko. Three subsequent reviews by senior CIA officers reached the same conclusion. So did Cleveland Cram, the senior officer who wrote a still-classified multi-volume study of Angleton’s operations. So did Benjamin Fischer, a career officer who became the Agency’s chief historian.

  “The Great Mole Hunt or Great Mole Scare of the late 1960s turned the CIA inside out, ruining careers and reputations in search for Soviet penetrations that may or may not have existed,” Fischer wrote.130

  Those who dissented from the institutional consensus about the mole hunt were mostly officers who had served Angleton on the Counterintelligence Staff. “The Angletonians,” as they called themselves, were a dogged bunch.131 Bill Hood and Pete Bagley asserted that the clandestine service was never penetrated during Angleton’s watch—which is true. They also claimed that the CIA’s operations against the Soviet Union were not unduly harmed by the mole hunt—which is not.132

  Angleton and his acolytes would speak many words in his defense and write more than a few books. They cited scores of statements by Yuri Nosenko that they said were misleading or not credible, and indeed Nosenko had exaggerated and embellished, as defectors often do. In retirement, Pete Bagley befriended a retired KGB officer, Sergei Kondrashev, and helped him write a book that expressed doubts about Nosenko’s credibility, raising the possibility that Nosenko’s defection was somehow sanctioned by the KGB. But Angleton’s theory of Nosenko’s role in the KGB’s “monster plot” asserted much more. Angleton insisted that Nosenko was not merely a controlled agent but that he was sent to protect a source working inside the CIA on a daily basis in 1963 and for many years after. Which begs the question: If there was a mole burrowed into the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s, as the Angletonians claimed, who the devil was it? And what damage did he do?

  The CIA learned the consequences of Soviet penetration in the 1980s when the KGB recruited FBI agent Robert Hanssen and CIA officer Aldrich Ames as spies. American agents were arrested and executed. But even after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and the opening of significant portions of the KGB archives, the Angletonians could not identify any CIA operations compromised by the putative mole. They could not even offer up the name of a single plausible candidate from the three dozen suspects whom Angleton investigated. After the passage of five decades, the likeliest explanation is that there wasn’t a mole.

  Such was the most notorious aspect of Angleton’s legacy. But while the mole hunt might have been foolish, it did not violate U.S. law or policy. Angleton’s most substantive accomplishments did both.

  * * *

  ANGLETON’S MOST SIGNIFICANT AND enduring legacy was to legitimize mass surveillance of Americans. While his mole hunt paralyzed CIA Soviet operations for five years at the most, Angleton’s LINGUAL/HUNTER program funneled secret reporting on law-abiding citizens to Hoover’s COINTELPRO operatives for eighteen years. The FBI used CIA information to harass leftists, liberals, and civil rights leaders from 1956 to 1974. Angleton was the ghost of COINTELPRO.

  Angleton was a ghost in the domestic politics of Italy and Great Britain. In December 1970, Valerio Borghese, the fascist commander whom he had saved from partisan justice in 1945, launched an abortive military coup against a leftist government in Rome. When the coup collapsed, Borghese fled to Spain, amid rumors of American involvement. COMPLOTTO NEOFASCISTI (“Neofascist Plot”) screamed one banner newspaper headline.133 The Italian parliament investigated the Golpe Borghese, as it was known, and found CIA money had purchased influence in Italy’s intelligence services and non-Communist political parties for decades. One State Department official says he personally assisted in the distribution of $25 million in cash to parties and individuals in 1970.134 For many years, Angleton had played a leading role in doling out such funds. He denied any knowledge of the Golpe Borghese, but the more general CIA-funded corruption of Italian politics is part of his legacy.