Legacy of Ashes (The History of the C.I.A.)

by Tim Weiner

  On Sunday morning, November 24, McCone returned to the White House, where the funeral cortege that would take John Kennedy’s casket to lie in state at the Capitol was assembling. McCone informed Lyndon Johnson more fully about some of the CIA’s operations to overthrow the government of Cuba. But Johnson still had no idea that the United States had been trying to kill Castro for the better part of three years. Very few people knew. One was Allen Dulles. Another was Richard Helms. A third was Bobby Kennedy. A fourth was very likely Fidel Castro.

  That same day, the CIA station in Mexico City determined without question that Oswald had made his pleas for a visa to Soviet intelligence officers on September 28. He had talked face-to-face with a man named Valery Kostikov, who was thought to be a member of Department 13 of the KGB—the department responsible for assassination.

  The station sent headquarters a list of all the foreigners it suspected had made contact with Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City. One of them was Rolando Cubela, the CIA’s Cuban agent in the final plot to kill Castro. Only two days before, at the hour of President Kennedy’s death, Cubela’s CIA case officer, Nestor Sanchez, had given the Cuban a pen rigged as a hypodermic syringe, filled with poison. The report from the Mexico City station raised a harrowing question: was Cubela a double agent for Fidel?

  The cortege to the Capitol was about to leave the White House when Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered on live television in the Dallas police station. The president ordered the CIA to give him everything it had on Oswald, immediately. Whitten pulled together a summary and gave it to Helms, who handed it over to the president a few hours later. The report itself has been lost or destroyed. Its gist, Whitten said, was that the CIA had no hard evidence that Oswald was an agent of Moscow or Havana—but he might be.

  “WE WERE TREADING VERY LIGHTLY”

  John McCone delivered a formal intelligence briefing to the new president of the United States on Tuesday, November 26. “The President noted with some considerable contempt the fact that certain people in the Department of Justice had suggested to him on Saturday that an independent investigation of the President’s assassination should be conducted,” McCone wrote in his daily memo for the record. “President Johnson rejected this idea.”

  Seventy-two hours later, against his instincts, Johnson reversed himself. On November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, he cajoled the reluctant chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to lead the investigation. He corralled the rest of the members of the Warren Commission in a furious five-hour round of telephone calls. Taking Bobby Kennedy’s recommendation, the president rang an astonished and befuddled Allen Dulles at home. “You’ve considered the effect of my previous work and my previous job?” Dulles asked. LBJ hastily assured him he had, and hung up. Dulles immediately called James Angleton.

  It was already dark outside, and the president was rushing to assemble the commission before the evening’s newspaper deadlines. He ran down the list of the chosen. Discretion was the key, the president said: “We can’t just have House and Senate and FBI and other people going around testifyin’ that Khrushchev killed Kennedy, or Castro killed him.” He impressed upon Representative Gerald R. Ford that he wanted men who knew how the CIA worked. His most important call came just before 9 p.m. Johnson’s beloved mentor, the man who most closely watched the CIA in Congress, Senator Richard Russell, was on the line from Winder, Georgia. Though LBJ already had given his name to the wire services as a member of the Warren Commission, Russell tried to turn the president down.

  “You’re goddamned sure gonna serve, I’ll tell you that,” the president yelled. “You’re gonna lend your name to this thing because you’re head of the CIA committee.” Johnson repeated that there could be no loose talk about Khrushchev’s killing Kennedy.

  “Well, I don’t think he did directly,” Senator Russell said, but “I wouldn’t be surprised if Castro had something to do with it.”

  The creation of the Warren Commission posed a crushing moral dilemma for Richard Helms. “Helms realized that disclosing the assassination plots would reflect very poorly on the Agency and reflect very poorly on him, and that it might indeed turn out that the Cubans had undertaken this assassination in retaliation for our operations to assassinate Castro. This would have a disastrous effect on him and the Agency,” John Whitten testified.

