Then there was “the Wilson Plot” in England. Angleton’s belief that British Labour leader Harold Wilson was a Soviet agent of influence never gained much credence in the CIA or the U.S. government. But it became an article of truth to Peter Wright and other British officers who believed most every word that Anatoly Golitsyn said.135 In the early 1970s Angleton’s allies in London leaked secret intelligence reports to the Fleet Street tabloids calling into question Wilson’s loyalty. Wilson eventually resigned.
David Leigh, the first journalist to tell the tale, concluded Angleton “more than any other individual was responsible for the climate of deceitfulness, paranoia, and mutual denunciation of which Harold Wilson became a victim.”136
* * *
ON JANUARY 14, 1977, Angleton got some good news. He would not be indicted for his role in the mail-opening operation.
Without fanfare, the Justice Department issued a fifty-seven-page report on legal questions arising from the Church Committee’s findings about the CIA’s mail-opening program. The report stated the department would not bring charges against “potential defendants” who created and ran the LINGUAL operation. Angleton’s name was never mentioned, but he was the chief beneficiary.
The prosecution of the responsible CIA officials would involve “elements of unfairness and an almost certain lack of success in obtaining convictions,” the Justice Department lawyers stated. While offering the “firm view” that the mail-opening operation would be unlawful in 1975, the attorneys asserted that “prosecution of the potential defendants would be unlikely to succeed because of the unavailability of important evidence and because of the state of the law that prevailed during the course of the mail opening program.”137
The Justice Department had to think about the politics of bringing a case into a Washington courtroom. Indicting Angleton would assure lengthy and difficult disputes about the admission of classified material. Angleton was sure to argue that he had presidential authorization via Dulles, McCone, and Helms. Powerful men in the capital already resented the indictment of Helms. “Retroactive morality,” the Los Angeles Times called it. The country was in a cynical mood after Nixon’s disgrace and the defeat in Vietnam. Washington was eager to welcome President-elect Jimmy Carter and to put Watergate in the past. Discretion seemed the better part of prosecutorial valor, and Angleton walked.
The Justice Department’s decision not to indict Angleton set a precedent and sent a message: that the secret intelligence arm of the government could reserve the right to review, without warrant or stated cause, the private communications of Americans—in the name of “national security.”
Angleton was the leading champion of this belief in the first twenty-five years of the CIA. He implemented it as U.S. government policy on the barest of authority, confident that any director and president would endorse his actions after the fact. With the fall of Nixon and the exposure of the full dimensions of LINGUAL and CHAOS, Angleton’s position became controversial and unpopular.
Yet in the fullness of time, Angleton’s thinking would prevail. The Constitutionalists of Washington emerged as the winners after the crisis of 1975–1976. The CIA had to submit to a new regime of legal and legislative oversight. After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the King’s Party regained the upper hand. With Dick Cheney now serving as a powerful vice president and legislative author, Congress passed the Patriot Act. The government stepped up mass surveillance of Americans’ private communications, now focusing on phone calls and e-mail. Thanks to the January 1977 decision not to indict Angleton, there was no legal precedent against it.
Angleton was a founding father of U.S. mass-surveillance policies. To oversimplify only slightly, Dick Cheney picked up where Jim Angleton had left off.
* * *
ANGLETON’S LOYALTY TO ISRAEL betrayed U.S. policy on an epic scale, and his former colleague John Hadden knew it. In 1978, Hadden, the retired Tel Aviv station chief, made the long trip from his home in Brunswick, Maine, to Washington, D.C. He had a story he needed to tell the right people: how Israel stole nuclear material from the United States government on Angleton’s watch.
The story of the great uranium heist at the NUMEC plant in Pennsylvania continued to attract official interest. Over the years, the story of the loss of hundreds of pounds of fissionable material from the Apollo facility had been examined by several government agencies. The question was whether the Israelis had used NUMEC to divert enriched uranium to Dimona and then used it to build their nuclear arsenal.
The CIA’s scientists reviewed the evidence. Without judging the legal questions, they all agreed that enriched uranium from NUMEC had been obtained by the Israelis. “I believe that all of my senior analysts who worked on the problem agreed with me fully,” said Carl Duckett, deputy director of the CIA responsible for technical and nuclear intelligence. “[T]he clear consensus in the CIA was that indeed NUMEC material had been diverted and had been used by the Israelis in fabricating weapons.”138
The Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked into the matter and found their efforts stymied by a lack of cooperation from the CIA and from NUMEC president Zalman Shapiro, as well as by a studious lack of interest from Capitol Hill. The investigators found no proof of diversion, but they did not have access to all the classified information available to the CIA scientists. When former NRC staffer Roger Mattson managed to get access to the CIA records, he concluded that NUMEC was the only possible source of Israel’s fissionable material.139
John Hadden said the same thing. “A crime was committed 10 or 20 years ago,” he wrote in a memo for the record, “a crime considered so serious that for its commission the death penalty is mandatory and no statute of limitations applies.”
