My fellow writers at the Carey Institute were a subversive bunch who made the daily work of writing the first draft of this book an unmitigated pleasure. They were Camas Davis, Sarah Maslin, Justin Cohen, David Zucchino, Sara Catania, Rania Abouzeid, Dan Ellsberg, Scott Rodd, Catalina Lobo-Guerrero, Susannah Breslin, Finnbar O’Reilly, Matt Young, and T. J. Brennan. They are friends for life as far as I am concerned.
I very much appreciated that authors of previous books about Angleton were generous with their thoughts: Ed Epstein, Aaron Latham, Hank Albarelli, and David Martin all responded to my questions. Michael Holzman shared a rare copy of Angleton’s FBI file.
This book was a family affair. My late aunt, Lorna Morley, shared memories of working for the CIA. My mother tutored me on the literary importance of Norman Holmes Pearson and located Perdita Schaffner’s memoir of Angleton. Mike Heller provided poetic lowdown on Ezra Pound. My sons, Anthony and Diego, made me clarify. Cousins Charley and Chris warned me not to tarnish the Morley journalism brand.
I was sustained in my mission to write this book by the support of constant friends: Brad Knott, Barry Lynn, Eric London, Mark Steitz, Steve Mufson, Agnes Tabah, Patrice LeMelle, Stephen Greener Davis, Clara Rivera, Ken Silverstein, Tom Blanton, Charles Sweeney, Laura Quinn, Janette Noltenius, Robbyn Swan, and Mark Sugg. Stan and Liz Salett were especially supportive.
Old friends like Jodie Allen, Tom Blanton, Sidney Blumenthal, Nina Burleigh, Malcolm Byrne, Kate Doyle, Paul Hoch, Peter Kornbluh, and Phil Weiss encouraged me from day one. So did new friends like James Rosen, Lisa Pease, Alan Dale, and Fernand Amandi.
Tony Summers was, as always, my most exacting editor. David Bromwich, Bill Connell, Val Schaffner, and Bruce Schulman read and commented sagely on draft chapters. Not only did Jim Campbell put me up at his house during my research at Stanford Library, he also goaded me to think more historically. David Talbot inspired.
Jamie Galbraith supported my visit to the LBJ Library in Austin. Jenny Fishmann retrieved key documents from the Stanford Library. Adem Kendir provided invaluable insights into the Eugen Dollmann file. Matt Orehek of Claremont McKenna College volunteered useful research on John McCone.
The faithful readers of JFK Facts keep me apprised of many items of interest about Angleton. Three of them—Damian Turner, Jim McClure, and Leslie Sharp—transcribed a previously unknown audio recording of Angleton talking to the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
The hospitality of Bill L’Herault, Nic and Gail Puzak, and Anita Kangas enabled me to finish editing the manuscript in the most comfortable of settings.
Thanks to Simon Lavee for his generosity and patience in showing me around the Angleton memorials at Mevaseret Zion and the King David Hotel; Val Schaffner for sharing memories of his mother, Perdita Macpherson Schaffner, and his godfather, Norman Holmes Pearson; Josh Ober for giving me an incisive sketch of his uncle, Richard Ober; Christopher Andrew for answering obscure questions about British intelligence; Albert Lulushi for sharing his deep knowledge of CIA operations in Albania; Micha Odenheimer for taking in a wandering goy in Jerusalem; and Liron and Mayaan for hosting me in Tel Aviv.
Laura Hanifin provided creative photo research.
I also want to thank Martha Murphy Wagner, head of the JFK Records Collection at the National Archives; Karen Abramson and Abigail Malangone at the JFK Library; Claudia Anderson at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library at the University of Texas; and Dorissa Martinez at the Richard M. Nixon Library.
I also benefited from the help of Nancy Lyon at the Sterling Library at Yale University; Nina Fattal at the Israeli Intelligence Heritage Center; Dean Rogers at the Vassar College Library; Carol Leadenham at the Hoover Institution Archives; Mary Curry of the National Security Archive at George Washington University; and Scott Taylor at the Booth Family Center for Special Collections at the Georgetown University Library.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
I am indebted to five authors who were drawn to the Angeltonian flame before me. Robin Winks’s Cloak and Gown is crucial to understanding Angleton’s roots at Yale. Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligentce, is the most subtle account of Angleton’s intellectual formation. David Martin’s classic Wilderness of Mirrors was the first book to capture the drama of Angleton’s career and his friendship and rivalry with Bill Harvey. Tom Mangold’s Cold Warrior (written with the help of researcher Jeffrey Goldberg) is the most deeply reported book in the Angleton library, with a wealth of interviews about his personal and professional life. David Wise’s Molehunt is the best informed account of Angleton’s search for KGB spies inside the CIA. Without these fine works, I could not have written The Ghost.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS USED
ACLU: American Civil Liberties Union
CI: Counterintelligence
CI/SIG Counterintelligence, Special Investigations Group
CIA: Central Intelligence Agency
DDP: Deputy Director of Plans
EP: Ezra Pound
EPP: Ezra Pound Papers
FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation
FPCC: Fair Play for Cuba Committee
GWP: George White Papers
HSCA: House Select Committee on Assassinations
JA: James Angleton
JCS: Joint Chiefs of Staff
KGB: Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)
NARA: National Archives and Records Administration
NHPP: Norman Holmes Pearson Papers
NSA-GWU: National Security Archive at George Washington University
MFF: Mary Ferrell Foundation
OPC: Office of Policy Coordination
OS: Office of Security
OSO: Office of Special Operations
OSS: Office of Strategic Services
RIF: Record Information Form
SNIE: Special National Intelligence Estimate
PART I: POETRY
1. Angleton’s friend John Pauker showed photographs of the naked Pound to classmates, according to Angleton’s biographer Robin Winks. Winks interviewed classmates who had seen the photos. Pauker was friends with Angleton, who had photographed Pound and was the most likely source of the photos. See Robin Winks, Cloak and Gown; Scholars in the Secret War, 1934–1961 (New York: William Morrow, 1988), 334.