  Helms knew it all too well. “We were treading very lightly,” he said in top secret testimony fifteen years later. “We were very concerned at the time as to what we might come up with…. Accusing a foreign government of having been responsible for this act is tearing the veil about as nastily as one can.”

  The question of disclosure of the plots against Castro also created an impossible burden for Bobby Kennedy. He kept his silence.

  The president had ordered the FBI to investigate the killing of the president, commanded the CIA to cooperate fully, and told them to report their findings to the Warren Commission, which depended on them for the facts in the case. But their malfeasance was profound.

  By early 1962, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service all had files on Oswald. In August 1963, in New Orleans, Oswald had a series of confrontations with members of the Cuban Student Directorate, a CIA-financed anti-Castro group, whose members reported to their case officer that they suspected Oswald was trying to infiltrate their ranks. By October 1963, the FBI knew him as a possibly deranged Marxist who supported the Cuban revolution, who was capable of violence, and who had been in recent contact with Soviet intelligence officers. On October 30, the bureau learned he was working at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.

  In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president’s motorcade in Dallas.

  The CIA and the FBI never compared notes. The FBI never came close to tracking him down. This was a prelude to their performance in the weeks before September 11, 2001. It was “gross incompetency,” J. Edgar Hoover declared in a December 10, 1963, memo that stayed secret until the turn of the century.

  Cartha DeLoach, the assistant FBI director, urged Hoover not to discipline his agents for dereliction, for fear it would be seen as “a direct admission that we are responsible for negligence which might have resulted in the assassination of the President.” Hoover nonetheless punished seventeen of his men. “We failed in carrying through some of the salient aspects of the Oswald investigation,” Hoover wrote in October 1964. “It ought to be a lesson to us all, but I doubt if some even realize it now.”

  The members of the Warren Commission knew none of this. As John Whitten soon learned, the CIA also concealed much of what it knew to be true from the commission.

  Whitten had a terrible time sorting out the facts from an avalanche of falsehoods cascading in from the CIA’s overseas stations. “Dozens of people were claiming that they had seen Oswald here, there, and everywhere in all kinds of conspiratorial circumstances, from the North Pole to the Congo,” he remembered. Thousands of false leads propelled the CIA into a labyrinth. To sort out the facts of the case, Whitten had to depend on the FBI to share information with him. It took two weeks before he was allowed to read the FBI’s preliminary investigative report on Oswald in December 1963. “For the first time,” he testified years later, “I learned a myriad of vital facts about Oswald’s background which apparently the FBI had known throughout the investigation and had not communicated to me.”

  The FBI routinely failed to share information with the CIA. But the president had ordered them to cooperate. The one man responsible for the CIA’s liaison with the FBI was Jim Angleton, and “Angleton never told me of his talks with the FBI or of FBI information he gained in those meetings,” Whitten said. Unable to influence the initial course of the investigation, Angleton had sandbagged Whitten, denounced his work, and doomed his efforts to uncover the facts of
the case.

  Helms and Angleton agreed to tell the Warren Commission and the CIA’s own investigators nothing about the plots to kill Castro. That was “a morally reprehensible act,” Whitten testified fifteen years later. “Helms withheld the information because it would have cost him his job.” The knowledge would have been “an absolutely vital factor in analyzing the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination,” Whitten said. Had he known, “our investigation of the Kennedy assassination would have looked much different than it did.”

  Angleton’s clandestine conversations with Allen Dulles controlled the flow of information from the CIA. The decisions he and Helms made may have shaped the Warren Commission’s conclusions. But Angleton testified that the commission could never have interpreted the significance of the Soviet and the Cuban connections the way that he and his small staff did.

  “We would have seen it more sharply,” he said. “We were more intensely engaged…. We had more experience in terms of Department 13 and the whole history of 30 years of Soviet sabotage and assassinations. We knew of cases and we knew of the modus operandi.” He said there was no point in giving away secrets best kept in his hands.

  His conduct was an obstruction of justice. He had only one defense. Angleton believed that Moscow had dispatched a double agent to cover up its role in the killing of John Kennedy.