A good CIA man, Hadden never spilled classified information, never reported out of channels. He spoke only with the senior staff of the AEC or the House Interior Committee.140 He prepared twenty-nine talking points to support his memo’s conclusion: that NUMEC was a front company deployed in an Israeli-American criminal conspiracy to evade U.S. nonproliferation laws and supply the Israeli nuclear arsenal.
“If the crime had been committed intentionally and was not the result of carelessness,” Hadden went on, “then the circumstances warranted a finding of high treason with a mandatory death penalty.”
The only other explanation, he wrote, was “gross incompetence on the part of those responsible for security in certain areas.”
It was either treason or incompetence, Hadden said. If one of those terms applied to his former boss, Jim Angleton, so be it.141
Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben-Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. If he didn’t ask questions about Israel’s actions, he wasn’t doing his job. Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it.
Angleton thought collaboration with the Israeli intelligence services was more important. And the results proved his point, he believed. When Angleton started as chief of the Counterintelligence Staff in 1954, the state of Israel and its leaders were regarded warily in Washington, especially at the State Department. When Angleton left government service twenty years later, Israel held twice as much territory as it had in 1948, the CIA and the Mossad collaborated on a daily basis, and the governments of the United States and Israel were strategic allies, knit together by expansive intelligence sharing, multibillion-dollar arms contracts, and coordinated diplomacy.
The failure of the U.S. nonproliferation policy to prevent the introduction of nuclear weapons to the Middle East in the 1960s is part of Angleton’s legacy, and its effects will be felt for decades, if not centuries. He was a leading architect of America’s strategic relationship with Israel that endures and
dominates the region to this day. He was, as his friend Meir Amit said, “the biggest Zionist of the lot.”
* * *
THE JFK STORY IS a blight on Angleton’s legacy. His handling of the Oswald file before the assassination of President Kennedy has never been explained by the CIA. His conspiracy theories about KGB involvement have never been substantiated. His animus toward those seeking to investigate JFK’s assassination was constant and arguably criminal. If the evidence of his actions had been known to law enforcement, he could have, and should have, been prosecuted for obstruction of justice and perjury.
When it came to the assassination of President Kennedy, Angleton acted as if he had something to hide. The question is, What? Angleton spoke for the record about JFK’s murder on four occasions. All four times, he insinuated the assassination of the liberal president might have been influenced by the KGB.
“I don’t think that the Oswald case is dead,” Angleton told the Church Committee. “There are too many leads that were never followed. There’s too much information that has developed later.”142
It was a curious admission. Angleton was chief of the Counterintelligence Staff for eleven years after JFK’s assassination. If there was any new information or any new leads into Oswald’s possible contacts with the KGB, Angleton himself was personally responsible for investigating them. He apparently never did so.143 The documentary foundation of Angleton’s KGB conspiracy theories was—and is—vanishingly thin.
Yet whenever the JFK investigation turned to the CIA’s preassassination interest in Oswald, Angleton stonewalled. The question was first raised during his appearance before the Church Committee. Senator Charles Mathias, a Republican Brahmin from Maryland posed the question.
“To your knowledge,” he asked, “was Oswald ever interrogated when he returned from Russia?”
Angleton fumbled for words.
“I don’t, probably would know but I don’t know whether the military—normally that would fall with the jurisdiction of the military, since he was a military man who defected,” Angleton babbled. “So I don’t know the answer to that.”144
In fact, Angleton did know the answer. The FBI had interviewed Oswald in August 1962 and Hoover had sent the report to Angleton’s office, where Betty Egerter signed for it, and Angleton surely read it.
Angleton also lied about his role in the CIA’s schemes to assassinate Fidel Castro. When an attorney for the House Select Committee on Assassinations asked about his knowledge of the plots, Angleton hedged.
“The question I want to ask you again is,” the attorney said, “do you recall approximately when you learned this information [about the Castro assassination plots] … before or after the Warren Commission?”145
“I am certain,” Angleton said, “it was well after the Warren Commission had completed its work.”
Angleton was lying. He had spoken with Bill Harvey and Peter Wright in late 1961 about using nerve gas as an assassination weapon. In June 1963, he knew the substance of Bill Harvey’s discussions with Johnny Rosselli, who had been enlisted to kill Castro. In July 1963, the counterintelligence staff had experimented with hypnotizing a potential assassin. Angleton denied knowledge of the AMLASH operation. But he knew of at least four different efforts to kill Castro six months before the Warren Commission completed its work.146
Angleton was lying to conceal his knowledge of the Castro assassination plots. He had to dissemble because he had used Oswald (or his file) in the mole hunt. He also probably felt duty bound to conceal his knowledge of the CIA’s operation against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the fall of 1963.
All of which begs the harder question: Was Angleton running Oswald as an agent as part of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy? He certainly had the knowledge and ability to do so.
Angleton and his staff had a granular knowledge of Oswald long before Kennedy was killed. Angleton had a penchant for running operations outside of reporting channels. He articulated a vigilant anti-communism that depicted the results of JFK’s liberal policies in apocalyptic terms. He participated in discussions of political assassination. And he worked in a penumbra of cunning that excluded few possibilities. “Angleton possessed a unique grasp of secret operations,” Dick Helms wrote in his memoirs. “… Jim had the ability to raise an operation discussion, not only to higher level but to another dimension.”147
Angleton made sure he could plausibly deny his monitoring of Oswald from 1959 to 1963. His admirers today can still plausibly deny he was involved in JFK’s assassination.