2. The sketch appears in Andrews Wanning, “Poetry in an Ivory Tower,” Harkness Hoot, April 1933, 33–39. Wanning was a close friend of Angleton’s.
3. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 329.
4. “Ezra Pound Papers,” at http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/collections/highlights/ezra-pound-papers.
5. “2 Idaho Boys Married at Border Camp/H. L. Potter Weds Miss Barbara Clyne of Boise and J. H. Angleton is Joined,” Idaho Daily Statesman, December 19, 1916. The story, repeated by Angleton biographers Tom Mangold, David Martin, and Michael Holzman, that James Hugh Angleton participated in “the punitive expedition” of Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing against Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa is erroneous, according to historians Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler, authors of The Great Call-Up: The Guard, the Border, and the Mexican Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 478n.104.
6. Ada County Assessor Land Records, “2016 Property Details for Parcel R5538912210”; available at http://www.adacountyassessor.org/propsys/ViewParcel.do?yearParcel=2016R5538912210.
7. Boise City and Ada County Directory, 1927 (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk, 1926), p. 49.
8. “James Hugh Angleton Jr, U.S Army Cpl.,” Personnel Files, 1942–1945, box 18, RG 226, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
9. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 330.
10. Bert Macintyre, Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (New York: Crown, 2014), 69.
11. Letter from James Angleton (JA) to Ezra Pound (EP), August 13, 1938, Ezra Pound Papers, YCAL MSS 43, Series I: Corresp
ondence, box 2, folder 63, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Hereafter, EPP.
12. Letter from JA to EP, August 23, 1938, EPP.
13. Letter from JA to EP, January 19, 1939, EPP.
14. That’s what Pound told his friend Mary Barnard. See Mary Barnard, Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 161.
15. “The Making of a Master Spy,” Time, February 24, 1975, 2.
16. Reed Whittemore, Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet (Washington, D.C.: Dryad Press, 2007), 38.
17. Michael Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA, and the Craft of Counterintelligence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 12–13.
18. Letter from JA to EP, December 28, 1939, EPP. “He is really going places here at Yale,” Angleton wrote of Mack. He went on to become the chairman of the Yale English Department and a famous critic.
19. Furioso Papers, YCAL MSS 75, Series I: Contributor Correspondence, 1938–1951, box 1, folder 30, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
20. Letter from EP to JA, January 10, 1939, EPP.
21. Letter from JA to EP, January 19, 1939, EPP.
22. Letter from EP to JA, March 1939, EPP.
23. Letter from JA to EP, March 23, 1939, EPP.
24. Letter from JA to EP, May 3, 1939, EPP. Angleton and Whittemore proved to be demanding editors. Pound sent them another verse, which read as follows:
THE DEATH OF THE PROFESSOR
Is the death of his curiousity. The Professor died the
moment he ceases hunting for truth, the moment he thinks
he knows something and starts telling it to the student
instead of trying to find out what it is.
This doggerel evidently didn’t meet Angleton and Whittemore’s standards, because they did not publish it. Letter from EP to JA, May 1939, EPP.
25. Furioso Papers, YCAL MSS 75 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
26. Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, 25.
27. Author’s interview with William Gowen, September 20, 2015.
28. Draft registration card for James Hugh Angleton, June 5, 1917; available at https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/6482/005240752_03982?pid-24559654.
29. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 329.
30. Author’s interview with Tom Hughes, August 20, 2015.
31. Letter from JA to E. E. Cummings, August 1939, EPP.
32. E-mail from Nancy Lyon, Yale University archivist, to the author, June 10, 2015.
33. Furioso 1, no. 2 (New Year’s Issue, 1940). Pound’s “Five Poems,” appears on page 5.
34. Letter from JA to EP, December 28, 1939, EPP.
35. Letter from JA to EP, February 1, 1940, EPP.
36. Letter from EP to JA, June 7, 1940, EPP.
37. Letter from EP to James Hugh Angleton, June 19, 1940, EPP.
38. Doob, Leonard, ed., Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of WWII, Part II, Miscellaneous Scripts #111, “Homestead”; available at http://www.vho.org/aaargh/fran/livres10/PoundRadiospeeches.pdf.