  “THE IMPLICATIONS…WOULD HAVE BEEN

  CATACLYSMIC”

  His suspect was Yuri Nosenko, who had come to the United States as a KGB defector in February 1964, just as Angleton took over the CIA’s investigation. Nosenko was a spoiled child of the Soviet elite: his father was the minister of shipbuilding, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, buried in the Kremlin wall after he died. Yuri joined the KGB in 1953, at age twenty-five. In 1958, he worked in the KGB section that focused on American and British travelers in the Soviet Union. He transferred to the American department, spying on the U.S. embassy in 1961 and 1962, and then he became deputy chief of the tourist department.

  His father’s status protected him against his many stumbles, all created by his thirst for vodka, until he traveled to Geneva in June 1962 as the security officer for a Soviet delegation at an eighteen-nation conference on disarmament. He got very drunk on his first night, and he awoke to discover that a prostitute had robbed him of $900 worth of Swiss francs. The KGB’s strictures on mishandling funds were severe.

  Nosenko had identified—or, rather, misidentified—a member of the American diplomatic delegation named David Mark as a CIA officer, and Yuri went looking for him. Mark had arrived in Moscow five years before as the political and economic counselor at the American embassy. Though he was never a spy, he had done small favors for the CIA, and he was publicly declared persona non grata by the Soviets. It did not hurt his career; he later became an ambassador and the number-two man at the State Department’s intelligence branch.

  At the end of an afternoon meeting on the nuclear test ban treaty, Mark remembered, Nosenko walked up to him and said, in Russian, “I’d like to talk to you…. But I don’t want to talk here. I want to have lunch with you.” It was an obvious pitch. Mark thought of a restaurant on the outskirts of town and made a date for the next day. “Of course, I told the CIA people about this right away, and they said, ‘God, why did you pick that restaurant? That’s where all the spies go.’” The American and the Russian broke bread, closely watched by two CIA officers.

  Nosenko told Mark about the prostitute and the missing money. “I’ve got to make it up,” Mark recalled him saying. “So I can give you some information that will be very interesting to the CIA, and all I want is my money.” Mark warned him: “Now, look, you’re going to commit treason.” But the Russian was ready. So they arranged another meeting for the following day in Geneva. Two CIA officers rushed to the Swiss capital to lead the interrogation. One was Tennent Bagley, a Soviet division officer based in Bern, who spoke little Russian. The second was George Kisevalter, the CIA’s premier Russian spy handler, who flew in from headquarters.

  Nosenko arrived drunk for their first meeting. “Very drunk,” he said many years later. The CIA taped him at great length, but the tape recorder malfunctioned. The record was patched together by Bagley, based on Kisevalter’s memory. Much was lost in translation.

  Bagley cabled headquarters on June 11, 1962, saying that Nosenko had “completely proven his bona fides,” had “provided information of importance,” and was completely cooperative. But over the next eighteen months, Angleton convinced Bagley that he had been duped; once Nosenko’s staunchest supporter, Bagley became his angriest antagonist.

  Nosenko had agreed to spy for the CIA in Moscow. He returned to Geneva with the Soviet disarmament delegation and met his CIA handlers at the end of January 1964. On February 3, the day the Warren Commission heard its first witness, he told the Americans that he wanted to defect immediately. Nosenko said he had handled the KGB’s Oswald file, and nothing in it implicated the Soviet Union in the Kennedy assassination.

  Angleton was certain that he was lying. This judgment had catastrophic consequences.

  Nosenko produced a flood of secrets. But Angleton had already determined that he was part of a Soviet master plot. He believed that the KGB long ago had penetrated the CIA at a very high level. What else could explain the long litany of blown operations in Albania and Ukraine, Poland and Korea, Cuba and Vietnam? Perhaps all of the CIA’s operations against the Soviets were known to Moscow. Perhaps they were controlled by Moscow. Perhaps Nosenko had been sent to protect the mole inside the CIA. The one and only defector Angleton ever embraced—Anatoly Golitsin, certified by CIA psychiatrists as clinically paranoid—confirmed and strengthened Angleton’s deepest fears.