What cannot be plausibly denied is that Angleton’s actions were illegal. He obstructed justice to hide interest in Oswald. He lied to veil his use of the ex-defector in late 1963 for intelligence purposes related to the Cuban consulate in Mexico City. Whether Angleton manipulated Oswald as part of an assassination plot is unknown. He certainly abetted those who did. Whoever killed JFK, Angleton protected them. He masterminded the JFK conspiracy cover-up.
* * *
ONE ACHIEVEMENT CANNOT BE denied Angleton: There was no high-level KGB penetration of the CIA on his watch. The Soviets ran hundreds of agents in the United States from 1947 to 1974, but after Kim Philby’s departure, they never had an agent with access to the top of the Agency.
Of course, Angleton denied any such achievement. He insisted to the end of his days that the Agency had been penetrated by one or more KGB moles. He had made sure it didn’t happen, yet he insisted it had. He deserved credit, but he couldn’t take it. About his greatest accomplishment, he was dead wrong. Such was the contradictory legacy of James Angleton.
He was an ingenious, vicious, mendacious, obsessive, and brilliant man who acted with impunity as he sought to expand the Anglo-American-Israeli sphere of influence after the end of World War II. Like his friend Ezra Pound, his mastery was sometimes indistinguishable from his madness. He was indeed a combination of Machiavelli, Svengali, and Iago. He was an intellectual, charming, and sinister. In retirement, at last, he was harmless.
LEGEND
IN JULY 1976, PHOTOGRAPHER Richard Avedon went to Arlington to take a photograph of Angleton. He went at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Renata Adler, a writer and novelist who had known Angleton since the early 1960s.148 Adler had met him in Washington through Jim’s sister Carmen. When Avedon told Adler that he was shooting portraits of the American ruling class for Rolling Stone magazine, she insisted he include Angleton.
Angleton’s portrait appeared in Rolling Stone in October 1976, along with those of Frank Church, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Barbara Jordan, Ronald Reagan, New York Times editor A. M. Rosenthal, and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. In Avedon’s black-and-white minimalist gallery, Angleton had achieved something he had never sought. He was glamorous.
Angleton rarely tired of sharing his ideas with journalist Ed Epstein, who was intrigued by his analysis of the JFK assassination. In 1978, Epstein published Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, which laid out Angleton’s “KGB done it” conspiracy theory for the first time, albeit in unattributed form. The book sold well and was important in spreading Angleton’s spurious theory of a super KGB manipulating American society and politics.
Angleton took to running reporters like he had once run agents in the field, and for the same purpose: to advance his geopolitical vision. He lunched often with Loch Johnson, a professor of intelligence history at the University of Georgia, who was working for the Church Committee. Johnson came away with his mind reeling. “To paraphrase Mark Twain, listening to Angleton for a half-hour could make you dizzy,” he wrote. “Listening to him for a whole hour could make you drunk.”149
Angleton invited Joe Trento, a reporter on military affairs, to lunch and found they shared a taste for conspiracy theories. From Angleton, Trento came away with the appreciation that “presidents come and go, but the intelligence bureaucracy remains in place as the real ruling class in our political system.”150
Davi
d Ignatius, then a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, called him “a character out of fiction. He was so eccentric in his hobbies and his personal manner, that he was a work of art … a self-created work of art. He was too self-knowledgeable not to understand what he conveyed. The homburg. The way he looked out over his glasses. He was a piece of artifice.”151
That was Angleton’s first code name in the OSS: ARTIFICE. In retirement, his life became the stuff of art. He became an iconic figure in the Anglo-American imagination, the paranoid genius as spymaster: fisherman, orchid grower, and spy. He was portrayed in a BBC movie about Yuri Nosenko. He figured prominently in a series on Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five. His career served as inspiration for a TV miniseries, The Company, and for William F. Buckley’s novel Spytime. He was the CIA man at the heart of Robert De Niro’s movie The Good Shepherd. The most private of men, Angleton wound up as the public face of American intelligence in the Cold War.
For Norman Mailer, Angleton was less a hero than an ambiguous oracle, a sardonic teller of bleak truths. In Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s biblical novel of the early days of the CIA, the narrator, a retired CIA man, has had a conversation with Hugh Tremont Montague, the retired counterintelligence chief, who was based on Angleton.
“Bobby knows so little about us,” the narrator tells us. The scene he describes took place not long after the gunfire in Dallas. Robert Kennedy, the grieving attorney general, confided in the narrator, who later recounted the story to Montague.
“One night he [RFK] began to talk of muffled suspicions and stifled half-certainties, and said to me, ‘I had my doubts about a few fellows in your agency, but I don’t anymore. I can trust John McCone and I asked him if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn’t lie to me, and he said he had looked into it and they hadn’t.’”
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