39. Their last written communication was a postcard from EP to JA, April 11, 1941, EPP.
40. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 37.
41. Cicely d’Autremont Angleton, A Cave of Overwhelming: A Collection of Poems (Cabin John, MD: Britain Books, 1995), 25.
42. Walter Van Brunt, Duluth and St. Louis County, Minnesota: Their Story and People, vol. 2, (Chicago: American Historical Society, 1921), 856.
43. “Helen Clara Congdon d’Autremont,” https://www.azwhf.org/inductions/inducted-women/helen-congdon-dautremont-1889-1966/.
44. Birth records, for Cecily Harriet d’Autremont, http://people.mnhs.org/finder/bci/1922-57325. Cicely did not use the spelling of her name that is found on her birth certificate.
45. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 32.
46. Letter from JA to E. E. Cummings, August 16, 1941, bMS AM 1892, Houghton Library, Harvard University. “Reed has gotten into the army and I have been rejected as a weakling but with few regrets,” he wrote.
47. Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, 28.
48. Ibid., 28.
49. Pearson’s story was told first and best in Winks, Cloak and Gown, 247–321.
50. Norman Holmes Pearson Papers, YCAL MSS 899, Letters, box II, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
51. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 340.
52. Doob, “Ezra Pound Speaking,” 6.
53. Holzman, James Jesus Angleton, 29.
54. Ibid., 30.
55. Records of the Office of Strategic Services, Personnel Files, 1942–1945, box 18.
56. Winks, Cloak and Gown, 340.
57. Mangold, Cold Warrior, 37.
58. Ancestry.com. Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015. Original data: Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics.
59. White’s OSS papers and an unpublished memoir are in the George Hunter White Papers, MS111, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University. Hereafter, GWP.
60. George White and Hugh Angleton had a meal on Monday, July 26, 1943, according to White’s pocket diary, GWP, carton 7. The diary entry reads “Dinner with Maj Angleton, X-2 sec.” Hugh Angleton was in the X-2 (counterintelligence) section of the OSS, where Jim was soon assigned.
61. In his unpublished memoir, White boasted of watching prostitutes ply their trade, the better to blackmail their customers. GWP, folder 11.
62. Perdita Schaffner, “Glass in My Typewriter,” East Hampton Star, May 15, 1975.
63. Anthony Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood: H. St. John Philby, Kim Philby, and the Spy Case of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 298–99.
64. Schaffner, “Glass in My Typewriter.”
65. Bryher, H.D.’s companion, captures the devoted friendship of Pearson and Hilda Doolittle in a wartime memoir. See Bryher, The Days of Mars: A Memoir 1940–46 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
66. This definition, modified slightly, is quoted in Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2004), 145. Helms, later CIA director, was another one of Pearson’s pupils at Bletchley Park.
67. See Cave Brown, Treason in the Blood, 87–142, for biographical details concerning Harry St. John Philby.
68. Joseph Trento, The Secret History of the CIA (New York: MJF Books, 2001), 37.
69. Timothy J. Naftali, “ARTIFICE: James Angleton and X-2 Operations in Italy,” in The Secret Wars: The Office of Strategic Services in World War II, ed. George C. Chalou (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Adminitration, 1992), 222.
70. Schaffner, “Glass in My Typewriter.”
71. Records of the Office of Strategic Services, 1941–1945, RM 1623, roll 10, vol. 2, July, August, September 1944, London Headquarters, 123–25.
72. Macpherson’s observations are from Schaffner, “Glass in My Typewriter.”
73. Jack Greene and Alessandro Massignani, The Black Prince and the Sea Devils: The Story of Valerio Borghese and the Elite Units of the Decima Mas (Boston: De Capo, 2004), 1–3, 69, 136–37.
74. Ibid., 174.
75. Ibid., 135.
76. Ibid., 177.
77. Naftali, “ARTIFICE,” 218.
78. Macintyre, Spy Among Friends, 95.
79. Ezio Costanzo, The Mafia and the Allies: Sicily 1943 and the Return of the Mafia (New York: Enigma Books, 2007), 146.
80. Naftali “ARTIFICE,” 239n.42.
81. Ibid., 225.
82. Interview with James Angleton, Epoca, February 11, 1976, 26–27.
83. “Report on the Mission Carried out in Occupied Italy by Captain Antonio Marceglia,” original in Italian, CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room; available at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/PLAN%20IVY_0078.pdf. Marceglia’s role in the Decima Mas: Greene and Massignani, Black Prince, 166.
84. Interview with James Angleton, Epoca, February 11, 1976, 26–27.
85. Greene and Massignani, Black Prince, 182. After the war, Fiume Square was renamed Palazzo della Repubblica.
86. Interview with James Angleton, Epoca, February 11, 1976, 26–27.
87. Greene and Massignani, Black Prince, 184.
88. Naftali, “ARTIFICE,” 240n.55.
89. Ibid. See also letter from JA to Commander Titolo, November 6, 1945, box 260, entry 108A, RG 226, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
The Ghost Page 31