  Angleton’s highest duty as chief of counterintelligence was to protect the CIA and its agents against its enemies. But a great deal had gone wrong on his watch. In 1959, Major Pyotr Popov, the CIA’s first spy of any note inside the Soviet Union, had been arrested and executed by the KGB. George Blake, the British spy for Moscow who blew the Berlin Tunnel before it was dug, had been exposed in the spring of 1961, forcing the CIA to consider that the tunnel had been used for Soviet disinformation. Six months later, Heinz Felfe, Angleton’s West German counterpart, was exposed as a Soviet spy after inflicting deep damage on the CIA’s operations in Germany and Eastern Europe. A year after that, the Soviets arrested Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, secret hero of the Cuban missile crisis. They executed him in the spring of 1962.

  Then there was Kim Philby. In January 1963, Angleton’s prime tutor in counterintelligence, his old confidant, his drinking partner, fled to Moscow. He was revealed at last as a Soviet spy who had served at the highest levels of British intelligence. Philby had been a suspect for twelve years. Back when he first fell under suspicion, Walter Bedell Smith had demanded reports from everyone having had contact with the man. Bill Harvey stated categorically that Philby was a Soviet agent. Jim Angleton stated categorically that he was not.

  In the spring of 1964, after years of crushing failures, Angleton sought redemption. He believed that if the CIA could break Nosenko, the master plot might be revealed—and the Kennedy assassination solved.

  Helms framed the problem in congressional testimony declassified in 1998:

  MR. HELMS: If the information that Nosenko had provided about Oswald was true, then it led to a certain conclusion about Oswald and his relationship to the Soviet authorities. If it was incorrect, if he was feeding this to the United States government under instructions from the Soviet service, then it would have led one to an entirely different conclusion…. If it were established beyond any doubt that he had been lying and, by implication, therefore, Oswald was an agent of the KGB, I would have thought that the implications of that—not for the CIA or for the FBI, but for the President of the United States and the Congress of the United States would have been cataclysmic.

  QUESTION : Can you be more specific?

  MR. HELMS : Yes, I can be specific. In othe
r words, the Soviet government ordered President Kennedy assassinated.

  Those were the stakes. In April 1964, with the approval of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the CIA threw Nosenko into solitary confinement, first in a CIA safe house, and then at Camp Peary, the CIA’s training site outside Williamsburg, Virginia. In the custody of the Soviet division, Nosenko received the treatment his fellow Russians received in the gulag. There were scanty meals of weak tea and gruel, a single bare light burning twenty-four hours a day, no human companionship. “I did not have enough to eat and was hungry all the time,” Nosenko said in a statement declassified in 2001. “I had no contact with anyone to talk. I could not read. I could not smoke. I even could not have fresh air.”

  His testimony was remarkably similar to that of prisoners taken by the CIA after September 2001: “I was taken by guards, blindfolded and handcuffed in a car and delivered to an airport and put on a plane,” he said. “I was taken to another location where I was put into a concrete room with bars on the door. In the room there was a single steel bed with a mattress.” Nosenko was subjected to psychological intimidation and physical hardship for three more years. An audiotape of a hostile interrogation conducted by Tennent Bagley in the CIA’s prison cell was preserved in the agency’s files. Nosenko’s low basso pleads in Russian: “From my soul…from my soul…I beg you to believe me.” Bagley’s high-pitched voice screams back in English, “That’s bullshit! That’s bullshit! That’s bullshit!” For his work, Bagley was promoted to deputy chief of the Soviet division and awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal by Richard Helms.

  In the late summer of 1964, the task of telling the Warren Commission about Yuri Nosenko fell to Helms. It was an excruciatingly delicate matter. Days before the commission concluded its work, Helms told the chief justice that the CIA could not accept Moscow’s protestations of innocence in the assassination of the president. Earl Warren was not pleased by this last-minute development. The commission’s final report never mentioned Nosenko’s existence.